Much as employers claim to despise Facebook, it has become a useful way of screening employees.
For advertisers, who feared losing a captive television audience to the Internet, Facebook is a way to engage in careful market segmentation and targeting. It expands the methods of surveillance into bedrooms and homes, and makes the posters willing participants in the process. Interactivity seems to have the illusion of consumer choice (given that consumers can select what websites to interact with) but because online consumer buying and surfing patterns can be followed, the online experience can be invisibly tailored to reflect seller's knowledge -- everyone has had the experience of being 'followed' by an advertisement after searching the web for a particular product, such as a new pair of Nike sneakers.
While posting on Facebook is very public, it can feel very private. A person can seem very much locked away in his or her world, while talking on a cellphone or posting on Facebook during a luncheon. Public space has an apparently unseen private sphere -- a sphere that feels private, but is not in reality. So should the death of the private sphere be mourned, given that according to Foucault it never really existed and the priority given to privacy is a product of industrialization?...
Today, people bargain for the 'privacy' of being able to search the Internet in public and to remove themselves from real, public spaces, but do so by giving up information to online advertisers. All of this is testimony to Foucault's idea that once an intellectual space is divided into public and private, it is almost impossible to opt out of the system, given that every attempt to be more private requires sacrificing some other type of personal and private information -- in this case to advertisers and to the owners of Facebook.
Bibliography
Andrejevic, Mark. 2002. The work of being watched: Interactive media and the exploitation of self-disclosure. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19 (2): 230 -- 248.
Denby, David. 2010. Influencing People: David Fincher and ' The Social Network'
The New Yorker. Accessed:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/10/04/101004crat_atlarge_denby
[August 20, 2011 at]
Privacy PowerPoint. 2011. In-class.
