October 16th, 2008

THE ERASURE OF MAN

One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area–European culture since the sixteenth century–one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words–in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same–only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possiblity–without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises–were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.

From Michel Foucault: the final two paragraphs of The Order of Things [Les mots et les choses] (1965)

THE PROBLEM WE ADDRESS

Today, 70% of all consumer time online is spent viewing content created by other consumers. As exciting as this development is, the explosive growth of social media and user-generated content has created a significant problem for marketers, publishers and advertisers all of whom rely on business tools and strategies that were created to monetize an Internet more closely resembling Henry Luce’s magazine model than the Internet that we know today. To make matters worse, the legacy advertising technologies that marketers today rely on generally fail to tap the unique opportunities afforded by social media and user generated content. The result: advertisers are disillusioned with the promise of social media but are still longing for a solution that properly addresses the significant audience (and obvious engagement) represented by the explosion of social content.

Media6° is the solution to the “social media problem”.

THE SOLUTION THAT WE PROVIDE

Our patent pending algorithms and methods connect a brand’s existing customers with user segments composed entirely of consumers who are interwoven via the social graph. These bespoke Media6° segments are both completely customized for each advertiser and enormously scalable. They reflect high degrees of homophily, the tendency of like-minded individuals to cluster with other people who strongly resemble them.

These Media6° audiences, sharing powerful demographic and psychographic traits, have been proven to respond to advertising messages at rates dramatically higher than other targeting alternatives.

Media6° is the ideal partner for brand marketers seeking large audiences displaying the highest levels of response, engagement, word of mouth and collective behavior.

CONSUMERS

Media6° believes that the best advertising solutions are those built from the ground up to protect consumer privacy. To that end, we are committed to these principles with regard to our interaction with consumers:

We do not collect or use any personal information about any consumer.

We do not attempt to discern the content or subject matter of any content page.

We help consumers to readily opt-out of Media6° cookies both at our site and through industry programs managed by the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI).

From the website of Media6°, a marketing firm specializing in online advertising.

Let’s break down what Media6° actually does. It’s fascinating, it’s brilliant, and it amounts to no less than the erasure of man.

Media6° (note the Stanley Milgram reference in their name) works with companies who want to advertise on the web. They’re in the business of collecting data, basically, which they then use to strategically place advertisements. In order to collect that data, they place 1 x 1 px squares on pages across the web, but most importantly, they place them on social networking sites like myspace, facebook, and linkedin. They don’t do so through any insidious means: they purchase advertising space from those sites, and when those sites go to retrieve an ad from the ad server, they report identifying information via the cookie that Media6° has embedded, as this is how cookies work.

They then collect information about where this individual user travels, and when they’re on a social networking site, this allows Media6° to see that person’s local social network by getting the cookie information from those users, too. Sociologists have found that people have between five and fifteen people with whom they actually associate as friends, i.e., more than acquaintances. The rest of a person’s friend list basically operates like a rolodex, but obviously, it binds a little more than that since it’s an interactive and semi-public bond (this is probably worth another essay). That means when we say network, we’re really talking about five to fifteen people. Here’s the reason for collecting the data, from a short article written by Media6° co-founder David Honig:

In fascinating research conducted in 2004, Chris Volinsky,the director of statistical research at AT&T Labs Research, undertook a study with Foster Provost, a New York University business professor, and Shawndra Hill, then an NYU graduate student and today a professor at the Wharton School. What these researchers discovered was remarkable: Any person in contact with an existing customer of a firm is three to five times more likely to respond to a message from the firm. Birds of a feather do indeed flock (and buy) together.

Even more significant, the researchers recorded these results in a direct-mail channel that involved neither an explicit nor an implied endorsement by one consumer to another – à la the troubled Facebook Beacon. In essence, the researchers found that by analyzing which customers communicated with each other, using inbound/outbound pairs on the telephone grid, they could identify “network neighbors” in the telephone social graph.

If they found one network neighbor to have responded to a particular direct mail offer, then sending the same offer to his network neighbors resulted in a three- to fivefold lift above any targeting technique not informed by this network-neighbor data. The researchers explained the results this way: “Social theory tells us that people who communicate with each other are more likely to be similar to each other, a concept called homophily …. Linked consumers probably are like-minded, and like-minded consumers tend to buy the same products.”

In other words, Media6° uses cookies on social networking sites to identify a person’s network. Those same cookies, when placed in the checkout page of a company’s website, can tell Media6° when one of their user IDs has bought a product. Then when someone in that user ID’s network visits a website populated by Media6° advertisements, the ad server pulls the advertisement for the product purchased by someone else in the network–that is to say, it pulls the advertisement that will be most effective in selling a product, as seen in the excerpt above. Also worth noting is that Media6° doesn’t advertise on social network sites because people are much more likely to tune out banner ads in that context. They collect data there and advertise elsewhere. Media6° is quite open about all this, and in addition to offering an opt-out link on their homepage, they provide a Relevant Reading section on their website, which is where I found David Honig’s article linked to above.

Now I want to note a couple things. First, I’ve been using the pronoun “they” to describe Media6°, and in some sentences this is appropriate, and in others, probably not. No person–no human–is actually looking at these cookies. Moreover, no computer program is looking at any personal data on anyone’s myspace page or even gathering anyone’s name. This is a computer running a program that takes the user ID information gathered by the embedded 1 x 1 px squares, runs it through an algorithm that makes sense of that data, and then eventually uses that to inform an ad server which ad to place on a page when a certain user ID visits. That’s it. All of the information that those of us using social network sites fill our pages with, whether sincere or tongue-in-cheek, is completely irrelevant to Media6°. While this in no way does away with the importance of demographic information for other methods of advertising, the most effective way to advertise products in 2008 does away with actual people and only sees them as nodes in a network.

Please don’t understand this as hyperbole. I mean this with complete sincerity and as much as Foucault did when he made his prediction: We are witnessing the erasure of man. I don’t say this fearfully or even as a negative evaluation. I’m not saying man is going to disappear in a vernacular sense, and to completely understand what I’m saying would require a rigorous recapitulation of The Order of Things, which while tempting is not something I’m going to do here. If I believed in an epochal view of history and thought there were epistemic breaks, I would be forced to say that at this moment we are witnessing such a transformation, and it means nothing less than the extinction of the anthropos.

[Please note: I'm not a tech guy; I'm a theory guy. If I've made any errors in explaining precisely how Media6° operates, don't hesitate to correct me. This is the web, of course, and revisions are easy.]