Impact of social media on teens
The social media has been recognized due to its impacts on today’s teens since they are now able to directly interact with their artists, celebrities, culture, movies, brands as well as one another in techniques that were never possible before. In the documentary, Generation Like, Douglas Rushkoff, the author and FRONTLINE correspondent of The Merchants of Cool, explores how the perennial teen quest for connection and identity has moved to social media and exposes how corporations are frolicking with the teen consumers. Do the teens think of being misused, do they care, and does the perceived opportunity to be the succeeding big star give it the desired credit? The movie is one of the powerful examination tools addressing the evolving and complicated association between the teens and companies that are progressively working with one dream of targeting them.
Rushkoff accurately anticipates social media’s influence on teens in several ways. Nowadays, the corporations do not have to follow-up today’s teens Rushkoff states that “The teens are placing themselves online where everyone interested can see” (Jang et al. 4039). They usually communicate to the whole world whatever they reason is cool preliminary with their online profiles. The follows, likes, re-tweets, and the favorites are the critical social currency of the current generation” (Jang et al. 4039). For example, teens are being used to promote items such as “The Hunger Games” for the most straightforward brush of custom-made contact with that property makes it at ease for corporations to exploit after tracking every move. The author further affirms that this young generation is the very actual currency for corporate marketers. For instance, corporates instead of marketing their product to the potential teenage audience, the indication is to obtain this teenage audience to retail the product merely to itself while the corporations collect big data in this process. The author writes, “Companies have the tactics of collecting the data while turning it into currency” (Jang et al. 4040). One of the corporate marketers tells the FRONTLINE. “The individuals who are conveying the data since they are just hitting, “I like that” or “I like this,” or they are sharing with all their networks, “Will you please come like me?” (Jang et al. 4041) without the idea about the value of the data, they are conveying to the corporate marketers.
However, Rushkoff failed to capture some critical aspects of this context. Budington says that in several cases, app designers perhaps include the tracking of the Software Developed Kits (SDKs) without wholly accepting the privacy consequences for users and maybe without receiving the data themselves (Benndorf & Normann 1261). Designers occasionally get paid for just including these SDKs and can include them as gathering analytics or debugging tools. However, the SDK operators can then potentially obtain information about people’s app usage and behaviors.
Further, Benndorf & Normann (1260) add that some devices are designed with built-in digital supporters, such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home (Benndorf & Normann 1260). It is a fact that these service platforms send recordings of user’s queries back to the corresponding corporations for further processing. With the Alexa voice assistants and Google Assistant, the user can listen to recordings of all questions that he or she might ever ask (Benndorf & Normann 1262). Benndorf & Normann (1262) say that while corporations have been open on what type of information they are collecting with these services and devices, what firms are exhausting the data for is much more opaque. Moreover, a subsection of the targeted adverts is the advert-retargeting. Retargeted adverts take into consideration user’s previous online actions in order to move an advert on the user’s way (Benndorf & Normann 1263). For instance, tracking pixels is usually added to the webpage, which is already opened by the user to ensure he or she is prompted to trace the same advert over and over again. The advert “follows” the user across the website, anticipating for a click (Benndorf & Normann 1265). This aspect has resulted in the growth of a general conspiracy notion that smart devices and phones are critically listening in and instead targeting adverts based on what the user is saying.
Individuals do not have a wide range of options when interacting with the current world. Most persons are fond of taking pictures while uploading them to social media platforms. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has produced Privacy Badger, a browser extension that blocks trackers and ads in efforts to address this internet user’s lack of choice (Bradbury11). The browser allows users to toggle the trackers that are permitted to interact with the website experience while replacing social widgets as well as the embedded social media videos with the badger icons that all viewers are supposed to click to activate it in order to ensure viewer’s information is transmitted (Bradbury13). Currently, the change is coming not from corporations and internet regulators but from the individuals who are always advertised in the first place.
Works Cited
Benndorf, Volker, and Hans‐Theo Normann. “The willingness to sell personal data.” The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 120.4 (2018): pp. 1260-1278.
Bradbury, Danny. “Anonymity and privacy: a guide for the perplexed.” Network Security 2014.10 (2014): pp. 10-14.
Jang, Jin Yea, et al. “Generation like” comparative characteristics in Instagram.” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, (2015): pp. 4039- 4042