When you write a post on Facebook about your sudden craving for blue cheese, an advertisement for gout prevention might suddenly pop up on your page. Post the phrase “bacon tidbits,” and you might get an ad for a book called “Forbidden Lessons in a Kabul Guesthouse.”
The robots are watching us. They’re announcing to the world that we just looked at Eames chairs on Pinterest and that we’ve listened to Taylor Swift and Conway Twitty on Spotify. They’re sending us ads labeled “Being Conservative in South Carolina” simply because we checked our e-mail in Charleston. They’re broadcasting the fact that we just read an article called “How to Satisfy Your Partner in Bed.” They’re trumpeting ”” with an undue amount of enthusiasm ”” that we just scored 6 points on Words With Friends for making the word “cat.”
Given the (politically speaking) unregulated Internet, we will all do well to remember that any apparently “free” sites and services, unless financed charitably, must seek income to sustain their hardware, software, and human administrators. It’s been the same from the beginning with commercial television, which can only keep going as an advertising medium with intervals for amusement. As for the growth of so-called social media, it is not an exaggeration to say that every day we Internet user/consumers are increasingly targeted by others also on the Internet who want to sell us something. It’s just free market capitalism using the latest popular media to doing what capitalism has to do, which is to make profit. So, Internet gamers, Facebook users, and Twitterers all: Beware!