You Are Not the Target
George W.S. Trow's "In the Context of No Context" is an elitist cry against the ravages of television and celebrity culture from the pages of the New Yorker — it occupied an entire issue in 1980, when it was first published. It feels endless, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who wasn't, say, a huge fan of Whit Stillman's politics. (The essay ends with Trow's sadness about not being able to wear a fedora without feeling silly.) But it has its moments.
Trow seems to have been extremely troubled by the game show Family Feud, detecting something apocalyptic in its methodology, how it pivots not even on trivia but on contestants' being able to guess other people's guesses about trivial things.
The important moment in the history of television was the moment when a man named Richard Dawson, the "host" of a program called "Family Feud," asked contestants to guess what a poll of a hundred people had guessed would be the height of the average American woman. Guess what they've guessed. Guess what they've guessed the average is.
"You said..."
"Our survey said..."
This reminds me of when media companies poll "average" Americans about incidents or situations they couldn't possibly have an informed opinion about — should the U.S. intervene in the civil war in Syria? are there WMD in Iraq? — and report it as if it were significant. What is that supposed to reveal? At most, it is a referendum on what propaganda has been most effective at getting through media channels: To what degree do our readers think what we've led them to believe?
Beyond proving the media's effectiveness at inculcating points of view, the purpose of conducting these polls and crowing about them seems to be to reassure us that it is enough to have opinions about opinions, that in the end it doesn't matter what we think specifically; it's enough to be asked about it. Reports on polls are actually preferable to "facts," even on factual matters, because polls place consumer opinion at the center of things, while facts threaten to challenge the sovereign right to consume as true whatever information you want.
In the wake of the anti-gun protests recently, an image circulated of Emma González — one of the students who survived the massacre in Parkland, Florida — appearing to tear up the Constitution. The image was, of course, fake, and it seems unlikely that anyone was fooled by it who didn't already want to believe it. It is not as though minds were changed by the fake photo; rather it seemed to function as a photo-illustration, an editorial cartoon of sorts. It was reported on as if it were something novel, proof of the dire threat of deepfakes, but its existence just confirmed what has always been true of commercial media, that images and stories will continue to be produced with the most sophisticated technological means available to flatter a particular audience's sense of its self and its beliefs. Rather than merely being asked our opinion about news stories, we also can now register our vote by sharing slanted stories and images that reflect how we want reality to be (or seem), and what is the point of social media, or democracy for that matter, if we can't make an active choice about the reality we prefer?
NRA advocates wanted an image of the Parkland students disrespecting the Constitution; liberals wanted images of NRA supporters warping reality to suit their ideology. Everyone "wins," especially the media companies and platforms getting the clicks and collecting the data about which side we're on.
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Trow argues that the rise of demography — dividing the nation's population according to their characteristics or interests — spelled the end of history. "Taken from one direction, people have personal histories. Taken from the other, they have characteristics." Advertising is not concerned with personal histories, but characteristics. Marketers don't care about individuals; they care about assembling sufficiently large enough groups of like-minded people to make their messages capable of affecting profits. Advertising is typically not about targeting individuals so much as aggregating them. This is the function of media — especially, in Trow's view, television, though it seems as though Facebook has taken over the role.
It's one thing when an ad auction in a search engine generates an ad specific to the information you are actively looking for. As invasive as that can be, the advertisers are mainly zeroing in on the fact that you are expressing a concrete demand. Behavioral targeting in social streams, or in the midst of other media we consume for entertainment, works differently; it presumes to assess your vulnerabilities based on the demographic you belong to, which it derives from various forms of data collection.
It used to be that targeting could only be indirect, and media had to design products that would deliver (or foster) certain demographics. Now the audience can be assembled out of a database, through narrowing queries to get the desired combination of elements: white men under 30 who own guns and are interested in video games, etc. This cab be as refined as seems valuable, but it is rarely economically efficient to target one individual.
Cambridge Analytica, the consultancy that exfiltrated data from Facebook in order to try to build dossiers on the political proclivities of individual users, is based on the idea that targeted ads can sway elections. This can seem like it is capable of manipulative brainwashing, the worst fears from Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders come to life in a vast apparatus of media mind control. But if it works at all, it is likely a matter not of changing minds or implanting new thoughts, but of motivating and demotivating people with information that activates their sense of possibility, their feelings of anger, or their apathy and despair. (This article has an overview of debates over whether targeted political ads work; naturally, some of it is grounded in polling people on their opinion about targeted ads.) The ads are meant to remind people that in belonging to a demographic, they also belong to a community that has come to a particular conclusion about what one should do, how one should act. They invite the targets simply to express themselves, their true selves.
It's not that the data should shape the content of the ad pitch; it is that the data allows advertisers to select the right audience. Then, the ads work by reinforcing the targets' sense of who they already are. They don't need to be persuaded; they have ben selected because they are seen as already more or less convinced. This sort of advertising wants to confirm your impressions, not alter them. It works best when it seems to be doing nothing at all, reminding consumers of their immunity to advertising.
It is in advertisers' interests to promote scare stories of the irresistible brainwashing power of ads, and to promote a behavioristic, Pavlovian view of human psychology in which one simply needs to pull the right mental trigger to get someone to do something — you can bypass their conscious mind and their executive functioning entirely. What we think about what we want is just epiphenomenal, from that view. Even what we say in polls is posturing — the "truth" is revealed only through one's automatic responses, and these can be caught through surveillance or unveiled by a layer of data analysis that reveals what we really think but wouldn't say.
Facebook bases its sales pitch on the same idea: "our data is valuable because it will allow you to unlock the minds of our users." Having data on users is more important than listening to them (or it is a way of "really" listening to them). They have already revealed their desires in the data, so why try to engage their rational mind? Instead, just create an environment around them that mirrors themselves back to themselves, amplifying their desires.
Ads become effective when we let our guard down to them, when we think they are foolish or obvious or dumb or irrational. (This is why so many ads are ironic or sarcastic or surreal.) The ad industry plays on this when it ludicrously touts its own magic manipulation abilities.
The cumulative effect of targeted ads isn't to change our minds but to confirm that we're accurately targeted, and that everything we do is already functioning mainly as a kind of advertisement of ourselves, regardless of whatever else we are trying to express. Ultimately the feedback loop may tighten into a perfect tautology in which the data dictates the self that dictates the data. There will be nothing left to say but "this is who I am."