Identity architecture

Google Plus‘s real name policy has made it clear that they aim to be not just a social network but the leading identity provider for online activity.

Facebook’s Timeline can, I think, be interpreted as a similar move. As others have said it provides a structure that’s something like the personal webpages of 10 years ago gone interactive – a central place for the definition of “me” to be constructed, curated and broadcast. Again there’s a real name policy, although rather less vigorously enforced.

But this talk of their aims to become the leading identity question begs the question, how is identity provided online now, already? The answer (suggested the boy a couple of days ago) is email. In a world containing Jesse Owens (Olympic sprinter) and Jay Owens (blues musician), if you want to find me on social networks you can’t search my name, you need to search my email address. You have your email address on business cards – Twitter handle too, perhaps, but 140-char has to redirect to longer-form channels somewhere along the lines. What’s your log-in for most websites you use? It’s either an email address directly, or a username set up from reference to an email address.

And the cornerstone of this liberty is free, web-based email. Hotmail. Gmail, until recently. Mail.ru and Gmx.us and so on and so forth. This has not always been the case – email started out connected to your ISP (and thus subscriber details and physical address). Google are trying to take it back there.

So just something to bear in mind in the great squall of online identity debates. Free anonymous web-based email is not cool, or glamorous, and it’s easy to see how it could be threatened through recourse to anti-spammer rhetoric and Gmail perhaps one day privileging emails from real-name-certified accounts…

…But it’s something very important to defend.

Performing identity in social media

[One written for the FACE company blog - hence the slightly different tone. Original story here.]

As we develop our online community research platform here at Face, we’ve been asking a deceptively simple-looking question. Should people have usernames, or real names, or some mixture of both?

It sounds trivial, but in fact design decisions such as this can have substantial impacts on how people contribute to online communities. Should participants use real names, as clients choose this kind of research to get in touch with “real consumers”? Or – as danah boyd and Skud (note names!) have argued – can real name policies be oppressive, as in the case of Google Plus? Might pseudonyms (a) help people talk more openly about difficult topics, and (b) be a more authentic representation of social media use in the wild, outside market research?

The bigger question here is one of identity.

Social media and social networks foreground this issue by the way that identities literally have to be written and created whenever we join a new group or network. Companies such as Facebook invite us to describe our identities within pre-defined categories – age, gender, location, favourite bands, favourite brands. Others such as Twitter, offer a 140-character blank box. Our updates and public messages then continue this process of producing an image of a certain kind of person – we tweet much more about things that make us look good than anything naff or mundane.

In an excellent blog post about this “identity work”, Jenny Davis (a PhD researcher in sociology at Texas A&M / @Jup83) concludes:

1) the social construction of identity is a laborious process;
2) the labor of identity construction must remain unseen; and
3) the architecture of social media asks us to present ourselves in explicit ways.
A tension is therefore created between the prevalence of interaction media which facilitate explicit self construction, and the appearance of a self, constructed through such media, that must appear to have organically emerged.
[Jenny Davis, ‘Identity Work and the Authentic Cyborg Self’]

A very interesting argument – but one potentially resting on two implications that need to be questioned:

1. How hidden is identity construction?
2. Are identity construction and authenticity really diametrically opposed?

Two distinctive features of digital life in 2011 are Lady Gaga, and self-branding blogs. Both seek to project a certain image in order to produce a particular reaction from people – fame and career success respectively. This method – “fake it to make it”, if you will – is backed up by the sociological concept of performativity.

Social theorist Judith Butler argues that our speech and actions (performance) produce what people understand as our identities and social norms:

Butler [explores] the ways that linguistic constructions create our reality in general through the speech acts we participate in every day. By endlessly citing the conventions and ideologies of the social world around us, we enact that reality; in the performative act of speaking, we “incorporate” that reality by enacting it with our bodies, but that “reality” nonetheless remains a social construction. […]
In the act of performing the conventions of reality, by embodying those fictions in our actions, we make those artificial conventions appear to be natural and necessary. By enacting conventions, we do make them “real” to some extent (after all, our ideologies have “real” consequences for people) but that does not make them any less artificial.
[Dino Felluga, “Modules on Butler: On Performativity” in Introductory Guide to Critical Theory.]

Butler makes the post-structuralist argument that the distinction between “real” and “constructed” identities is a misnomer – the ‘real us’ is something we perform and construct. Bringing this back to social media research, the question is how far might our research participants agree that the same is true for their online identities?

We can start by asking people what choices they have made in (a) setting up their social media profiles, and (b) in deciding what content to share on a daily basis. What may be most revealing is asking people what they choose not to mention – e.g. only mentioning your activity or location if it’s interesting and a bit braggable; not sharing links to the Daily Mail horoscopes (which you’ve actually been reading for the last 10 minutes) but rather a breaking piece of news about some new Silicon Valley start-up.

Every professional on Twitter, in particular, is making daily choices about the balance of personal and industry-relevant content they want to present. This is seen as normal and good practice, counter to the idea that the work of identity construction is supposed to remain hidden. This “conscious performativity” is most visible in the case of Lady Gaga – and legions of fame-hungry contestants on reality TV shows – who take calculated self-construction to an extreme, presenting conceptualised, mediatised packages where artifice becomes very much the point.

If people acknowledge the effort they put into presenting their online identities, what does this mean for authenticity? Empirically we can see that authenticity is still valued in people’s online identities – “self-branding” is fairly widely mocked (at least in the UK) for encouraging fake and pushy personas online. But how can identity be authentic and yet also constructed and performed? Why does Lady Gaga insist that she was “born this way”?

The issue is what we mean by “being authentic”. Being “made” is acceptable – what is at stake is the sincerity of our identities. Erving Goffman’s classic text on performed identities, The Construction Of Self in Everyday Life (1959), makes this point clearly:

“When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be.”
[Goffman 1959]

An insincere or cynical performance violates the trust required for social interaction, hence its taboo nature.

Finally, it is important to note that we can be authentic in different ways in different contexts. For example, James is an honest man and also kind. At the funeral of his wicked uncle, he will not be honest about his thoughts about the deceased, in order to be kind to the feelings of the rest of his family. As Erving Goffman highlights, the performance is specific to the stage where it occurs – our identities are not socially universal.

To sum up, this results in a conception of identity departing from Davis’s:
1) the social construction of identity is a laborious process;
2) we are aware that this labour of construction occurs, and do not demand self-making to be invisible
3) nonetheless authenticity is still required, specifically in the sense of sincerity
4) authenticity depends on context

So what are the implications for online research communities? A few suggestions:

1. Participants need a space where they can determine the social context for their community and construct the appropriate identities. Researchers do this with initial getting-to-know-you tasks, asking people to introduce themselves to the community, but research communities don’t tend to offer much more than this – which potentially results in ‘thinner’, less fleshed-out identities and interactions between the group. Allowing people spaces to share “irrelevant” content, e.g. in status updates, general chat or personal blogs, provides the necessary space for people to build ‘thicker’, deeper identities – and also provides more interpersonal information to help participants come together as a community.

2. Should your community use an external ID provider, e.g. Facebook? No, as this will bringswith it a pre-determined social context that may not be appropriate for the community you’re trying to build. (e.g. LinkedIn IDs won’t get people in the right frame of mind for a community about parenting.)

3. In an ongoing community, let people choose and change their userIDs, display names and avatars between projects, as a way of helping them foreground the relevant social identity (e.g. as student, or mum, or twentysomething, or Italian) for the project at hand.

4. Clients may want to see “real names”, but this may not necessarily be the most appropriate and relevant identity to foreground – some social groups (e.g. video gamers, sports teams) are strongly nickname-based.

Macro trends: black box algorithms & the end of the middle class

A couple of days ago I was thinking through the question, what’s important now? Or rather, what is now – what are the currents shaping the way the world is going over the next 10 or so years?

Perhaps this was inspired by Jon Henley’s article on September 11th, which argued that it wasn’t actually the “day that changed everything”, and many of the geopolitical events seen as consequences of the attack may have happened regardless.

One key trend is clearly black box algorithms:

In a speech at the technology conference TEDGlobal this summer, computer scientist Kevin Slavin argued that a profound shift is taking place: maths is undergoing a “transition from being something that we extract and derive from the world to something that actually starts to shape it”.

The maths Slavin is talking about, and Harris is writing about, is algorithms. We are, he says, living in an “algo-world”. If Slavin is right, algorithms are shaping everything from the goods we buy to the value of the money with which we buy them.

[...]

The thing is, as systems of algorithms get more complex and take control of ever greater areas of everyday life, concerns are being raised over how much we’re able to track what they’re up to. The answer is: not all that much. As Slavin puts it: “We’re writing these things that we can no longer read.”

[Welcome to the algoworld, Sam Leith, Evening Standard, 12th Sept 2011]

Second, and bigger point – the stagnation and decline of the middle class standard of life.

Take a story that appeared in the Wall Street Journal Monday. The tale is nominally one about marketing strategy and it looks at how giant firm Procter & Gamble sells its household goods to its customers. But the picture that emerges is terrifying. P&G, it transpires, is cutting back on marketing to the disappearing middle classes, instead selling more and more to either high-income or low-income customers and abandoning the middle. Other big firms, like Heinz, are following suit. The piece reveals there is even a word for this strategy, helpfully coined by Citibank: the Consumer Hourglass Theory – because it denotes a society that bulges at the top and bottom and is squeezed in the middle.

The story contains some scary figures, such as the fact that the net worth of the middle fifth of American households has plunged by 26% in the last two years. Or that the income of the median American family, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than in 1998.

Or look at a story in the New York Times Tuesday. It starkly shows how the plight of the American working person has worsened. Solid jobs that once provided a secure grasp on middle class aims (a house, college for the kids, a retirement) have changed to become low-wage ones. It looks at the situation of some Detroit auto-workers, pointing out that new hires can find themselves working opposite long-term colleagues who do similar jobs yet earn twice as much. The system is called a “two tier” wage structure.

Perhaps that system can be justified as an emergency measure to keep Detroit’s auto-industry alive and help it survive the current tough times. But, like the Consumer Hourglass Theory, it actually looks far more like the permanent shape of things to come. American society is bifurcating, squeezing the middle class out of existence. The ranks of the poor and low-income earners are growing and the rich are doing just fine – and no one is talking about it, much less doing anything about it.

[The decline and fall of the American middle class, Paul Harris, Guardian, 13th Sept 2011]

More thinking on these later…

The rise of corporate anthropology

Anthropology is having something of an intellectual moment:

Anthropologically, we have been informed and influenced throughout time by the people around us, and that’s equally true on Facebook as it is offline,” said Facebook’s advertising chief, David Fischer. “Now we look at the networks people communicate in”

This sentence above could not have been said five years ago. But somehow something has happened to make the tech and business worlds recognise anthropological thinking to be relevant and valuable.

Yet this is a new scientised, technicalised anthropology – an anthropology that’s presumed to be the natural partner of comp sci network analysis.

It’s a depoliticised anthropology, too. Not that anthropology has ever had an official political position – left-leaning, to be sure, but not didactically so. Anthropology is, however, fundamentally concerned with understanding hierarchies and the operation of power – the ways in which social norms (the status quo) are socially reproduced and come to be seen as immutable.

Arguably this new corporate anthropology is only interested in that as far as it can further its own ends – which is to say it’s not interested in doing it properly at all.

To be interested in “anthropology” but not anthropological criticism, not critical anthropology – what does that mean? Is it intellectually coherent? How does it change the discipline?

Editd: making fashion forecasting data-driven

New fashion trends consultancy Editd is (finally) bringing big data, crowdsourcing and quantitative rigour to the hitherto very expert-driven world of fashion forecasting.

Watts and Fowler recognised that forecasting for the industry has mostly been attempted through services that offer expensive, tailored but unscientific trend books or dry, panel-based market research from the likes of Nielsen and MPD.

“It means the industry is making decisions off the back of what are really just guesses,” says Watts. “Julia suggested that as I could already do financial modelling and data cubes, and we could crawl the web for information, then why couldn’t we do that for the entire fashion world?”

It’s an ambitious business, but striking in its boldness and simplicity. Combining Fowler’s background as a fashion designer and Watts’s experience as a developer, Editd serves up customised industry trend data to clients that include retailers, designers, buyers and merchandisers. Watts describes the service as 85-90% data and 10-15% creative inspiration, but it’s the scale of data gathering that lends Editd such authority.

As well as crawling retail sites across the web to gather details on stock, prices and sizes, Editd monitors mentions on Twitter, Facebook and blogs, aggregates data from key catwalk and trade shows and adds a sprinkle of secret sauce that captures public “mind share”.

The result is a bespoke dashboard digitising the age-old mood board, also accessible through the Editd iPad app, that serves up detailed reports on anything from knitwear to colour swatches from individual designers’ shows, but with the force of thousands of data sources behind it.

Pretty amused that this is in the same week I’m working on a pilot trend forecasting project at Face, seeing if social media buzz can be used to predict what’ll be the key looks at Glastonbury this weekend. Our monitoring tool Pulsar uses same range of social media datasources as Editd – Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, Tumblr and all the rest – bringing them all together on a bespoke dashboard designed for research rather than PR use.

But Editd are using a few extra datasources too – included the Top 20 most Liked garments on ASOS (and elsewhere?) to produce a really strong indicator of current trend buzz (this week: cut-outs). I wasn’t aware that ASOS had an API to pull this data from – and I’d love to know where they’re getting retailers’ sales figures for individual items too – but this mash-up of datasources is the future of business intelligence and it would be the future of market research, except it’s pretty clear this won’t be happening in market research companies per se.

Having these different stages of purchase intent – from general social media buzz, to what people have been browsing and Liking, to actual sales figures – should allow it to be a very powerful prediction tool, capturing different stages of the decision-making process to probably do some pretty prescient stuff.

With a bit of expert curation on top, Editd looks really exciting – follow at @EDITDtweets to see what’s next.

That said, ASOS have half this stuff in-house already: at least all the Likes and all the purchase data, and I’d be very surprised if they’re behind on the social media monitoring… Wonder what we’ll see develop there too?

Being a teenage girl on the internet

I’ve read a couple of good long-form pieces recently about teenage girls online – the whole nexus of growing up and working out who you are in a digital culture voraciously set to consume youth, fashion, cool, and of course sexuality.

Here they are:

1. bebe zeva and overcoming the hatred of the american teenage girl

This blogpost sets out a progression from cute kid – to girl consciously being cute – to teen girl playing with looking sexy before she’s quite aware of how it’s being read – to being picked up by other blogs (Hipster Runoff) for having a prominent ‘personal brand’ – to having a lofi documentary made about 24 hours in your hipster life.

along the way bebe talks about her life being home schooled, her isolation, her philosophy on life and the internet and her strange family situation. the best moments are when bebe talks candidly about her unusual life, which is focused on her internet presence, or makes comments that shows us she knows exactly how ridiculous it is. bebe says “I understand that life is bleak and you can either kill yourself or donate yourself to social commentary. I’m just a brand. I’m just shit. All of my content regarding my personality is available.”

…

obviously, society’s problem is not teenage girls. rather, what society views its problems to be often become fully embodied by the teenage girl. in other words, the teenage girl has become a mirror, in which we see everything we believe to be bad about our culture and ourselves — excess materiality, a desire for fame, vapidity and so on. as a young woman it can be close to impossible to avoid taking on these qualities when our society values our beauty over our intellect and the services we can provide rather than our contributions.

Significant also that the article’s author is artist Ann Hirsch, who’s done some pretty big performative projects about “internet cewebrity”, gaining 1.5 million YouTube views for her Scandalishious dancing girl vids.

Hirsh’s essay was spurred in part by this rather uncomfortable review by (who else?) Vice of the Bebe Zeva documentary.

Bebe Zeva’s photoblog is called Fated To Be Hated, which says it all.

2. Rolling Stone on Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire

Another story from MySpace to Stickam video stream to online shop – and cyberbullying spilling over into the real world, and stalkers, and paedophiles – and a really nasty sub-Perez Hilton site called Stickydrama.com created by an adult man seeking to cash in on teen drama, internet celebrities, and all their sexy naked pics.

Ick.

It’s particularly interesting to read Stickydrama.com as a compare-and-contrast with Fandom Wank. They initially seem to be similar meta-blogs reporting on activity within particular scenes’ social mediaspheres – and, subtitled Mock Mock Mockity-mock-mock – both would seem to be equally savage.

Except that Fandom Wank ends up working as a disciplinary mechanism for the fandom community, shooting down hostile and malicious behaviour and reaffirming social norms of decent behaviour. It’s basically the Internet Police, but with enough autocritique (and indeed postgrad social scientists onboard) to keep its own actions in check and largely clear of anything that can be called bullying.

Why Fandom Wank is constructive and most other scene blogs wildly destructive, I’m not sure. I’d moot it was something to do with fandom being highly female-dominated – but I went to an all-girls’ school, so bitch puh-lease! So maybe it’s something to do with fandom culture being anti-commercial – fanfiction, fansubs, shared vids, and somehow managing to build something creative strong enough to escape the vortex of capitalist consumption in a way that Scene Girls putting together new outfits somehow never quite does?

3. danah boyd on Publicity and the culture of celebritization

As information swirls all around us, we have begun to build an attention economy where the value of a piece of content is driven by how much attention it can attract and sustain. It’s all about eyeballs, especially when advertising is involved. Countless social media consultants are swarming around Web2.0, trying to help organizations increase their status and profitability in the attention economy. But the attention economy doesn’t just affect the monetization of web properties; it’s increasingly shaping how people interact with one another.

Teens’ desire for attention is not new. Teens have always looked for attention and validation from others – parents, peers, and high-status individuals. And just as many in business argue that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, there are plenty of teens who believe that there’s no such thing as bad attention. The notion of an “attention whore” predates the internet. Likewise, the notion that a child might “act out” is recognized as being a call for attention. And it’s important to highlight that the gendered aspects of these tropes are reinforced online.

So what happens when a teen who is predisposed to seeking attention gets access to the tools of the attention economy? Needless to say, we see both exciting and horrifying events play out. We see teens like Tavi Gevinson propel her interest in fashion into a full-blown career before the age of 14. And we see countless teens replicating the trainwreck activities of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and other celebrities. When teens leverage social media to propel themselves into the spotlight, they fully (and with reckless abandon) engage in a set of practices that Terri Senft and Alice Marwick talk about as micro-celebrity. They work to manage their impressions, cultivate attention, and interact in ways that will increase their fame and social status.

Epigraph: Hipster Runoff on Where have all the Myspacers gone?

Whenever ur internet identity is so strongly linked to a social network’s brand

U run the risk of being buried alive

underneath the sands of internet time

in the digital graveyard

What is Facebook worth?

The arguments about valuing Facebook et al at astronomical prices all rely on the fact that it will provide extremely pertinent consumer information for targeting advertising.

So we are basically saying that their chief commercial interest is as an ancillary service for real-world marketing, where real consumers part with real dollars to purchase real products and services.

So the ultimate value of Facebook is dependent on the health of consumer goods markets, which, in the west at least, are saturated as illusory credit-based *wealth* is now disproved as a means of replacing lost income due to mass unemployment and stagnating wages.

Comment by thrawnpop on Guardian article, Is this the start of the second dotcom bubble? by Dominic Rushe, 20 Feb 2011.

This.

Everyone’s like, “OMG, Facebook means we know so much more about our consumers – that’s got to be worth sofuckingmuch.”

They seem to be forgetting that “consumers” – aka people – don’t have limitless money to suddenly start buying loads more stuff. Better targeting may make more people buy the socially-marketed product, but only at the expense of not buying stuff they currently purchase.

It’s essentially zero sum.

In the UK and America, salaries are flat and inflation is over 5%. In real terms people are getting a bit poorer every year. What’s different is that this time, we know it – after a decade’s economic growth funded by consumer borrowing (funded by debt, not wealth), individuals – and lenders – have cottoned on that that gravy train has halted. With little in the way of savings and nervous in mood, now we spend what we earn. Which is decreasing.

Facebook marketing could be magic mind control juice, but all consumers could do would be to want more stuff, not buy it.

The only way Facebook can justify these valuations is if it manages to take essentially all advertising budgets for everything everywhere.

Size of the global advertising market: estimated to reach $500bn in 2012

Google: valued at $189bn

Facebook: $50bn

1. There is a New New Thing that trancends the Old Economics, and you cannot value It the Old Way. This Time It will Be Different

From the now-famous article, 10 steps to see if you’re in a bubble.

Chinoiserie chic

Really interesting post by fashion blogger Susie Bubble on Asian influences in Western designer fashion, and whether this will work (and what it means) given that much of the customerbase (and all the growth) for these brands is now in markets such as China…

After fashion month, I’ve been bashing my head about the presence of an Asian aesthetic in some of the collections this season, specifically looking to Louis Vuitton, a collection that references some clichés that perhaps might not sit all that well with actual Chinese women. My opinion is but one of over a billion of course and my perspective as a British Born Chinese person is even more warped in that generally speaking, there exists a love hate relationship with ethnic heritage on varying levels when growing up in a country that’s biologically not your own. Previously I’ve stated that I have trouble wearing Chinese traditional dress as a rule of thumb, stopped by the gut feeling that I don’t really wish to wear my ethnicity on my sleeve as well as being in fear of looking like a waitress in a dodgy restaurant or a roleplay actor in a theme park. That said, traditional dress, when abstracted, reflected, refracted and dissected can have positive results, and in truth, I love both Rodarte and Louis Vuitton’s collections, before and after raising this query about the ethnic connotations on a wider level.

However beyond my wanton sartorial desires, I really wanted to find out whether presenting a Chinese aesthetic would indeed appeal to the Chinese, when there were these insider signs telling me that Chinese women would find it hard to accept or wear certain looks from the collection for numerous reasons be it a detachment to the shackles of old fashioned traditional dress or just a lack of desire to look overtly Chinese.

Sarah Rutson, fashion buying director at Lane Crawford of Hong Kong who has a great insight into the shifts of buying patterns within mainland China and Hong Kong says “China customers are not wanting to buy looks that are obviously ‘China Doll’ as the reality is it is too close to home and costume -y. The Chinese customer loves colour and embraces lux rich fabrics and with a brand like Louis Vuitton they will embrace certain looks because of colour, print and fabrics, not because it is a reworked cheong sam. I remember when Tom Ford did his last YSL collection – the world loved it and I looked at the YSL representative for the China region and it was not the happiest face I’ve seen.”

Style Bubble – Chinoiserie Query

One the one hand, a lot of fashion’s orientalism is explicitly imaginary, based on a fantasy of “Old Shanghai” decadence. It’s not (directly) the dangerous sort of orientalism that devalues by its co-opting, because designers aren’t claiming to define any truth for ‘Oriental’ cultures, and also because they purloin from Western history with the same ceaseless magpie-ism. Instead it’s simply relentless postmodernity where all images are equal.

It’s a fascinating fantasy to have resonance at the moment. As I understand, Shanghai in the 1930s generated its buzz from being a trade hub and a cosmopolitan melting pot – essentially globalised, much as we (falsely) believe globalisation to be a phenomenon of the past 40-odd years.

So I wonder whether the return to this imagery is about fashion trying to get a handle on what globalisation means now. What to do now that – in barely 5 or 10 years – their main consumer base has seismically shifted East. When the West is scared by what we perceive as the discipline and the dynamism of these quite alien cultures, a fashion collection like this is an attempt to mollify these anxieties by translating the Other into a familiar repertoires of Glamour and A Time When The Europeans Were There. It’s an attempt to persuade ourselves – despite our economic fears – that it’s all going to be ok.

(Designers cannot yet entertain the possibility that emerging market countries have their own distinct ideas of glamour, let alone dare to start learning aesthetic registers that may be quite separate from Western norms.)

Of course the Chinese consumer doesn’t want to buy our Western neuroses. These collections won’t sell. Jacobs won’t have the economic luxury of designing anything so self-indulgent for Louis Vuitton much longer.

Fair & not so Lovely: when individual product branding fails

People have talked about the conflicting messages from Dove and Vaseline Fair & Lovely as being perfectly reasonable branding – Unilever tailoring its brands’ advertising so it addresses different beauty trends in two different markets.

It’s still a problem for Unilever, however, because those marketing campaigns haven’t stayed safely confined to their own markets – instead, Vaseline Fair & Lovely is getting a lot of coverage on the Anglo-American parts of the internet. A bunch of Westerners not liking the ads doesn’t just mean they’re not going to buy the Fair & Lovely product – obviously enough we were unlikely to do that anyway. Rather it does two things:

  1. Make Unilever look pretty nasty for preying on the caste-driven pressures on young people in India, where skintone can affect employability and marriage options;
  2. Makes the ‘niceness’ of Dove really, really visible as a BRAND, as nothing more than a branding trick.

It’s this latter that’s the main problem for Unilever. While anyone seeing the Dove adverts should be aware that, simply enough, they are adverts and therefore they’re trying to sell you something, the ads were good enough and played well enough off an anti-size-zero zeitgeist that they felt quite sincere. They did a really good job of making people like the brand and seeing it as something that’d make them feel good about themselves.

Awareness of what Unilever are doing in other markets, however, makes their brands in this one – i.e. Dove – look very hollow. The success of the Dove campaign was predicated on a kind of cognitive dissonance: consumers could only swallow what it was saying about ‘real women’ and self-acceptance if they didn’t think too hard about it being an advert designed to sell stuff. The Fair & Lovely marketing, though, shows the depths of manipulativeness that Unilever will sink to in order to sell their beauty products, and as such I would argue it’s damaging to other brands in the portfolio.

Maybe that’s the problem with individual product branding… In February my then-colleague Sue Burden said in Marketing Week that, “With the Individual product brand model, the benefits are mainly an absence of possible negatives – no great fear of negative news about a parent or sibling brand affecting them.”

This only works, though, if consumers don’t ‘join the the dots’ between individual brands (Dove; Vaseline Fair & Lovely) and the parent company (Unilever). As this episode would indicate, that can be quite an easy thing for consumers or the media to do – and as such it’s not a very strong advantage.

Notes on the end of privacy

1. Companies are mining the social web to build dossiers on you. Anything you post to blogs, Facebook, Twitter or other websites will be stored in a cross-referenced database of your online activities, to be sold to marketers – and, frankly, whoever the hell wants it, for whatever the hell purpose – to track you down as an individual.

Jules Polonetsky, director and co-chair of the Future of Privacy Forum, said online users have no clue that a comment they made on a blog is being added to a database for some unknown use.

“I don’t think users expect that,” he said, and if consumers think idle chatter and casual conversation can be used against them by institutions, it’s almost certain to create a backlash, according to Polonetsky. He said the Federal Trade Commission is right now re-examining the current privacy structure in the U.S.

But at the same time, he said consumers are always very comfortable with Amazon using data to recommend books they might like. “When users are in control of it, it’s a win-win — if they feel empowered.”

Do marketers realise that what they’re doing is sinister? The article linked above (on Mashable) discusses how credit card companies are looking at people’s social connections to sell them new products. So-so. But what about a US health insurer using this information to deny coverage to people who they can classify as ‘high risk’ because they live in areas or communities with poor health? Or anti-abortion terrorists using this information to harass women who’ve been asking questions about abortion? “I know who you are and I know where you live” – the dark side of personalisation is a flat-out threat.

What marketers behind this – e.g. Rapleaf.com with some 389 million people tracked – don’t want to acknowledge is consent. I’ve given Amazon lots of information about the books I’ve bought and the books I like, so not only have I opted into its recommendations process but it’s also quite transparent. The exact algorithm might remain a mystery, but I know the data-points it’s feeding into that sum, and I know what it’s going to try & do with that data, viz, recommend me books in the hope I might buy them.

But no-one’s opted-in to having their online social lives (Twitter, FB, blogs & the rest) mined for information like this. While web users are aware that what they say in these forums is public, I’d argue that we’re used to thinking about a human-scale definition of public which is now dangerously obsolete.

This human-scale public is what we’re used to walking down a city street. Sure, anyone might see us, but there are two crucial points: (i) whoever can see me, I can also see them, and (ii) in a crowd of strangers I am both in public and anonymous. I would argue that this is the kind of “public-ness” people instinctively imagine they have online.

E.g. if I make some comments on a message board of course I know that anyone else on that site (=city street) will be able to read it, but it’s unlikely anyone I know from elsewhere will come wandering by and see what I’ve been up to. Perhaps I’ve posted under a handle or pseudonym, so surely that’s anonymous vis-a-vis my real name. This, I argue, is how most people instinctively think about public comments they make on the internet: an effective anonymity by dint of scale.

But these aggregating and connecting web trackers aren’t human-scale. This is a new techno-scale public in which everything publicly visible will be seen (collected, aggregated, linked) rather than simply can. The balance of possibility has shifted, such that actually the online public isn’t anonymous any more – the internet’s still too big for a human acquaintance to happen across everything you’ve said elsewhere, but it’s easy for a crawler to grab it all.

As mentioned below, you don’t need to leave a comment with your name on it for a website to trace your identity. That question you had about redundancy? Assume your bank can find out. Sexual health? Your health insurer wants to know. This is the surveillance public, the online equivalent of urban CCTV with face recognition and car numberplate tracking. You’re still free to do anything… As long as you’re happy for anyone to know about it.

2. Introducing ubercookies, a technique for websites to uncover the exact identities of visitors by using Flash to probe their browser histories for identifiable patterns. This is made even easier by the social web.

3. What can I find out about you if I know your email address? Answer: a lot, including full name and location allowing for telephone number look-ups.

4. My hacker boyfriend close friend the security researcher recommends Mozilla add-on BetterPrivacy for blocking Flash cookies, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation / Tor add-on HTTPS everywhere which encrypts your communications with major websites.