This is a fine, incisive updating of humdog's important pandora's vox essay. It's tempting to repost the whole thing, but I'll show some restraint.
[first, valuable historical and personal perspective, then...]
the business community is pretty good with language. they understand, and appreciate, the subtleties of doublespeak. consequently you will never hear anybody in the business community use the word “exploit” in a sentence. no. instead, the business community will talk about “leverage”. ok: “leverage” = “exploit”. leverage is an important word. it is a code word. it tells you where the revenue stream might be.
the business community began to understand that it could leverage online social interaction and online social relationships and this need-to-confess that seems to be such a big part of the web. the business community began to understand that it could make products that leveraged social interaction and online self-disclosure and so it began to make products.
. . .
you can not do any of these things without surrendering personal information to the database behind the application, and the marketing department monitors of the offering business community monitors all this stuff very carefully. and you know this already. think about it: explain to me why, if you are going to download a white paper, you need to give your address and phone number for any reason other than to solicit a cold call from a software sales ummmmm engineer. try to reason out why, if you want to engage in online self-disclosure you need to divulge your age or gender or approximate annual income level for any reason at all. explain spyware. explain doubleclick. i will explain it to you: social interaction online is a commodity. like bubblegum. like cheap ballpoint pens. it is also a huge illusion because it is a product that is telling you that if you use yahoo im that somehow your online social interaction will be shinier or hipper than if you use aol im when all of it is probably more or less the same technical functionality and the quality of the content is primarily affected by the quality of your head. aol and yahoo can’t do anything about your head. but you buy the illusion because you want to talk about that your mom hated you or that you love porsches or even that you want to do one-hand typing with a troll on the other side of the planet.
you buy it. you let your identity get leveraged. it is all about leveraging traffic to web and revenue streams.
of course the marketeers will not say this. the marketers will take out an ad with a suit hottie and the suit hottie will smile in the picture and talk about grave responsibilities and we want to help you and we want to improve your productivity. the suit hottie will insist that maintaining a 96 terabyte datawarehouse that tracks you and your phone bills and your bank records and your favorite sites and your frequency patterns is the most wonderful thing that her company can do for you. in the old days the suit hottie would hold focus groups in order to drag in members of the demographic groups seen as possible consumers of whatever products she was selling, but now with the web, it is much easier. now with the web, all that is required is that someone build a blahblah board or area. the demographic group will self-identify by topic and they will bring their friends so that the friends, also, may become enchanted by the possibility of free t-shirts. the other day i learned a new word: fluffer. a fluffer is a person who maintains a erection for a porn star between takes. learn to think of marketeers as fluffers: learn to think of the web as a fluffer relative to the act of maintaining excitement for and interest in the act of consuming goods and services among members of the community.
. . .
[and then an analysis of the board ho and diva phenomenon, in the context heretofore established]
Good stuff. Thanks for it.
