When I was a kid, I was crazy for Mad Magazine, and a passionate follower of Mad’s campaign against consumerism and materialism in general, and against Madison Avenue and the world of advertising in particular.
Lots has happened since then. When Mad talked about advertising, it was talking about television, radio and newspapers. There was no Internet. The debate back then was over whether TV, which catered to the sponsors, would kill off newspapers, which took pains to separate the news from the ads. Now the Internet, originally an academic project financed by the American military, has become the World Wide Web, which is both a powerful vehicle for disseminating information and a mighty commercial mechanism. And it’s proving to be the Web which is finally killing off the newspapers.
New web ventures have a patina of geeky chic, but behind them all are hard-nosed venture capitalists who are trying to figure out how to monetize the web – their polite way of saying they want to make money from web users. This is something of a challenge since the Web started off free; we have many warnings that this will change, and that our culture will veer off into an even higher stage of materialism and consumerism.
What’s more frightening is that many efforts to monetize the web accomplish it with a massive invasion of our privacy. Our web searches reveal what we are thinking about and interested in; our emails explicitly contain our personal concerns and professional activities. All this information is fair game for Web businesses to collect, analyze and use or sell in an effort to make advertising more effective.
The latest development is the social network, primarily Facebook and Myspace. These seemingly innocuous platforms for people to communicate are valued in the billions by investors.
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