Keep your noses out of my business, Facebook creeps
I’M thinking about a change of direction in my career, readers. Forget social media, from now on my columns will be all about being single in my thirties. I could be a modern day Carrie Bradshaw – Sex And The City, Glasgow style. Why? Because social media is showing me the error of my ways. In the last week alone, Facebook has put adverts in front of me for a pregnancy test, an online dating app, a wedding planner, and a website with tips on cheering yourself up. Presumably thanks to a lack of wedding or baby pictures on my news feed, Facebook has concluded I’m an emotionally unstable 31-year-old in need of a nudge in the right direction. Forget politics, forget the news, it’s time my ovaries got a move on. I know what you’re thinking: “Haha, very good, but everybody knows Facebook advertising is based on things you’re already interested in. You must be crying alone at home on a Saturday night, scrolling through dating apps, looking up cheap wedding dresses on eBay and googling ‘why am I still single?’.” Well, I don’t buy it. I’m convinced that a form of social media profiling is at play here, and when the algorithms that drive online adverts are created by humans, why on earth wouldn’t society’s little prejudices be creeping their way into technology’s judgment of what you’re likely to care about? Of course, it’s not just me. Annoyed with Facebook, I headed over to Twitter in a fit of revenge to let everyone know that Big Brother Facebook was casting judgment over my single, childless life, and a few people got back to me with their own tales. For men of a certain age, the ads included products for tackling hair loss (for a guy who still had his hair), life insurance and funeral planning. Another woman I spoke to told me that, now in her forties, Facebook wasn’t too fussed about sending pregnancy test ads her way, but she was also getting promotions for Tena Lady.
As one Twitter user put it, Facebook is like the stereotypical misogynist on the bus who notices you’re not wearing a wedding ring and starts droning on about how someone would snap you right up if you just smiled a bit more.
Social media is my dad at Christmas when he delivers the “you’re not getting any younger” speech after 20 years of telling you to focus on your career (I’ll find out this week if my dad really reads this column).
Sure, whether it’s television, newspapers, magazines or billboards, adverts have always been placed wherever they’re most likely to reach the target audience. But in the pre-digital days it was far more general – some people walking past a billboard ad might be interested in it, but they didn’t feel they were being picked out of the crowd.
The personalisation of advertising feels more like a judgment than an opportunity: these aren’t just things you might be interested in, they’re things you should be interested in. If you’re a 31-year-old woman, you should be thinking about getting married and starting a family – and if you’re not, what the hell’s wrong with you? Do you need to cheer yourself up because it’s making you miserable? Maybe if you were a little less miserable someone would take you off the market.
Maybe by next week Facebook will have moved onto botox, IVF and rehab clinics when it hasn’t detected a flurry of clicks. Or the ultimate insult: a cat.
The truth is that I’m a proud workaholic. I put the news on when I get up in the morning. On my way into the office, I catch up on the latest stories in the papers.
When I’m at work, I’m playing heavy metal albums via YouTube on my headphones. In my spare time I take self-defence classes and punch and kick hell out of things. Failing all of that, you’ll find me in the pub watching football. I’ll get round to the settling down thing, but it’s not up for speculation from anyone but me – and not least from Facebook and its advertising pals.
We’re all individual, and advertising essentially dumbs us down into corporate opportunities. It is such a powerful industry that it not only reflects some of society’s worst stereotypes and depictions of normality, but it influences and reinforces them, and nowadays – much to the advertisers’ delight – it really is more personal than ever.