Individuality lost in a web of advertising

The Age

Tuesday February 16, 2010

GORDON FARRER

Follow the money and you'll end up at the ads. IS ADVERTISING the financial enabler of the internet or the ultimate debaser of its potential? Is it the web's vital creative engine room or a usurping beast that demands that all other content and activity be without value?Would we all be happier if the internet were ad-free?These questions are suggested by a couple of articles that popped up during the past week. The first was an interview in The Independent with author Jaron Lanier.Lanier argues that social media �� the Facebooks, LinkedIns, MySpaces and so on through which people increasingly connect �� commoditise relationships and debase knowledge by requiring people to define themselves with the scantest of information. "Individual reductionism", he calls it.He says the collective thinking that arises from social media relationships, known as the "hive mind", is regarded by the market as a kind of superhuman intelligence, greater and more valuable than individual intelligence.In the process, says Lanier, the individual disappears, their effort is devalued and people become mere receptacles for advertising �� the only online content with hard commercial value.Lanier speaks like a dreadlock-wearing hippie iconoclast �� which he is �� so his cynicism is not surprising. But he is also a computer scientist, a pioneer of virtual reality and the author of the recently released You Are Not a Gadget.In his book, Lanier takes particular aim at advertising. He argues that to understand what is going on in a society or ideology you have to "follow the money"."If money is flowing to advertising instead of to musicians, journalists and artists," he writes, "then a society is more concerned with manipulation than with truth or beauty."The combination of the hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract in which "authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given away without pay to the hive mind".Advertising, curiously, is untouched by this effect."At the end of the rainbow of (social media's) open culture," Lanier writes, "lies an eternal spring of advertisements. Advertising is elevated by open culture from its previous role as an accelerant and placed at the centre of the human universe."Advertising is singled out as the only form of expression meriting genuine commercial protection in the new world to come. Any other form of expression is to be remashed, anonymised and decontextualised to the point of meaninglessness."Now add to Lanier's tough talk a paper titled The Advertising Effect, released yesterday by Compass, a British political pressure group.According to the authors, the purpose of advertising �� here I'm paraphrasing Jackie Ashley, who wrote about the paper in The Guardian on the weekend �� is not to make people feel happy or fulfilled but to make them feel needy: "The creation of a mood of restless dissatisfaction with what we have got and who we are so that we go out and buy more."The paper goes on to suggest banning all advertising in public places �� to which Lanier would no doubt add the internet.It is true that advertising is pervasive. It does its best to saturate whatever media it travels in, fingering every crevice looking for eyeballs, potential customers, more undiscovered markets to sacrifice to the god called "Economic Growth".Would banning advertising from the internet make us feel happier?The kingdom of Bhutan, nestled between India and China, is famous for having the highest level of gross national happiness in the world. It also has one of the world's lowest levels of internet penetration: just 5.8 per cent of the population is connected.I'm just saying.Follow this column on Twitter:untanglingweb