\t\t\t\tToday, it is apparent that advertising’s roots in propaganda are resurfacing, we can now add the term analytics under the propaganda heading. These new and\u00a0highly devious suites of\u00a0 techniques\u00a0are becoming key to swaying hundreds of millions of people who use social media and who\u00a0are unprotected from targeted advertising\u00a0during their internet sessions. <\/p>\n
Persuasion is part and parcel of advertising,\u00a0but this is taking on new forms and posing as legitimate\u00a0information, supplanting the role of newspapers and creeping into every available\u00a0crack in the interface of\u00a0internet driven data, social, and news media landscapes. As that occurs, the unwitting reader is tagged, read, tracked, ranked, categorized, sized, and mined for every bit of information during their internet sessions, and probably when they call the doctor. <\/p>\n
At this time, I’m unaware of how analytics works with cell phone data, but if the Snowden disclosures on the NSA’s use of telephone metadata are any indication, all telcom data is also probed, recorded, and analyzed \u00a0for all the potential informational wealth which is sold on to data amalgamators by the Telco providers. \u00a0No form of electronic communication is exempt from this data mining and resale as far as I can tell.<\/p>\n
It takes an effort to fight tracking, let alone learning how to avoid the exploitive uses of targeted advertising, efforts that that average non-technical user might find burdensome. Leaving the social media landscape would be unheard of by hundreds of millions of people, yet that may be the only way to curtail some of the effects of this new effort. Simply existing in the early part of the 21st century is enough, there is a placeholder for each of us in the data model. How detailed a record is maintained is the only question, some of which is governed by where you live, but in all cases, efforts to curb this trawling of data have no teeth and there are no guarantees you will be left out or overlooked, computers don’t get bored. Blocking these techniques is becoming more important as we can’t trust providers from letting us opt out. <\/p>\n
Some reading on analytics and their impact on society: Mercer, Bannon, Farage in the Guardian<\/a><\/p>\n
\n“SCL\u2019s main offering, first developed by its affiliated London think tank in 1989, involves gathering vast quantities of data about an audience\u2019s values, attitudes and beliefs, identifying groups of \u201cpersuadables\u201d and then targeting them with tailored messages. SCL began testing the technique on health and development campaigns in Britain in the early 1990s, then branched out into international political consulting and later defense contracting.”<\/em>\u00b9<\/p>\n