Is The Personal Political?

 I was a little shocked when I noticed that a few of my friends on Facebook had filled out and submitted polls concerned with the renaming of the new Kraft product, iSnack 2.0 . As if that wasn’t bad enough, the  response options offered by the poll gave me the chills – two of which were, ‘I don’t give a toss!’ and ‘No, shithouse.’ The whole thing left me really confused. Did the people filling it out realise it was a funded market research study, or did the informal language used in the questionnaire feign the appearance of a user created survey, not unlike the thousands of quizzes that already populate the Facebook site?
  It’s not that there is anything wrong with the Facebook website now integrating market research into its strategy, for all intents and purposes this is exactly what the advertising side panel has been doing all along.

Instead, the one thing that struck me was the way the site, in this instance, had caused the collision of the private and public spheres. What happens if these digital networking pages, which essentially aid in the online perpetuation of our private social groups – one could argue that they aren’t, in reality, all that private, but I would suggest that there is a level of censorship exercised by most users, especially if the friends list includes colleagues or family members – start to incorporate elements of the public sector?

It’s kind of tricky to identify whether or not this could ever become a serious problem and if we will one day wake up in a world where it is impossible to keep the advertising and corporate world at bay. For the most part Facebook seems quite responsive when it’s users dislike new functions or upgrades. Some might even say that this could be a sign exactly the opposite occurring in modern society, and that the consumer is now king – surely these viral marketing campaigns on sites such as Facebook suggest that age-old ‘bottom up’ communication theory is well and truly in place. This may be the case, but it irks me for some reason; I can’t help but see it as being analogous to receiving a market research call at your home in the evening, right in the middle of eating dinner. 
A little more on this topic here.