Selling to social selves
Facebook has become more panoptic. In doing so, it is leading the trend towards greater sharing online, a loss of anonymity, and the growth of a huge market in making cyberspace social. Google, threatened by the transformation of the online economy from links to likes, is trying to follow suit, holding services that people have come to depend upon ransom to its real names policy. Facebook’s policy change is, as always, motivated by the desire to increase advertising revenue, by making it easier for advertisers to target users who are most likely to buy particular products and services. This post is about advertising. It’s illustrated with beautiful Shiseido ads that, I suspect, speak not to the social self, but to something that Facebook can’t touch in its current state.
I like getting relevant, targeted ads. Facebook has hooked me up with paid work, interesting charity work, and awesome concert tickets, because a couple of years ago its targeted ads became more nuanced than simply seeing the ‘female’ box in my profile and assuming that I wanted weight loss pills. I appreciate this, and I do feel that it has made my life more positive. Enforced transparency could well make Facebook more money. I’m not in any position to imply that it won’t. However, I think - or rather, hope - that there’s a gap here that has been left behind. Essentially, I’m left wondering if there’s a part of the people that can’t be advertised at in completely open social networks.
My suspicions about this are based on passive exposure to pop-psychological ideas about the self that might, for all I know, have no basis whatsoever in reputable psychological theories. That’s the idea that there is a social self, a front we present to the world and a concern for how others see us; and a hidden self, the self that we don’t want to show to the world and don’t even want to look at ourselves. It’s an idea common to lots of branches of academia and lots of world cultures, but I can’t be sure that any exposure to the idea that I may have received was free of the influence of European psychoanalytic theory. In Japanese the two selves are called tatemae and honne, but those terms had themselves been reinterpreted by anthropologists writing in English in the mid-20th century before I heard anything about them. In any case, it’s an influential idea, an idea that might have been theorised in a highly complicated manner but which also carries meaning as a simple notion. That’s my get-out clause if anyone criticises my understanding of psychology.
The hidden self has a fascinating history of being advertised at. Adam Curtis' Century of the Self series of documentaries shows, with beautiful vintage footage and exhiliratingly terrifying historical narrative, how the Freud family used their theories about the dark, irrational, antisocial elements of the human psyche to help the burgeoning advertising industry in the 1960s, and how those same theories made politics both populist and elitist from the 1990s.
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If Facebook and Twitter provide mechanics for living out the social self on the internet, then 4chan, postsecret, and 25thingsaboutmysexuality are little corners of the internet where the dark, hidden aspects of people’s personalities can play out. Perhaps people have long suspected that anonymity and pseudonymity all too easily tear down the mask and allow people to vomit out objectionable things from their gut. Even sites that are ostensibly social, like chatroulette, quickly became dark places. This darkness is not about no longer being held accountable for your words. There is plenty of trolling and bullying on Facebook, just as there is in the playground, in the press and in politics - some people don’t actually mind being associated with speech that others find offensive, because they can actually gain social capital from it. Anonymity is about not having to put up any front at all.
None of the examples above of spaces for the hidden self make money. Internet pornography is a good example of profit-making from the primal, but might be an outlying exception for now - although I will argue that orgasms are a good way of winning customer loyalty. Is it possible to have a crush on a brand? Part with some cash at Coco de Mer or funfactory, and you might find that it is. But crushes are private, fragile, emotional attachments that can easily lead to humiliation if made public.
Print advertising went through a phase of targeting people’s desire for social approval and fear of being shamed. Public service advertisements still do so a lot of the time. But in the end, it seems like advertisements that target people’s primal urges came to dominate. Can social media achieve this? I have a feeling that as social media becomes more transparent and demands of us a greater awareness of the panoptic gaze, it will become less able to make us put our money where our amygdalae are, perhaps ultimately limiting how much revenue it can milk from us.