Surveillance-Based Advertising
Over the decades, there have been significant and constant technological advancement that has changed the way of doing things, both from a social and business perspective. In the same breath, the marketplace for social media surveillance has been on the rise, giving astuteness and law implementation agencies new apparatuses for maneuvering through vast amounts of data. It is on this aspect that much debate around online promotion, which, its attention is on the assortment of private data regarding the users through promotion networks, and the application of that data for targeted promotion. Today, targeted advertising is at the heat of the largest technology companies, and has become increasingly precise. Concurrently, the users have been generating more and more personalized data that is shared with advertisers as more and more day to day life is intertwined with networked technology. The text will seek to analyze the surveillance-based advertisement on the online platform and discuss its implication on the advertising company from Gramsci’s hegemony concept perspective.
Privacy is not an issue precisely to digital media like the internet as the contemporary thinking about privacy and surveillance has, for many years, been bound up with the media. From a digital media perspective, privacy is depicted as the freedom to be alone or the right to control for oneself the parts of life that should be reachable to others (Fuchs, 395). Surveillance is a concept that is seen to hinder the privacy of media users as it is defined as the organized collection and dispensation of individual data for the supervision of persons or groups. Surveillance has also been viewed as the prevention of certain behavior in groups of persons by collecting, dispensation, evaluating, and applying data. However, from a business perspective, it is more of influencing the individuals or the groups using the collected and processed data. Thus, surveillance is a procedure by which companies trail persons or groups. It is exhibited as an organized procedure that has enough power to the viewer, the companies, but not the experiential, the consumers, and it is, thus, a procedure whereby the surveiller emphasizes his control over the subject.
How companies execute surveillance is multifaceted, but technological advancement has supported the swiftness and effectiveness of the process, facilitating more efficient and persistent observation. The rise of the network society is viewed as a contributor to the increased surveillance by business organizations. Collaborative identity construction is a common feature of media surveillance whereby users contribute to the character creation of others through image classification and wall commentaries. Social media is a forefront platform that has facilitated the surveillance of consumers by different organizations. Social media allow the monitoring of different social systems of individuals and makes use of social toes that are searchable, observable, and measurable. Social media observation is challenged with constant change in content and interfaces, which makes it easy to survey different social contexts of the users (Fuchs, 397). The social media users are not aware that some organize survey their profiles, which underlines the authority and power exhibited by the companies at the expense of the social media users.
The power exhibited by the companies surveilling the user’s profile and using the data for advertising purposes is best analyzed through Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. In his first notes on the southern question (1926), Gramsci described hegemony concept as a system of the class association that exerted political control over the lower social class by winning over them (Lash, 55). in his prison notebooks, Gramsci gave an in-depth definition of the concept by including intellectual and moral leadership in the initial definition. Hegemony was outlined as containing two aspects. The first aspect is the proposition that hegemonic class tale into consideration the preferences of the class and groups that are subjected to its hegemony. Secondly, the hegemony entails economic leadership, whereby the fundamental class is positioned at the critical part of the production. The two aspects help to understand the position and influence of the companies that conduct a survey on social media platforms. The first aspect tells us how companies understand the interests and preferences of their surveillance subjects. The second aspect relates to how the companies initiating the surveillance are key to production, hence the use of the obtained data to advertising their products.
Tufekci’s analysis of media surveillance depicts a scenario whereby the users have no alternative but to try and make their data private as much as they can (Tufekci, 7). Such a scenario is best analyzed by the hegemony concept that illustrates how the dominant class maintains authority and power through coercion and consent (Lash, 59). Companies are applying hegemony concept to manipulate social media users through collective belief-system to instill a common send world-view. Common sense is through creating an image of their products that aligns with the profile of the targeted groups or individuals through advertisement; it is a move that does not only manipulate the social media users but one that forces them to seek to influence their decision making. Within the context of manipulation, the organizations tend to force the social media users to adopt ideological positions and make choices that they perceive to be in their best interest, even when such a choice may counter their conviction or wellbeing. For example, a Facebook user who keeps updating his use of a certain model of a phone will be a target of ads that suggest different models and may be forced to purchase out of frequent ads on his social media platform.
One of the strengths of hegemony concept is the focus on the human creators of culture, each with distinct positioned interests and needs (Lash, 60). However, the execution of surveillance on the social media platforms and posting advertainments that seek to align with the interest and preferences of the users negates the fact that every user has distinct needs and interests. Gramsci evades objectifying culture into a self-sufficient system but opts to focus on how hegemonic tools fight to describe the boundaries of a common-sense realism through conceptual means. However, the surveillance-based advertisement seems to be doing the opposite of Gramsci’s philosophical view. As outlined by Tufekci’s analysis, companies are disregarding the boundaries of common-sense realism by subjecting social media users to similar ads (Tufekci, 8). The organizations disregard the right to choose what individual needs to see in the ads has, and a concept of generalization has been instilled. For example, if an individual profile on Facebook is under surveillance and a company realized that they subject the user and his/her friends to similar ads with an assumption that they have common interests.
Target acquisition is one of the approaches that are used by companies such as twitter for surveillance-based advertisements. The approach is used as the companies know what the kinds of targets they want to surveil but lacks the identifies for the targets. Companies that need in-depth surveillance of the subjects, such as tracking the physical address of the social media users or identifying sensitive apps they are connected to, necessitate precise identifiers to harvest data. Thus, companies will need to acquire identifiers for their subjects to perform an in-depth survey. It is in this aspect that companies have identified google and Facebook as the leading surveillance-based business model as they are the best identifiers that companies can get (Hankey et al., 540). Facebook is one of the most used platforms of social media, which gives it authority to dominate in regards to the surveillance-based advertisement. Such a business implies that while companies can reach a large population, there is an aspect of human rights abuse.
Rights groups across the world are highlighting that the surveillance giants are integrally unsuited with the right to privacy. Some argue that Google and Facebook are threatening other rights such as the right to equality, freedom, and expression, and the right to non-discrimination. Both companies are accused of being vacuuming the personal data to feed voracious advertising businesses, which indicates an unprecedented assault on user’s privacy rights (Hankey et al., 536). The surveillance-based advertisement has undermined the very essence of the user’s rights to privacy, for example. Facebook uses algorithmic structures to generate and conclude thorough profiles on users. The practice delays the user’s capacity to form one’s character within a private domain. However, the companies have come to the defense arguing that the choice to use their platform’s services and the way to collect, receive or use data is disclosed and acknowledged by the users cannot meaningfully be associated with involuntary surveillance.
Amnesty International, an organization that campaign to end human rights abuse, stated that the google and fakebook’s ubiquitous observation of billions of users pose a systematic danger to human rights, in what I referred to as a sweeping revolution of the tech giant essential business model (Hankey et al., 540). Both companies dominate people’s modern lives, as they amass unmatched influence over the digital world by gathering and monetizing the personal information of social media users. The sinister control of user’s digital lives weakens the very spirit of confidentiality and is one of the crucial human rights challenges. It is on this aspect that there have been calls for a fundamental consideration of the way large-tech functions and to move to a platform that abides and observes human rights. The dominance of Google and Facebook is exhibited by the presence of WhatsApp, Google search, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram that enable the ways users share and seek information, relate in the debate, as well as participate in society Clarke, 70).
The surveillance-based online advertising economy has, in the past decade, grown as the dominant way to gain profits on the internet is by allowing advertainment on web services. The extent to which the media and cultural content is widely distributed stresses the relevance and significance of economic surveillance in the capitalism of information. The surveillance advertising economy subjected the consumer in a marketplace that is technologically equipped to identify transaction records in digital formats. The information about the consumers is stored, organized, and distributed instantly with a few spatial constraints (Sevignani, 53). The surveillance advertising economy has a digitalized market that is structured to produce or present the consumers, who are social media users, as commodities. However, surveillance advertising by using consumers as commodities is discriminatory as some users are valued more than others. The surveillance advertising economy has had one goal, which is to consolidate persona data and exploit it to target advertainment, price goods, influence behavior of the consumer, and service at the highest level that a person is willing to bear.
Although there have been financial gains among companies that harvest and use data for advertainment, the digital surveillance economy harbors serious threats to the interests of organizations, societies, and individuals (Sevignani, 54). It is a factor that creates risks for corporations as the new surveillance economy is proving to be a wave that will swamp the social dimension and wash away the past individualism and humanism. Alternatively, there might be an institution adaptation that may happen, overcoming the adverse impact or a breaking point that may force consumers to revel against corporate domination as highlighted by the hegemony concept. Companies are applying hegemony concept to manipulate social media users through collective belief-system to instill a common send world-view. Within the context of manipulation, the organizations tend to force the social media users to adopt ideological positions and make choices that they perceive to be in their best interest, even when such a choice may counter their conviction or wellbeing. The hegemony concept holds that each person has distinct interests and needs. However, the execution of surveillance advertisement negates the fact that every user has distinct needs and interests.
References
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Fuchs, Christian. “Social media surveillance.” Handbook of digital politics. Edward Elgar
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Hankey, Stephanie, and Daniel Ó Clunaigh. “Rethinking risk and security of human rights defenders in the digital age.” Journal of Human Rights Practice 5.3 (2013): 535-547.
Lash, Scott. “Power after hegemony: Cultural studies in mutation?.” Theory, culture & society 24.3 (2007): 55-78.
Sevignani, Sebastian. Privacy and capitalism in the age of social media. Routledge, 2015.
Tufekci, Zeynep. “Engineering the public: Big data, surveillance and computational politics.”
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