Ethan Zuckerman appears to show a lot of remorse for his actions twenty years. By creating the idea of the pop-up ad, he started a precedence where the accessibility of the internet depended on the sale of the identity of Internet users to large corporations who view them as a source of revenue. Although advertisements are universally regarded as annoying, Internet users’ relationships to advertisements is far more complex and cannot be described by simple disgust.
The Angelic Side
Advertisements have a strange ability to make our life so much easier, even as they make our life more inconvenient. Although they may distract us from the content that we desire, targeted ads allow us to quickly and efficiently find products that we may be interested in. We could potentially save time by finding products that suit our needs, as the ads that we receive are based on information that companies receive about our digital footprint. Most importantly, these advertisements make the internet free to use. The internet wouldn’t be accessible to low-income families without ads, meaning that the societal and educational divides that already exist would be further exacerbated. Communities associated with wealth (especially white communities) would be able to use the Internet to form communities that serve their interest, while those of minority communities (who typically feel isolated in the real world) would be limited once again.
Another way that advertisements can potentially do good is by providing recommendations to improve our health, especially for communities that are commonly ignored. One example I can think of is the LGBTQ community. This community doesn’t typically receive the sexual education that their counterparts obtain through mass media, primary school and even their families. As a bisexual man myself, I had to do a lot of research myself. One way that ads have helped me is by promoting PrEP, an antiviral drug that dramatically reduces the risk of HIV transmission. As HIV is very concentrated within the gay and bisexual communities, these advertisements encouraged me to take steps to protect myself and truly understand an identity that I was commonly fearful of.
The Satanic Side
Even though advertisements have the ability to do good, I believe they do more harm in the end. By selling our identities to companies, we allow them to perceive us only as a potential consumer. These targeted advertisements encourage a version of capitalism that can be obsessive and can cause anxiety for consumers who want the products they are advertised, but cannot afford them. Furthermore, we lose the ability to have a private life. We do not have time to develop our identities before our information is sold to companies, making it so corporations play a large guiding role in our identity formation. An important case study of our lack of privacy is displayed here, where a father found out his daughter was pregnant after receiving advertisements for maternal products, including maternity clothing, diapers, etc. The daughter did not have time to reveal this information to her father in a controlled manner, showing how we not only lose control on the internet, but we lose control in the physical world as well.
