Abstract: This blogpost will discuss the how today’s interaction between the private sphere and the market sphere is increasing concern among society’s individuals as they begin realizing how living in a “consumer culture” can be as dangerous as it is progressive.
In the past, the boundary between the private and market spheres was clear: individuals were once able to live in a world without branding. They could control what and how much they were exposed to. Today, newer technology, such as the television, has caused the boundary between the market sphere and the private sphere to fade, creating more of a “consumer culture”—one in which individuals are allowing the market sphere to “brand” them, by influencing certain aspects of their lives, based on their interests and dislikes. These sudden changes have allowed society to progress economically, but threaten the personal identities of individuals living in the private sphere.
First of all, the private sphere is greatly affected by the intentions of market sphere. Specifically, the market sphere is all about the buying and selling of goods and services, but today, what is not mentioned is that producers are not only extracting monetary material from consumers, but personal information as well. Individuals will often wonder, “how did [that company] get my email address?” or “how did they know my phone number?” The market sphere wants to make individuals in the private sphere think that it has been performing like it always has, but the market sphere makes it’s money by using personal information to figure out what customers really want. The fact that it is so stealthy about it is why the “new and improved” market sphere poses a threat to the private sphere.
The market sphere also utilizes Web 2.0 to obtain private information; showing that it’s influence is not limited to only physical interactions with individuals. For example, when discussing Google’s influence in society, Daniel Soar states, “Google knows or has sought to know, and may increasingly seek to know, your credit card numbers, your purchasing history, your date of birth, your medical history, your reading habits, your taste in music…or whatever you idly speculate about at 3:45 on a Wednesday afternoon” (Soar, 2011). This is a scary thought. Yes, users reveal pieces of their personal lives online, but the difference between what users solicit about themselves and what Google solicits about users is that users know and are aware of what they reveal about themselves, whereas Google automatically collects all of the user’s information—how they search, what they search for, the time the search happened, where the search happened—and has the potential and the tools to reveal everything else about that user, for the sake of their market advertising. Google does not do things like this yet, but knowing that it has the option to do so, worries people.
The same goes for social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Users on the web feel violated when these sites sell their personal information to advertising companies because they are uncertain about what types of things online communities and businesses around the world, know about them. While it might feel as though their lives are private and that they get to choose what they reveal about themselves online, their lives are actually very public and are exposed to big, profit-making businesses and it is all thanks to the movement of the market sphere into the private sphere. This is the reason why there needs to be some sort of understanding between what the private sphere expects from the market sphere and what the market sphere expects from the private sphere—the boundary between the two is slowly fading away.
In addition to taking and using a user’s personal information for profit-gain, the market sphere also expects the private sphere to accept its possible, future role as a market commodity. This has not happened yet, but Daniel Soar alludes to a quote by Siva Vaidhyanathan, a writer who seems to think that the objectification of the private sphere has already occurred: “‘We are not Google’s customers. We are its product. We – our fancies, fetishes, predilections and preferences – are what Google sells to advertisers.” Daniel Soar then goes on to say that Google has not gone so far as to confirm Vaidhyanathan’s accusations, but the possibility of this happening is what frightens individuals in the private sphere. Since most of Web 2.0 is already extracting personal information from users, what is to stop Google from doing the same thing?
The implication is that soon, a user’s identity will be sold into the market sphere in ways that will be out of his or her control. Sure, in order for databases, such as Google and Bing, to make “searching the web” more efficient, it needs to know a little bit about users in order to produce exactly what they are looking for. However, because Google and Bing are constantly developing new methods of efficiency and improving their features to enhance the user’s experience, knowing “a little bit” about users could very well shift towards knowing “everything” about users.
Fortunately, society’s private sphere seems to be turning its fears of the “future Google” into efforts towards pulling away from the market sphere. In the past, interactions between people were based on the market sphere’s ability to create products that brought people together, allowing them to discover common likes and dislikes about one another. Now, since we know about one another, the market sphere wants to know more about individuals on a more personal level, so that it can promote new products. The attempts by the market sphere to improve the state consumer culture has greatly affected the individual’s constitutional right to privacy. As a result, consumers are opening their eyes to the concept of “branding,” what it means and how the market sphere has used it to infiltrate the private sphere.
In conclusion, the market sphere has proved to be more dominant than the private sphere and this evidence lies in how individuals have been covertly exploited through the development of a consumer culture. This issue is demonstrated when Holt says that the, “consumption code [is] the system of cultural meanings that the market inscribes in commodities…Marketing is a form of distorted communication in that marketers control the information that is exchanged. Marketers organize the code, and we, as consumers have no choice but to participate” (Holt, 72). Thankfully, society is now pushing towards a culture that is not market-dominated at all, but focuses on consumer resistance. Individuals want to re-define the boundaries between the market and private spheres because there is an imbalance between the territories in which they occupy, but most importantly, the private sphere wants to reclaim both its privacy and peace of mind.
Holt, Douglas B. “Why do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding.” Journal of Consumer Research. Vol. 29, No. 1 (June 2002), pp. 70-90. The University of Chicago Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339922 (accessed on October 26, 2011).
Soar, Daniel. “It Knows.” The London Review of Books. Vol. 33, No. 19 (October 6, 2011), pp. 3-6. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n19/daniel-soar/it-knows (accessed on November 4, 2011).
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