Here’s an article on NPR’s website about Facebook’s new default “opt-in” policy. According to the article, Facebook is changing its default privacy setting from one where users must “opt-out”–manually increase their security settings– to make their profile private. With this new “opt-in” policy, Facebook profiles are public by default.
Who you are, quite literally, is for sale. Well, not the particulars of our information, but the mundane nuances of our preferences, our “likes” and our “dislikes.” Speaking for myself, what I cherish about “typical” human relationships is the ability to lie. I like being able to lie. I mean, of course, not the big stuff– I’m an exceedingly honest and trustworthy person. Honest. But, I mean the small stuff. I appreciate that I can lie to the cable TV sales guy at the mall. “Yes, I do have the Premium-Super-Kick-Butt TV package with HBO, home phone service, and broadband Internet attached to my brain. No, I don’t think I would like to upgrade right now.” I like that I can lie to the cable sales guy and walk away. I find it expedient, and it helps keep me out of a conversation when all I want is to gawk at the latest LCD tv that I can’t afford (not to mention– I don’t have cable…).
Again, I like being able to lie. Face it– we all do. In a sense, don’t we even like lying to ourselves? How else could we muster up the courage to do novel things? Call it– the fuzziness of being human– a form of Stephen Colbert’s “Truthiness.”
Of course, there are other privacy concerns that extend beyond advertising. But, let’s sideline those important concerns for the moment. I understand that the old advertising model (where I consume content for free, and in return, the content distributers get to sell me to advertisers) is quickly becoming extinct. And, I can follow the argument that personalized advertising is “good” for me because I’m only troubled by ads that interest me. (Except, in order to buy ad space tailored to a particular demographic, advertisers and companies get to decide what “type” of person I am.)
What I find interesting is that sorting of humans into categories, in a sense, clamps down on that human fuzziness. It’s a new type of demographic tool that is more powerful than any of us could have imagined a couple of decades ago. In that way, Facebook and all of the other advertisers make personalized adverts are really practicing a form of pastoral biopower. As Foucault would have put it, they “give life” because they limit the potentiality of what it means to be human to categories that can be marketable (e.g., Tweens, Gen X, Gen Y, Baby Boomers).
It’s this power that I think troubles most people when we talk about Facebook’s (and others’) ability to pry into our information. Again, I’m not sure what this will all mean in the long haul. But, for now, it seems that most of us find it at least uncomfortable.
And, with all forms of biopower and especially with pastoral biopower, things can get really bad.