Intimate Data

Think about how much personal information has been uploaded to the Internet for the convenience of participating in the marketplace of ideas online. Rather a large amount concerns textual, photographical, and video sent on the subnet. Social media has drawn many people to its strengths of self-representation and ambient intimacy through these bandwidth capabilities. Anyone can now leverage the internet’s social media to create a virtual representation of their personality. For example, Instagram is highly curated to show one’s best version of themselves, whereas on Snapchat a user’s more intimate personality is encouraged to be revealed. Differences in features on certain platforms result in different benefits for users. Although creators on social media may lose ownership of their work they can surely garner an audience for their content that can be just as loyal, if not more so than are present in radio and television audiences. Social media is primarily thought of being affective from the perspective of users, rather than informatic. The latter is most relevant to marketers, promoters, and advertisers. As we consider how users may give up their right to privacy in posting relational data, we have to think about how users may begin working with advertisers to influence their social media audiences. Already there are thousands of social media users that have influence over large swaths of people, and can work with advertisers seeking affiliates to promote their products. Intimate conversations and time spent online over social media allow social media companies to gauge what issues and interests their users have, and then they can garner advertisers that can specifically target them. Facebook has become the prime example of this structure. Politicians have used the power of influential advertisements in television and radio, and they are not unfamiliar with social media influence either. In tandem, users should make themselves aware of how targeted influence campaigns may be directed at them in order to accomplish a political goal, be that creating an issue to rally around, or to instigate voters into voting for a certain candidate at the behest of their opponent. Being able to create a meaningful balance between the affective and the informatic means that one will either have to capitalize off social media and give up their personal ownership of content in favor of advertiser affiliation, or try and keep their presence online as limited in terms of personal information and consumptive behaviors. This is to avoid being targeted by advertisers consistently. The more people give up their personal information to be shared with advertisers, the higher the chance their information will be compromised in the event an advertiser holding their information is hacked. The digital public sphere has been able to be fully accessible for free because advertisers are being sold on all these consumer insights. The users have become the product of the digital sphere itself, and this should alter how users interact with the sphere. As previously mentioned, a large percentage of users have turned to affiliate marketing in order to profit off of their influence.