Twitter And The Inevitable Cocoon of Advertising

Ben Kunz has a nice post on Thought Gadgets about how much we reveal about who we are on Twitter, and how easily that information can be exploited by future employers, friends, clients, and brands looking for information and opinions about their products.

What’s interesting to me (and I’m sure Ben has thought about this too) is the comprehensive, one-on-one, tip-of-the-long-tail targeted advertising that is bound to come about through Twitter and similar services.

In days of yore (i.e. this morning), companies like MRI would actually pay members of the public to participate in exhaustive surveys, to be completed partly on paper and partly in person, in order to supply a massive pool of demographic, psychographic, and purchase data that could be used to target advertising.

But Twitter, Facebook, and other social apps will eventually remove the necessity for all that. For a while, the online user dealt with a simple tradeoff: get free content, but accept that you’re going to see ads.

Now there’s something else going on: get free tools that make you feel as if your every navel-gazing thought is important enough to share with the world, and expose your psyche for permanent and non-anonymous analysis by any company (or government) that wants to try to sell you on anything, for the rest of your life. And you’ll update that personal pool of data every couple of minutes.

As this police detective explains, over 80% of criminal cases don’t go to trial, because the accused confess to the police. And it’s not necessarily because they feel guilty. It’s just that people like to talk about themselves. They like to tell their own stories. They can’t help it.

Twenty years ago, anyone who said that they were going to make moment-to-moment observations of their own life, typed, and that those observations would all be stored in a database that could be accessed by anyone on the planet at any time, they would have sounded like a megalomaniac. Now, we can all do it, and we’re all megalomaniacs, and that’s fine.

For a sobering take on how your tweets (and other voluntarily broadcast self-revelation) can be used against you, check out the companion video to the one I linked above. Twitter is not mentioned in this law professor’s speech about all the reasons that no one, innocent or guilty, should ever give police information about anything. But it’s easy enough to imagine how tweets could be used.

Remember those telescreens in 1984? They were basically interactive TVs with webcams. Fearful citizens would go about their business in full view of the authority, hoping not to reveal any unpatriotic feelings to the thought police watching from the other side.

But the reality is much more insidious. It’s not (necessarily) the police on the other side; it’s an infinite number of advertisers. And we aren’t wishing forlornly that we could turn the telescreen off. We’re parading around in front of it.

Caveat #1: As someone who works in online advertising, I may be “part of the problem.”

Caveat #2: It all seems so inevitable that it’s difficult for me to really see this situation as a “problem.” It’s simply what’s happening.