Audience Manipulation and controlling the normal

 

(choose your audience, 2017).

One of the most impactful and unnoticed aspects of the power imbalance in Facebook is that of the design of the space itself. Wood, Kaiser, & Abramms, (2006) put forward that “Every map serves a purpose, every map advances an interest”. Whose interest, then, is advanced by the architecture and mapping of the Facebook site? Once again, it is the purpose of the multinational corporation of Facebook to increase the amount of advertising and as a result the money it can generate from this advertising revenue.

The power imbalance in this situation is again in the subtle ways Facebook manipulates and controls its users under the mask of a completely user-focused “social network”. When one looks at it critically, the idea that a platform, run by a corporation, that reaches millions of people daily wouldn’t be used to generate profit through the use and manipulation of information doesn’t seem to make good business sense.

Many people in the postmodern world are increasingly more aware of the types and amount of personal information we allow into the cyber world, despite reaching a point in our collective online activities where we habitually give away this information and more daily, on Facebook.

One of the reasons Facebook has been so incredibly successful in its use of targeted advertising is in the way the space has been constructed to gather information; such a way that users have been made to feel as though the space is all about them and so, they are much more willing to ‘like’ a page that aligns with their views or fill out profile information because they are under the illusion it is only seen by them, and the chosen few they nominate as ‘friends’. Whereas in actuality, the bulk of that data is used to improve the relevance of the advertising content to the individual users’ preferences. This YouTube video by dottotech explains how advertising can be targeted based on information gleaned from user’s innocuous interactions with the site.

This purposeful, designed space bears a resemblance to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project as described by Dr Victoria Kuttainen (2017). However, this space differs from the classical arcades as it has vastly different meanings based on who is interacting with the space. In a sense, Facebook can constantly ‘renovate’ its ‘main street arcade’ based on the changing interests of the specific patron, as they walk, or scroll, along it.

More so, the actual movement of the user through this virtual space has been specifically constructed as well. Success in the Facebook context means keeping the user online for as much time as possible using whatever means possible. The way they achieve this is through the personalised ‘timeline’. This is designed in a way that content can be viewed instance at a time as the user scrolls down a (more or less) chronological, time line of content assumed to be relevant to them. Facebook, the entity, uses its power in this aspect by subtly injecting its own advertising in strategic intervals throughout the timeline. This is designed in such a way so as to seem normal enough to go unnoticed as advertising but relevant enough to demand attention from the user. This constructed normality is another example of how Facebook is used as a means of control through massive, yet widely unnoticed, power disparity.

By Adam Brown

Reference list

Choose your audience [image]. (2017). Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/business/products/ads/ad-targeting

Dottotech. (producer). (2015, January 12) Facebook Ads - How they work! [video file] Retreived from https://youtu.be/r6ZVwtP3xz8

Kuttainen, V. (2017). BA1002: Maps. Week 4 Notes [power point slides]. retrieved from https://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au/

Wood, D., Kaiser, W. L., & Abramms, B. (2006). Seeing through maps: many ways to see the world. Oxford, UK: New Internationalist Publications.