Freedom from Propaganda that Comes With Digital Technology Is Illusory
As technological advances allow salesmen to track down their consumers and bombard them with targeted advertising, very little information about private individuals remains confidential. Alexander Arkhangelsky argues that in this era of the seemingly harmless, omnipresent tracking devices, the state and the secret services can take advantage of the available technology in order to unobtrusively infiltrate hearts and minds with their propaganda and ideology. Unless, of course, people retain their freedom of choice.
Mildly put, I’m not a blonde. But the more time goes by, the better I understand the horror of the heroine of a famous joke, who gets into her car, turns on the radio, and a cheerful voice announces: “You’re listening to Europe Plus radio!” The blonde pauses in a state of shock and exclaims: “How do they know everything?”
Moving around the country and the world, we are acutely aware of the fact that there are tracking devices aimed at each of us. And day by day, these devices become more precise; they accurately catch our attention, they are selective and steadfast. We are like airplanes in the thermal trap of a locator—the fired missile will catch up sooner or later. I’m not even going to mention credit cards—rumor has it that all personal plastic card information is open only to the bank’s security services. Let’s suppose that’s true. But you turn on your computer, you enter the dear old Internet, and immediately advertisements from the country you just arrived in are sprayed on the shell of a Russian web domain. Or, if it is a large city you’re visiting, you see local advertisements. They see you; they recognize you. If you want to open your own LiveJournal blog when you’re abroad, you have to first read the announcements of the local community. And this community is not interested in Georgia and Ossetia or in the murder of Yamadayev, but in either cheap airfares to Barcelona or the personal drama of a Bollywood actor, or in something else, just as close to a patriotic heart.
But you don’t actually have to go abroad. Just do a Yandex search on a topic of your choosing, repeat it once or twice, and without any travel or prior request, day in day out you will be offered similar advertising links. I’ve heard that pretty soon the system of automatic client location will be so advanced that when we walk by a large department store or an expensive boutique, we will receive text messages on our cell phones: Don’t miss your chance, buddy! There’s a sale in this store! Everything is just your size! How will they know the size? Oh, because one time you ordered something online, or sent a message to your wife asking her to buy you a shirt. This system is called “all-accounted-for.”
We’ve long argued about the pros and cons of anonymous Internet, about the dangers and benefits of avatars. In the meantime, we have all been anonymously, namelessly counted. Each of us separately – as an impersonal resource, a walking machine for making purchases, isolated from other machines. Until now, the only Big Brothers that watched common citizens from the outside were the media and the special services—television created a generalized picture of the world in which individuality was completely dissolved; special agents selectively put people under close surveillance. Now, advertising has enveloped each of us in its electronic warp: it doesn’t matter what our names are, it makes no difference what we think, it only matters where we are, what we wear, where we eat and what our jean size is.
What’s interesting is that the media itself is actually moving in a different direction, from an informationally manageable, centripetal world to one that’s centrifugal, divided and scattered. The beam of the television signal has split; it went from limited meter frequency ranges to decimeters, from there it jumped to satellites, and now makes its way down to the Internet, where the number of channels will actually be uncountable. Moreover, we’ve long expected a channel based on the “suit yourself” principle – when you simply indicate your interests and your preferred airtime, and the program, diving in and out of the global stream, offers you a cocktail of choices of different programs from different studios based on your individual taste. This year, this resource has finally appeared.
It would seem that the coming of a digital era would grant us more freedom from politics and ideology in exchange for a greater dependence on the omnipresent retail. And then – well, it won’t be too bad, just a loss of universal, complete informational control over minds in exchange for a trail of meddlesome advertising. You can just not care about individualized advertizing, but you can’t ignore universal ideology. However, historical experience tells us that the research and the work of sales experts will, with a hundred percent certainty, be used by the unmercenary officers in blue caps. Both here and there, since there is no avoiding fate. The technology of targeted information, isolated in form, leveled in content, will somehow find an application in television and media. Your individualized channel will automatically be filled with the most delicious, scrumptiously filmed commercials, and if you’re a big lover of world history, you will certainly be offered correct, intellectual movies with the necessary educative subtext. The news reports will be mixed and adjusted a bit, if necessary.
With just one reservation, without accepting which it’s easy to sink down to the positions of His Grace Diomid, the father of all individual tax number holders of Russia, who really enjoy getting a scare out of an anti-Christ code on store labels, in passports or on the electronic Visas, MasterCards and American Expresses. The problem is that in the oncoming era of omnipresent informational locators, aimed at each of us personally, just like it was in the era of smokescreens of impersonal television propaganda, one opportunity will be preserved: that of individual choice. If we don’t care about anything and we’re ready to throw ourselves at the mercy of our computer, letting the machine sift out all the excess material and create a program policy, then we’ll get the same result as the TV viewers of an official news show. It will be packaged differently, with a different outward appearance, but in essence – the same, because automatic, seemingly uncontrolled processes are actually the most controlled ones. For every perfect automatic machine, an even more perfect one can be found. But if we don’t give in, if we keep controlling the selection process, being fully aware of what we’re watching and why, who will be able to impose somebody else’s opinion and somebody else’s views upon us? After all, even back in the times of Joseph Stalin, people still had the sad freedom of preserving themselves and their internal world, even when they were at the last boundary; what’s to say of the current era, which is, overall, rather dietary and a bit lazy?
On the whole, you can comfort the blonde (and yourself): everything that we’re seeing today is not a new misfortune; it is just a new clinical course of an old illness. And a therapy that develops immunity to this illness can be found for those who wish it, as was always the case.
