Justin Honra

Prof. Bean
WRD 103/321
10 June 2014
Privacy: An Outdated Concept
I was emailing my therapist about switching to a different medication and Google
decided that it would be okay to read my messages. It started annoying me with medication ads
and ads for psychologists and psychiatrists. I dont know if it bothers everyone, but I kid you not,
one ad said something along the lines of crazy people help. I do NOT like to be called crazy. It
also suggested several inpatient locations for specific problems that I have. I honestly believe
that this is a HUGE invasion of privacy. Im not the crazy one. Google is crazy, not to mention
stupid.
- Not So Anonymous Gmail User
In todays digital age, our society has become so heavily saturated with advertisements
that any moment of respite has become almost impossible. Personalized advertising, as
illustrated in Not So Anonymous Gmail Users experience, is the common method advertisers
use in which a persons digital information is extracted to produce and present ads relevant to
that person. The ubiquity of personalized advertising is promoting a complacent American
culture that normalizes the act of digital espionage by corporations and the United States
government. Privacy is an unalienable right protected under the U.S. Constitution. However, has
privacy become an outdated concept all in the name of capital?
According to Mark Tungate, author of Adland A Global History of Advertising, Its safe
to say that advertising has been around for as long as there have been goods to sell and a medium
to talk them up (7). At its infancy, advertising was intimate, existing only in direct contact and
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word-of-mouth. In 1447, German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press,
allowing one to quickly reproduce multiple texts (Tungate, 2007). It was not until the printing
press was used to create newspapers, in combination with the Industrial Revolution that the
advertising industry began to develop its level of ubiquity experienced today.
The ability manufacturers had to mass produce goods and reach far flung audiences
through newspapers created a communication system between companies and potential
consumers. This early form of communication through newspapers could be understood through
the transmission model. According to the transmission model of communication, an encoder (a
company or advertiser) creates a message (an advertisement) and sends it through a medium (a
newspaper) to be received by a receiver (a potential customer). The flow of information in this
model is linear coming from companies, point A, and ending at the consumers, point B (Baran,
2011).
In todays digital age, the rise of societal dependency on the internet and electronic
devices such as smart phones, iPods, and tablets has disrupted the linear flow of effective
communication from companies to consumers. More and more of peoples waking hours are
spent looking at various screens whether they are a television screen, a computer screen, or a
screen of a mobile device (Sutanto, 2013). Consumers are no longer effectively reachable
through one channel as they are becoming more fragmented in platform use and interests.
To combat this, advertisers have turned to personalized advertising or retargeting, a
method in which advertisers extract a persons previous internet browsing history via a tracking
device called cookies and then produce ads shown on Google, Facebook, etc. specific to the
websites one has visited before. Advertising has become a two way street for information. The
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linear communication of advertisements has become a circular flow in which ad agencies have
the ability to collect tremendous amounts of personal information from consumers and interpret
them in a way to better sell their products. The circular flow of information is ongoing and
reciprocal because ad companies and consumers are always in the act of decoding and encoding
messages when creating and receiving personalized advertisements (Baran, 2011). Experiencing
a personalized advertisement is a way for consumers to unconsciously partake in this everyday
dialogue of commodity and their personal information.