Consumerism tends to drive us to want more and more culture (more is always better) and thus it requires an apparatus that foists new options on us and strenuously tries to encourage these new and improved options will give us more than what we’ve already got, and probably haven’t exhausted—can one ever really exhaust works of art, after all? The nature of that appartus is changing, though, as the old monolithic culture industry—empowered by economies of scale, driven by profit-seeking, and hewing to the lowest common denominator among the large audiences it hoped to muster and hold together—is falling apart under the stress of new ad hoc distributional networks made possible by digitization of works and the internet hooking together consumers who love to share. Part of this sharing is sheer generosity, part of it is an aggrieved feeling that the really good stuff needs to be heard by more people and that filesharing is a way to strike a blow against the industry that has made its money stifling or neutering independent voices.

The temptation to tell people what they should like is always strong. And people often like to be told—that’s why there are so many services supplying cultural criticism. I remember how seriously I took the album reviews I read in Rolling Stone or even in the local newspaper—now, having had some exposure to what such reviewers are actually like, I can’t even believe that I ever paid any attention to what they thought. Consequently I’m driven even further toward the unfortunate egomaniacal position that I probably know more than many of the people writing these things; then there’s the problem also that I’m starting to have decades more experience listening to music on many of them, leaving me in a position where I have nothing to learn from them that’s not wrong or superseded by something that I already learned about years ago. And then there’s the fact that so much highly recommended new music is rehashed old music that is best appreciated when you don’t know the antecedents. It makes me feel very old, as though I have outgrown the opportunity to enjoy contemporary culture, and have become instead one of those relics, living in the past and arguing how everything was so much better before. This still seems preferable to being one of those old guys trying desperately to stay young and “relevant,” as if what teenagers determine that relevance for anyone other than marketers looking to tap a lucrative demographic segment.

Those advocating legislating taste in various ways, whether through censorship or some form of sumptuary laws, typically believe that when individuals are left to their own devices, they are too easily influenced by advertising or by other parties who are in bad faith in making their suggestions. Those who oppose top-down culture believe that individuals should be free to choose to enjoy whatever they want, and that their authentic wishes supersede any attempts at influencing or shaping their choices. Of course, everyone likes freedom in the abstract, and everyone likes to believe that they know their own mind and know what they like without having to be told. But in practice, people tend to seek out opinions, because they may enjoy the suggestion of human company in opinions more than the works of art in themselves. People look to culture to invest them with a sense of belonging, and sharing opinions or liking something that is liked in general is a way of simulating that feeling of inclusion. So a work’s reception can be more significant than the work itself, which makes the dogma about individuals following their own tastes and a work’s popularity reflecting its intrinsic quality suspect.

If people aren’t really following their own hearts in choosing what culture to consume, the question becomes, who should they follow? People want to follow the tastes of people they like and want to count themselves among, absent that, they’ll go along with who seems to be liking the same sorts of things—an impression that can be created either by advertising or by the opinion-making media or by both in conjunction. The alternative would be to mandate popular culture through state-funded educational systems—this would provide a much more uniform harmony of tastes, but would discourage variety. It would restore much of the meaning to the currently meaningless terms independent and alternative, however.

But there isn’t really enough at stake to warrant state intervention, unless you believe that culture is primarily didactic, teaching people how to behave and interact with one another. Those who want censorship usually invoke this argument, that the loose morals on display in commercial culture—the sexual objectification of anything beautiful to turn it into a lure, the promotion of giving in to temptation always (how else to keep consumerism rolling in the face of economic crisis?) —warrants a clampdown. Snobs, on the other hand, claim that commercial culture is vulgar, playing to the tastes of the most ignorant, and encouraging everyone else to become stupid too, as in Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy. But snobs are in bad faith when they argue that culture should be subjected to top-down control (presumably by wise people like themselves) because their sense of esteem comes from the superiority they feel to common tastes, which would vanish if their wish for power over culture was granted.

This is meandering a bit, but the reason I started thinking about this was because of the questions I was trying to get at in the previous entry, about what will be lost if commercial culture truly gives way to some new form of cultural participation enabled by technology. The culture industry, that Frankfort school boogeyman, was one way of controlling culture in the name of a popular taste gauging and tested by functionaries and agents and middlemen who just wanted to make money off other people’s talents. In some ways, this is a pure, paradoxically selfless motive—they weren’t trying to foist their own talents on the world or skew what culture was produced with their own idiosyncratic vision. They just worked as conduits, trying to find the easiest way to please people. Sometimes that meant trying to brainwash them and feed them shit that was already on hand, sometimes that meant responding to an unexpected turn, a sea change in demography or popular expectation. Absent a culture industry, these people are out of jobs, but they may be replaced by strict opinion makers, who filter the mass of what artists make available directly to audiences to pick out stuff worthy of attention. A&R men will work after the fact rather than before, and will deal directly with the public. They will perhaps be like stock pickers, marketing their track record. But in order for this to happen, they will need to set their opinions off from the mass of freely offered (and easily aggregated) opinion that’s already available on the internet. Opinions would have to become scarce in order to have any value, and that seems unlikely. What is scarce is people who put money behind their opinions, who have “skin in the game”. Perhaps what is needed is a futures market in culture to replace the signal investments made by the culture industry.

So instead, tastes will perhaps be formed by aggregators, who collect data on what different groups are actually doing—so you can tailor your choices to who you want to fit in with. You can have a Muzak like service supply culture for Brand You the same way they do for retail stores. More likely, the data about what stuff individuals should be getting into to belong to a specific set will be aggregated within social networks on social networking sites. It is up to clever marketers to figure out how to infiltrate these networks or co-opt the opinion leaders within these networks, the sort of people Malcolm Gladwell profiles in The Tipping Point. Social networking sites should make these people easier to track down, and will yield them opportunities to reap rewards for their natural proselytizing talents. So these folks will have the opportunity to become the new A&R people. And groups of friends will come to be organized as mini-culture industry firms.

—Rob Horning

The Hollywood writers’ strike certainly helps throw this in relief, but it seems clear that the commercial entertainment industry is in trouble. Digitization and dispersed internet distribution has made it impossible for them to control supply, and the intellectual property concepts their business models depend on seem likely to come under attack or undergo extreme revision in an era where anonymous collaboration and open-source development become more and more customary. Not to wax too utopian about it, but it seems like the idea of commercial artists working for industry middlemen is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, and as that changes, the means by which our society defines what makes for an artist or entertainer will change as well. Reality TV and blogging are just the most obvious examples of semi-professional and, in some cases, post-commercial entertainment supplanting the work of pros. The expectations we have of polish and high-end production values may continue to become more and more relaxed; what lo-fi indie rock helped pioneer could become acceptable in every genre and every medium, as YouTube would suggest. (Though all I ever seem to use YouTube for is watching old clips of bands from the 1960s and 1970s appearing on European TV; it’s become sort of a random-access collective memory. In fact, I can safely say that the internet, by enriching my access to obscure culture detritus from past decades, has guaranteed that I won’t pay any attention to contemporary culture for the foreseeable future.) While paid ads still support part of the distribution medium for these works (i.e. Google’s ad brokering makes it worth its while to host all this junk), the creators themselves, who are confronted with very little overhead for making and self-distributing their own product, are not necessarily compensated monetarily and seem to have attention (becoming more and more measurable, more and more useful as a means for status competition) rather than monetary reward as their motivation. This seems like a good thing, at first, but is it actually a license or a prod for all art to become even more about ego than communication? in other words, is self-expression as a goal wildly overrated, especially now that it’s so easy, now that we are in the so-called age of microcelebrity Clive Thompson notes in this Wired column? Is art being subsumed to an even greater degree by the (commercially derived) ideology of personal branding? Are we getting the worse of both worlds—the superficial, narcissistic culture without the discipline brought on by the need to make money?

In his book In Praise of Commercial Culture, economist Tyler Cowen points out that on the 18th century, when the printing press was having similar effects on culture as the internet is having now, critics worried that the commercialization of art, the market for books, would erode the power of fame as an incentive, without which writers would produce nothing but trash. But with fame devalued now that the trappings of celebrity are open to all, it seems like money and the professionalization that went along with it were last-ditch means to uphold standards. In Cowen’s view, 18th century critics sought to impose aesthetic standards and use fame as the reward that would induce writers to adhere to them. In a similar fashion, centralized cultural production enables a few media corporations, or the state (as in China, Soviet Russia, etc.), to impose similar standards. In a market economy, mass popularity seems to justify after the fact those decisions made early on about which works met the approved standards and were worthy of being supported. But mass popularity, or monetary reward may not be as significant when you can bask in the recognition of a niche audience and feel righteous about not having sold out. The “microcelebrity” thesis perhaps bears out Cowen’s argument that there is not a limited supply of fame, and that technology and the density of intertextual references multiplies the amount of fame there is to go around, albeit in ever finer measurements. But conversely, the demands on our attention may be stretched to the limit, leaving us in even greater need for filters and organizers of what’s available. Commercial gatekeepers once served this function; perhaps now social networking tools (linked in to targeted advertising) will replace them. Nothing, though, stands to discourage anyone from producing culture and “cluttering” the public sphere with it. I waver between thinking this is a pervasive triumph over passivity and fretting that it’s a disaster that’s made self-branding and the commercialization of our intimate identity commonplace—an eagerly sought accomplishment that we hope to confirm in the public sphere.

Having cheered for so long against the culture industry Goliath (without ever really suspecting it was actually vulnerable), it hasn’t often occurred to me to consider what we lose with its decline. The need to make art that will sell is usually derided as forcing artists to pursue the lowest common denominator and compromise their vision. But it may also have required artists to focus, to consider how effective their work would be on audiences. Respect for the bottom line typically makes people more receptive to criticism, and criticism from invested parties generally improves things. And the commercial entertainment industry performed a useful filtering service, putting hurdles between artists and audiences that eliminated some poetasters (and, unfortunately, some talented but easily deterred entertainers). One could be critical of what made it through that initial filter, but usually the fact that it made it through meant it was worth taking the time to criticize—it had been chosen and produced among thousands of other contenders. But free from the restrictions of commercialism, artists can ignore criticism and be as self-indulgent as they choose, selecting self-referential topics and making no effort to generalize subject matter so that others may get more out of them. Instead, artists can develop the expectation that others should be interested in their work for the sake of person making it, that it be interesting only on a personal level, the way Facebook pages are supposed to be.

—Rob Horning

After years of people going into deeper debt to fund steady increases in consumption, it seems like consumer spending is finally going to give, just in time for Black Friday and the high retail season buckling under the strain of increased fuel prices, drops in housing prices, and suddenly tighter lending standards. Both the Economist and BusinessWeek ran cover stories about the possibility of a recession in America stemming from consumers inability to keep on consuming. The Economist story notes that “even if the economy technically avoids a recession, it will feel like one to most Americans—because it will be led by consumers. That will be a big change. Consumer spending has not fallen in a single quarter since 1991; it has not fallen on an annual basis since 1980. Consumers barely noticed America’s last recession—when low interest rates and high house prices kept them spending solidly.” In other words, easy credit has made consumers feel entitled, even obliged to spend. The loss of disposable income/loan funds to spend will force consumers to get more creative to stretch their dollars to provide the same amount of shopping excitement. If shopping action can be likened to gambling action, shoppers may have to drop down to cheaper tables and throw out fewer bets for the dealers.

For years, credit was easily available, at interest rates that almost made it imprudent not to borrow, especially considering that housing prices were perpetually increasing, supplying new collateral for further borrowing. Hence people would extract equity from their homes in the form of loans and spend it on consumer goods. The stereotype—one I admittedly have a weakness for—is that self-indulgent Americans were splurging on flat-screen TVs, luxury cars, electronic gadgets and whatnot, but it also includes things like college tuition, cell-phone services, child care, medical expenses, and things less glamorous and easy to condemn as wasteful. (Law professor Elizabeth Warren has a good paper on the “overconsumption myth.” She argues that “The Over-Consumption story dominates any discussion of the financial condition of America’s families, but when all the plusses and minuses of changes in family spending are added up, a very different picture emerges. Families are spending less on ordinary consumption and more on the basics of being middle class.” Whether the basics of being middle class are skewed, or subject to hedonic-treadmill style escalation into frivolous unnecessaries is a different question, but people feel obliged to spend what they must to hold on the status they achieved, regardless of whether what they spend it on is truly useful or necessary in the abstract).

Michael Mandel’s piece in BusinessWeek surveys the likelihood of a consumer pullback, balancing the optimists against the pessimists and ultimately making it seem as though consumer spending is divorced from underlying economic forces, and that consumers instead respond to vague impressions they get from the economic zeitgeist. Thus, Mandel comments that the Fed needs to use rate policy to encourage consumers to remain calm. “More rate cuts by the Fed can cushion the impact of the consumer cutbacks but not avert them altogether. It’s best to think of this as the end of a long-term spending and borrowing bubble, where the role of policy is to keep the inevitable adjustment from turning into panic.” If rates stabilize, perhaps people will continue to feel comfortable tapping the “about $4 trillion in unused borrowing capacity on their credit cards” that remains available to them in the aggregate. Because ours is such a consumerism-oriented culture, institutional forces to encourage shopping regardless of conditions are already entrenched—think of the expanse of the advertising infrastructure, or the way shopping today is a news story on every local news program across the country, or the flood of credit card solicitations that come to our mailboxes virtually daily.

I’m prone to mistaking a drop in consumer confidence as a pervasive and potential loss of faith in consumer values, even though the two have little to do with each other. Just because people report that they are worried about how much they can spend doesn’t mean they have suddenly made their peace with doing less shopping and finding alternative preoccupations. It’s not like they are losing confidence in the promised power of things to make them happy. If anything, advertisers likely redouble their efforts in down times and people rely more than ever on the fantasies ads evoke, in lieu of being able to actually get the things advertised. The fantasies can sustain them until purchasing power returns, and the objects of the fantasies probably become even more alluring.

But whenever consumer confidence dips, or consumer spending drops, or retailers report weaker earnings than expected, I tend to see this as good news, as proof that people are busy doing something else. That’s probably because I think of consumption mainly as frivolous consumerism, as a self-defeating preoccupation with acquiring things rather than making the best use of them. If economic conditions diverts people from consumerism, maybe then they will refocus on making the most of what they already have, better conserve what already exists and find alternatives to consumption for ways of spending time—to consume leisure rather than goods, to avail oneself of shared, cooperative public activities rather than retrench in private and partake in invidious comparison—figure out ways to gloat about how much higher on the ladder one is, or how one’s belongings prove how much better one’s taste is in things.

But of course, when consumer confidence drops, and consumption levels suffer, growth is restricted, investment falls off, and unemployment rises along with general anxiety. People are not likely to seize upon recessions and relative privation as great opportunities to get in touch with the “things that really matter in life,” as consumption measures do take those things into account. This is where the longstanding argument about whether levels of consumption correlate with levels of reported happiness come into play. On the face of things, the correlation seems weak; people don’t tend to be any happier as their incomes improve, since they adapt quickly to their new horizons, and the stress of keeping up with unfamiliar mores in new socioeconomic classes takes its toll. But some argue that self-reporting is no way of measuring happiness because people have no useful perspective on themselves, and that the clear improvements in standards of living measured in other terms—in productivity and leisure and in the richness and diversity and quality of goods—are, though taken for granted, extremely significant advances that no one would voluntarily surrender. These things clearly derive from economic growth driven by stimulating consumption.

—Rob Horning

In the New York Review of Books, Frederick Crews (who I know of primarily and outdatedly, I’m sure, as a psychoanalytically-minded Hawthorne scholar) looks at three books that argue that depression has been fomented by the pharmaceutical industry, which stands to benefit directly from any increase in depression diagnoses. If you have ever seen the film Johnny Mnemonic—if any of those 12 people are reading—this will sound familiar:

Most of us naively regard mental disturbances, like physical ones, as timeless realities that our doctors address according to up-to-date research, employing medicines whose appropriateness and safety have been tested and approved by a benignly vigilant government. Here, however, we catch a glimpse of a different world in which convictions, perceived needs, and choices regarding health care are manufactured along with the products that will match them.
The corporate giants popularly known as Big Pharma spend annually, worldwide, some $25 billion on marketing, and they employ more Washington lobbyists than there are legislators. Their power, in relation to all of the forces that might oppose their will, is so disproportionately huge that they can dictate how they are to be (lightly) regulated, shape much of the medical research agenda, spin the findings in their favor, conceal incriminating data, co-opt their potential critics, and insidiously colonize both our doctors’ minds and our own.

In Johnny Mnemonic, Keanu Reeves had to rescue the world from some pharmaceutically manufactured chronic disease that would make the world entirely dependent on an evil drug company’s ministrations. (I think it also involved the perilous downloading of information into Keanu’s overloaded brain.) The filmmakers probably didn’t have SSRIs in mind then, but the analogy would have been apt: Citing one of the books, Crews notes the SSRIs “horrific withdrawal symptoms, such as dizziness, anxiety, nightmares, nausea, and constant agitation, that were frightening some users out of ever terminating their regimen—an especially bitter outcome in view of the manufacturers’ promise of enhancing self-sufficiency and peace of mind. The key proclaimed advantage of the new serotonin drugs over the early tranquilizers, freedom from dependency, was simply false.”

That loss of individual autonomy in the face of marketing campaigns and the slipperiness of diagnosing mental illness on the basis of a movable feast of symptoms is the part of premise of the books Crews looks at: Big Pharma uses advertising to transform what may once have been considered character traits into pathologies that one should treat with medication, promoting the sense that individual idiosyncrasy is a kind of disability that needs to be corrected, so we can all conform to the same master personality, the sort of synthetic pseudo-humans we see impersonated on television, people who are always happy, never hostile or self-sabotaging, never wracked by doubt, never anything but eager to cooperate and behave how society expects. Turning idiosyncrasies into mental health problems is known as “condition branding”—the industry treats the name of a disease as a brand and promulgates it with the same marketing techniques that a company would use for toothpaste or laundry detergent, a process that has brought us social anxiety and restless legs syndrome and, these books argue, the depression epidemic.

Such a thesis is certain to offend lots of people who are debilitated by depression and may potentially see this line of argument as an attack on their right to feel better. For them, Crews has this rejoinder:

This isn’t to say that people who experience infrequent minor depression without long-term dysfunction aren’t sick enough to deserve treatment. Of course they are. But as all three of the books under consideration here attest, the pharmaceutical companies haven’t so much answered a need as turbocharged it. And because self-reporting is the only means by which nonpsychotic mental ailments come to notice, a wave of induced panic may wildly inflate the epidemiological numbers, which will then drive the funding of public health campaigns to combat the chosen affliction.

The books are not simply denying the severity of a particular illness; instead they offer a subtler attack on individual autonomy, implying that people can be talked into feeling sick by advertising and other devious promotional campaigns. The premise of these books would seem to imply that people don’t really know what to make of what they are feeling, and it’s our inclination to turn to social norms for guidance. In our commercial, consumerist society, of course, those norms are bought and sold, and they hinge on solutions that permit for shopping and consuming objects with magic-seeming properties of transformation—like, say, Prozac. Crews calls such drugs political sedatives, since any relief they seem to provide also serves to dissuade us from wondering whether commercial imperatives dictated their prescription.

But, as Crews explains, this is an old story, and it goes back to the imperatives that underlie the whole ediface of a consumer society, which hinges on an building an insecure populace that can be counted on to seek comfort in goods. Advertising is the art of creating dissatisfaction, and preying on personal vulnerabilities is an especially efficient way of accomplishing that end. The process is perhaps at its most extreme when the goods being advertised as medicines, and the dissatisfaction is elevated to the level of a disease that one ignores only at one’s personal peril. The tendency of marketing to drift toward this maximalist approach is one reason sensible countries ban pharmaceutical advertising directed at consumers rather than theoretically disinterested medical professionals.

—Rob Horning

I love miniature golf, the more preposterous the holes the better. I like loop-de-loops, rotating obstacles, crossing wood-plank bridges over moats, the whole thing. I even played a glow-in-the dark goofy golf course in some dingy cellar on Clifton Hill in Niagara Falls.

But though I like a healthy amount of chance mixed into my mini golf, I still play to win. When I used to go down to a friend’s beach house in Ocean City, New Jersey, we became dork aficionados of the many boardwalk courses and eventually got to the point where we’d bring our own putters and balls to the courses, to up the level of competition (and to perhaps compensate for the edge taken away by the beverages that were also brought along). But no matter how geeky we got, we never approached the level of the men profiled in this Wall Street Journal story by Charles Forelle about competitive minature golf, as it’s played in Scandinavia.

In Europe, competitors like Mr. Ryner play a rigorously pure form of miniature golf. Course designs are more Mies van der Rohe than Myrtle Beach—clean lines, crisp angles, geometric obstacles. There are no garden gnomes astride the mini fairways. No toy windmills. No water hazards teeming with plywood crocodiles. Here, minigolf is an athletic fugue of golf and billiards, a challenge of precision and consistency.

I was shocked to discover that these hardcore minigolfers have a range of balls that they use for different surfaces and different angles, and that they can hit shots with deliberate spin. They even go to the trouble of heating or cooling balls when necessary to get the right amount of bounce off the walls.

Forelle maintains throughout the perfect A-hed-story tone of haute seriousness ("athletic fugue” is genius), but what makes the story priceless is the quotes collected from the stern Europeans who compete with such rigorous purity.

Minigolf requires stamina and precise control. Most of all, it takes mental fortitude, says Hans Bergström, a computer specialist at Volvo and president of the European Minigolfsport Federation. “You have a very small muscle movement that makes the difference. If you cannot control your nerves, you will get it wrong,” he says. “The very best players in the world are ice-cold men.”

What does this say about the Swedes and Germans who seem to dominate the sport?

To grow the sport in America, some entrepreneurs are encouraging enlivening the sport with goofier holes. But one of the champions is not pleased with the idea that courses will become more gimmicky to make the sport more enticing and perhaps televisable (and if you’ve read this far I definitely recommend you watch all the clips on the WSJ’s interactive video feature):

Walter Erlbruch bristles at the memory of a round of American-style minigolf. The passing blades of a windmill scooped up putted balls and flung them into a pool. “Luck,” sniffs Mr. Erlbruch. “If you make a nonsense of my sport, I don’t like it.”

I’m sure somewhere in America, miniature golf is played with this level of intensity, but it never managed to reach even the level of horseshoes in terms of respectability here as an adult game. That’s probably because it tends to be a family activity, meaning competitors are at unequal levels of ability. This encourages course designs that negate the role of talent, or else it makes adult players not to get too hung up on playing well in order to keep it “fun” for everyone—so they play down to the level of the kid who’s whacking the ball around with no conception of the rules or the purpose of keeping score. Also, it’s probably never caught on with adults here because, unlike, say, bowling or darts, drinking is not usually integrated with playing minigolf. Mini golf courses—inexplicably, to my mind—don’t typically have bars on site. You are discouraged from beer drinking while putt-putting, which is strange considering how commonplace drinking is on real golf courses, where players typically have to pilot motor vehicles around and send flying projectiles through the air with as much velocity as they can muster. But then, my pleasure in minigolf may strictly be a nostalgic thing for childhood, when cutthroat competition meant trying to get the ball in the clown’s nose for a free game, not trying to make sure you weren’t forced to work overtime without compensation just to keep your job.

—Rob Horning

It may be a generational thing, or a my-being-a-Luddite thing, but social networking seems to me to have less to do with being social and more to do with self-marketing. MySpace, when it started, was primarily a place to market your band; it was a means to mounting a commercial website without the HTML knowhow. Once people had personal websites, they could be drawn in with the allure of metrics, the thrill of measuring one’s reach the way a marketer would—how many hits you get, what kind of demographic you are drawing, how successful you are at getting target audiences to interact with your site, what you need to say or how much skin you have to show to attract more attention and things like that. The attention, in this realm, becomes a measurable kind of currency, whereas in the dreary real world, it’s much harder to put a number on it—you can’t really count how often someone looks at you or answers your questions or has a positive thought about the way you have designed yourself.

So social networking is about quantifying the attention we can receive and finding some solace in that; real-world attention is a severely scarce commodity, but online the number of internet users, and the effectiveness of programmed simulacrums, make it seem limitless. It also can invert the sense of scarcity—instead of their not being enough attention out there for us to attract, suddenly it’s the attention that we can give that becomes treasured and scarce, a powerful feeling and one that is continually stoked by marketers in their attempts to flatter us with the attention they pay—“Hey you—yes, you, and only you. I have something I really want to show you. See? See, I knew you would like it. I know you so well!” The internet in general caters to our craving for instant attention—it promises us the precise kind of audience we want at any time, andif that audience proves elusive, it supplies another conduit for the personal attention of last resort, advertising. If one is lonely and looking for recognition, targeted ads are better than nothing, and for the advertisers, nothing could be better than hitting someone when they are down and vulnerable.

It was only a matter of time before social networks became more explicitly about marketing, since they were already about measuring attention and influence and defining oneself as a certain sort of marketing target. This Economist article looks at the recent developments of integrating ads more smoothly with social networking sites, letting advertisers eavesdrop on the conversations among “friends” and interject themselves when it seems appropriate or lucrative. And Facebook itself will take the commercial behavior of its users—buying something, participating in some brand’s Facebook page—and try to spread them across the user’s network as a kind of advertising, mimicking word-of-mouth. It forces you to be a shill, unless you opt out, and it furthers the perception that people shop to be noticed. Shopping may inevitably be a social activity, but social networking sites are trying to make it the cornerstone of friendship. So one can share such momentous decisions as buying shoes online with friends as if were deeply significant personal news and thereby let people get to know you better—since after all, we are what we buy and spending money is the only way we can signify we’re serious about something.

Social-networking technology basically lets brands aspire to be mistaken for actual peers, things people can have relationships with, and it also encourages people not only to see themselves as brands themselves (the metrics component of social networks already encourages this) but also to monetize their personal brand and treat their friend groups as demographics to exploit—as people primarily to market to with word-of-mouth recommendations, or automatically generated web notifications. This would be depressing if the groups on the networks resembled one’s real-life circle of friends (which one presumes is built on trust rather than exploitation). But there may not be enough incentive for people to groom their networks to make them match their real ones, and the colonization of the networks by marketing reduces that incentive further. The article cites Paul Martino, a proprietor of an early social network, who argues that

the interpersonal connections (called the “social graph”) on such networks are also of low quality. Because few people dare to dump former friends or to reject unwanted friend requests from casual acquaintances, “social graphs degenerate to noise in all cases,” he says. If he is right, social-marketing campaigns will descend into visual clutter about the banal doings of increasingly random people, rather than being the next big thing in advertising.

Let’s hope he’s right.

—Rob Horning