Who needs Don Draper when we've got Facebook?

I guess the thing I have against the internet, or one of the things I have against it, is that it isn’t a fair game, at least from an advertising standpoint.
This weekend I saw the new Fincher movie “The Social Network”. A good movie; I’d recommend it. Fincher has a way of making the story of a few nerds inventing a non-porn website seem so exciting. But that is beside the point. The thing that really struck me was one statistic stated during the closing shot of the movie. Facebook, a website designed simply to allow people to share their personal bullshit is worth 25 billion dollars. How the hell did that happen?
But then the simple answer hits like a brick to the happy-sack. Of course! This is the tool advertisers have been waiting for since the invention of advertising. Information advertisers used have to procure through weeks or months of market research is now willingly given up by the consumer, for free, in one centralized location. Age, Profession, Interests, Sexual orientation; it’s all there. Now all advertisers have to do is farm the Facebook servers and they suddenly have relatively precise market coverage. Before Facebook came along advertising was like doing surgery with a police baton. Now they’ve gone and invented the scalpel.
The problem I have with this model is that I don’t want advertisers to have to much information. Otherwise the ads get a little to close for comfort. Because surgical advertising isn’t just confined to Facebook, and not everything I look up on the internet is something I want a major corporation, or the general public for that matter, to know about. But there isn’t any real way to opt out of this surgical advertising model unless you sever all personal involvement on the Net. And that’s pretty hard to do these days because many people only communicate electronically.
Integrate or isolate, those are the choices. Kind of harsh but as our electronic world grows and fundamentally alters our physical world for better and for worse we are left with new, and sometimes frightening, choices to make. The times they are a changing. That’s for damn sure.


PS. Carl- I'm going to be late to class on Monday. For more Explanation, check the e-mail on the syllabus. I sent you a message a couple of days ago but still haven't gotten a response.