My consumer profile reflected in the novel 'Feed' would be quite different from many other consumers. Unlike a lot of people my age, I don't have a desire to have something at the very second that I want it. Instead, I'm patient, and I can usually wait for some sort of object, looking more towards the past than to the future.
My feed would be advertising a lot of music. I spend a lot of time listening to all different genres of music, and as a result, there would be a large amount of audio streaming through my feed. As well, it would transmit advertisements for some of my personal hobbies, like Cardfight!! Vanguard and poetry readings, and would be a lot for swimming, the second-most important part of my life.
There would be advertisements for new aquatic facilities, new speedsuits, new tech suits and speedos, as well as new brands of goggles, new lines of goggles that fit my particular swimming style and methods; there would be opening days for concerts reflecting my favorite rap artists and metal groups, and a lot of feed streaming towards sports and athletics.
The interesting part of these is most of these advertisements are already streaming when I browse the internet. When I enter my product placements into coretcg.com, or when I buy a speed suit from swim outlet, automatically the transmissions from my product purchases tell people what I like and what I want to buy. Thus, there are already a ton of advertisements in my face from card shops and swimming sites.
My visual representation of a feed is almost mirrored in the way I browse the internet and place product orders, because the computers that we use already tend to read the things we purchase and as a result know what we want. We don't need a microchip in our brains because the things we enter into a search engine and the results we click on when they appear already tell the computer the things we want, and the things we're most likely to buy.
We don't have the microchips yet because the government has no way of making a professional instigation for forcing installation of chips into our brains. But there's nothing wrong with being skeptical, as the technological advancements in the realm of media and social advertising are quickly increasing at a very rapid rate. We aren't interrupted with our own 'Feeds' yet, but the mass corporations of the world have a solid understanding of the people we are based solely off our search engines and virtual swipes of the credit card.
While reading the novel, I also thought about how ads of my favorite stores and brands showed up every time I opened my laptop. However, I always was grateful that those same corporations weren't in my head, integrated into every aspect of my life, monitoring my thoughts. Then I read your entry and realized that day might not be too far off, given the rate of technological advancement and increase in corporations' knowledge that you mentioned.
ReplyDelete