There seems to be a bubble pattern for pretty much every popular website. They trend, they supertrend and this wave can last a while. It becomes overwhelming. Everyone you know is somehow attached to this website and somehow you feel like a social misfit if you don’t have an account on that website. Like you’re missing out on something. You see adverts and references to this site everywhere you look. It’s in movies. Movies are made about the website. News stories center around the site. Friendships develop there. Some relationships start there and others are ended. On social websites, status reports are like virtual nukes.
So you follow the trend. You jump on the bandwagon and you sign up an account. You start uploading pictures or videos and making comments and before you know it you’re embedded in the social and political aspect of that site. And there are politics. Last year according to North American divorce statistics Facebook was listed as responsible for 1 in 5 divorces. There’s no saying how many non marital relationships its responsible for breaking up. But, like it or not, you stay despite your feelings. For a while anyway. And then, eventually, it begins to fade. You give less and less of a shit about the whole thing for a variety of reasons. Perhaps you see it as the colossal narcissistic time waster that it is. Perhaps you’re tired of allowing people to see what’s going on in your life that you don’t otherwise care for. Or maybe your fed up and exhausted dealing with the emotional fallout over some comment you made, or even erased from your profile that someone wrote that you simply didn’t want there. You stop making comments. You stop uploading pictures and videos. Your daily visits to the site decrease to a weekly event and eventually monthly. You may even almost forget about it altogether if it weren’t for the odd email you receive from it. And you’re not the only one this is happening to. You notice some people have taken a stand and deleted their accounts completely. And perhaps you go so far as to do the same.
And just like that…the website slowly loses popularity and fizzles away, it may even die altogether. And then the pattern inevitably starts all over again at another trending website.
The problem is that we all become so distracted by each other and, let’s face it, ourselves that most of us don’t realize what’s going on around the site. And by that I mean advertising. Commercialization. Sure everyone’s entitled to make a buck, but anymore it seems that, unless you’re sleeping, you’re getting advertised at. Most have noticed that on Facebook, by far the most popular social website, if you have an email exchange you will see advertising banners and text ads on your profile dealing with the content of that email. I find that a little creepy. And this isn’t just isolated to social websites, it’s also trending on email providers as well. Gmail in particular. Call me paranoid, but doesn’t that indicate that our every email is being monitored? Even if it’s some bot program that picks up on key words and uses that information to market at you, you’re being watched. And only a complete fool would deny the possibility and absolute likelihood that this program is being used to flag and monitor emails for a variety of subject matters.
So this is the new grey line they’ve created. They’re telling us, “We can’t exactly legally get away with looking into your email accounts without a warrant to do so, but we’re coyly going to have a program in place that literally scans your emails for key words.”
I can prove it. Better yet, if you have a Gmail account you can prove it to yourself. What I did was write a test email to myself. I wrote about how I wanted to buy a watch, I wrote about loving watches, about how I’m a bit of a watch whore…that’s right, I used the word whore. I saved it to a draft, went to my draft file and opened it up. And sure enough down the right side of my page there were ads for watches and, get this, a documentary movie called Babylon is Rising, a piece of religious tripe about biblical prophecy. And there was a third ad for becoming a pastor. It’s a safe and educated guess to say that these came up because I went and used the word whore. Babylon the Great is depicted in the bible and universally by Christianity as a self-indulgent prostitute. Now mix it up. Write a number of email drafts on a variety of subjects, save them as drafts and see what comes up as ads when you open them up. Next time you write an email and can’t fight the nagging feeling that somebody is watching, it’s because somebody’s watching. Now I could be wrong but, isn’t that a serious invasion of privacy? You don’t need a crystal ball to see a Class Action lawsuit coming. As if that isn’t enough, now when you log into an account you will periodically get sent to a page where it asks you to input more info in fear that you may forget your password. The backup plan they suggest is to give them, get this, your cell number. That’s right, your personal cell number so they can text you the info in case you some day have an aneurysm and forget your password. I don’t know a person in their right mind who gives out that kind of information. Then again, look at the crap people post on Facebook. So there is obviously no short supply of naïve suckers.
My attention recently has been focused on Youtube. This is a site we take for granted. It’s supposed to be the peoples website for uploading videos of pretty much anything we like barring anything of sexual content. Not general explicit content mind you, just nudity. If you don’t believe me just go to Youtube and search “live killing captured on video”. The advertising level on Youtube is unbearable. Random videos that show any sign of trending will have an ad on it quicker than you can imagine. Also, like Google, Youtube tracks your views and the subject matter of what you’ve been watching so that when you go back to the home page there is a list of videos “Recommended for You” that are all in the same vein as your recent views. The excuse used is that it enhances your Youtube experience and enables you to effortlessly watch content you’re interested in. However what this coincidentally means is they are tracking your viewing and your own personal trends. Also Youtube is now in the practice of censoring comments. Comments on various videos with a variety of sensitive or controversial content. And the censorship makes little sense. It seems someone is going out of there way to muddle opinions of people on select videos of political nature, meanwhile Youtube does nothing about things like disgustingly racist comments on videos showing the recent tsunamis in Japan or lewd and foul language left on comments for children’s videos from Sesame Street.
Mostly it’s about watching your web habits and what they call your Consumer Behaviour. Because they want you to buy their shit so bad. The Wall Street Journal did a study about the whole thing and discovered that the nation's 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto computers per visitor, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. They discovered that tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to "cookie" files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Did you get that? Were you paying attention? “Tools that scan in real time”. Apparently some scanning tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them. Which is just fucking insidious. Your profile, your Consumption and Web Browsing Behavior, it’s constantly being refreshed and bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges.
And while we’re on the subject of electronic tracking we should discuss Radio Frequency Identification chips. Or RFID’s as they call them. These tags, all but invisible, require no batteries and can use the radio waves of a nearby RFID reader to send a signal back to that reader. It offers the convenience of skipping the checkout lane at the supermarket entirely. A RFID reader will automatically scan your shopping cart and charge your credit card. It’s disguised and presented to us as a convenience, more importantly it offers to corporations an open and unabated voyeuristic view into your entire life. And they never die. So not only can they tell what kind of underwear you wear, if they wanted to they could track where you like to wear them.
Just so you know, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, so-called “Rewards” programs are designed for the same purpose.
There’s a term for all this. It’s called it Micromarketing. And its all about dissecting your consumer habits and behavior so that you are so barraged with ads, so smothered and drowned in marketing of products and services, that you don’t even have time to surface and take a breath to take stock of what’s going on around you. If they could inject a chip in your ass to read your every movement they would do it without hesitation.
But even more disturbing is the Big Brother aspect to all this. Did you know that, should a court decide, everything you do electronically can be subpoenaed? It’s not just phone records anymore. It’s email, Skype, chats, texts, comments on websites and even your Facebook or Myspace page activity.
So be warned. You are definitely being watched. By machines. Which I think is even scarier.
