You might not think this is important, but there's something here, something Big Brotherish, something that's going to get bigger in time.
Based on the content from this page, Amazon's widget is supposed to display relevant products, but it seems to be stuck on porn because for three days it showed: a book on Adult Website startups, a dvd for some movie about an amateur porn star killer, an autographed gay porn dvd, "ski porn," a porn for women book, a band called the porn kings, and a motley crue autobiography.
There are other keywords like libraries, computers, NRA, GPS, and pickles that could have caused Amazon to change its ads. But it didn't.
Now, whenever I post here, a copy of the post gets sent back to my Gmail account. And when I open that post, Gmail applies ads to my mail based on keywords from the message. And to their credit, the people at Gmail do not show me any ads for any "porn" items based on my blog posts. When I open the message for the "Porn is my life" post, Gmail shows no ads, which is cool. But some of my other posts return ads for tax-shelters, and jokes and quizzes.
This is what got me started thinking these deep, deep thoughts:
Radar Online has a fiction piece called Scroogled which includes this little exchange between the "author" and the "customs agent."
[The Agent] "We see only the ads that show up when you read your mail and do your searching. I have a brochure explaining it. I'll give it to you when we're through here."
"But the ads don't mean anything," Greg sputtered. "I get ads for Ann Coulter ring tones whenever I get e-mail from my friend in Coulter, Iowa!"
"The man nodded. "I understand, sir. And that's just why I'm here talking to you."
You might not think much of this, but adwords are tools for identification. Since the United States produces nothing, I think we stopped making actual products in 1988, we've become a full-blown ad-based economy. Advertising is being applied everywhere. Boxers have ads painted on their backs. Sports scores on television are bordered by tiny logos. Every event you have attended for the last ten years has had a corporate sponsor. The fairways and greens at the PGA Nissan Open are color-keyed within a six percent tolerance for Hex #009933 (green) and respond with a digital image for the 2007 Z. Tiger Woods' pants are always keyed as #FFFFFF (true white) so that the Nike logo is always digitally signalled at the correct angle even while he walks or bends. (Don't panic; that last part was made up.)
Whatever you search, whatever email you receive, the adwords tagged for you, define you as a person. In the past, you might have received a fifty-cent off coupon for a future purchase of English muffins that came out of the receipt printer when you purchased a loaf of bread; and like most of us, you threw that out without a thought. Maybe if you paid by credit card, that coupon signalled the bread company, who considered contacting the credit card company to create some partnership. But the effort involved was too great and the cost too high, so the partnership withered before it had time to bear fruit.
But now, these adwords promise more to the companies who use them. The Internet makes this possible; the massive unconscious, seemingly random clicking of the masses has been tamed by silicon and mathematics into new meaning. To Amazon, my site was a porn site (and anyone who logged into their Amazon account carried the porn virus with them if they viewed my page). Google, for now, is blind to my porn habits. But that may be a conscious choice which can be reversed at any time.
If not now, adwords will soon define who we are. You'd better make room on your CV:
Education: Whatsamatta U.
Job Experience: Werked in a Liberry.
Most Recent Google Adwords: coffee, bikes, surveys, hawaii, porn, jobs, magick, analytics, teachers, metal.
I hope you get the job.
[p.s. I'm glad some of you decided to leave and that my subscribers have gone down...I'm too much of a neurotic to feel like I deserved all that attention. Now, it's just my real friends... I love you guys, sniff.]
