Institute For The Future

Biocitizens, Advertizing, and the Virtual Dead

A recent piece in the NYT BITS blog has some interesting ramifications for our forecasts on biosocial identities and affinities. It discusses a set of “compromises” reached by the Network Advertising Initiative, an advertising trade association.

 

The lists of restrictions and red-flag categories represented here is about as culturally loaded as you can get, but what drew my attention was the way that biological identities, biological affinities, online collective organization were called out as particularly tricky areas of “behavioral correlation.” Top of the list are:

Certain medical/health conditions– HIV/ AIDS status, Sexually-related conditions (e.g., sexually transmitted diseases, erectile dysfunction), Psychiatric conditions, Cancer status, and Abortion-related ...

 

We have argued that web 2.0 tools and internet media more broadly will make it easier for biosocial identities to coalesce, and for the people who hold them to find each other and organize around claim-making. This process will transform people from patients and consumers into Biocitizens exercising collective power and voice. However, these very activities that may bring people together in citizenship and identity leave trails analogous to the “taste trails” discussed last week. These trails may be useful for people to find each other, but they are also visible to a number of other entities on the internet with a variety of motivations—in this case, advertising.

 

This article represents a corner of unintended consequences, some dilemmas in this space. Particular categories of disease, especially those that seem to intersect with particularly strong, culturally loaded and “sensitive” identities, are called out here as inappropriate to track and target. A longer list defines a space of ambiguity, possibly but not absolutely sensitive identities. Even the segment of online advertising entities participating in this agreement acknowledges that this is a space of voluntary restraint, and I wonder how transparent the boundaries of this kind of data monitoring will eventually be.

 

To our forecasts, some questions here are: how do biocommons emerge out of a milieu of individual privacy rights? What kinds of entities will attempt to enter this space, and how will they restrict themselves, allow themselves to be regulated? How will the ethics of correlating “Self-help 2.0” behaviors with biosocial identities and needs evolve, and who will be the influential voices in those conversations?

 

A rather dry quip by the author brings up another interest of mine: death and the internet. Call it hobby research. I find the ways that people constitute the dead, mourn, invent and repurpose cultural narratives of grief, closure, and memory in virtual media fascinating. There was an article some time ago in the LA Times (now in for-pay archives, I’ll post it if I can find a copy somewhere) examining a few pertinent internet practices, such as MySpace pages maintained in memoriam of young people who have died by their friends and family, presence technologies of at-a-distance participation in physically held funerals, etc. I find the memorial pages, specifically in social network space particularly interesting, because through a community’s actions a person who no longer has a living physical body retains an active social body, and identity, in virtual space.

 

Back to the article though, the author remarks in several places in total deadpan:

 

“Advertising to people who are dead may also be acceptable, the group said. … What sort of technology is needed to display advertising to potential customers afflicted by “death” goes unexamined in the document.”

 

Now… is there some technicality of advertising inflation or general practice that could account for this intriguing inclusion in the list of groups about whom it is permissible to collect behavioral information for advertising purposes? Do they really mean to advertise to those afflicted by “death,” or rather by mourning and the practices of the living to deal with death, or the categorical identities of those relating to the deaths of others (eg, the “widows and orphans ok” jape?). And assuming that they meant precisely what they wrote, and all technical questions aside, what kinds of offerings would be aimed over the internet to the dead?

 

I’m going to light some virtual incense on my facebook page.

 

Thanks to Melodie McBride for forwarding this article.