Mistaken Targeted Identity

This week I was the victim of mistaken identity, manifesting as a barrage of oddly irrelevant, ‘targeted’, advertising.

The Social Media Collective blog defines this algorithmic marketing as “an effort that combined human activity and computational analysis”, yet it reads more like a blind man’s interpretation of the Mona Lisa.

Facebook targeted me with: clickbait generators Revcontent, an ANZ Air Points Visa and Conqa, a construction quality assurance firm.

I can’t help but find the targeted ad for Revcontent a little ironic. I had actually visited their website that same day in order to get to find the culprit responsible for generating the odd clickbait ads that seem to follow me across the internet. The other two seem to grasp my geographic location, but not much else.

Based on my browsing history, Facebook seems to perceive me as a business owner with capital to invest in advertising, overseas trips, and a property portfolio. I honestly can’t fathom – outside of my brief visit to the Revcontent website – where this idea came from but I must say I am flattered.

While my days of Mi Goreng noodles and crowded bus trips up to Kelburn might contrast a little from the life of a corporate hot shot, it’s nice to think of myself in such a way. Hey, maybe one day I’ll take ANZ up on their offer of an airpoints credit card. And who knows, perhaps Facebook has developed technologies to predict the future and are just trying to do me a solid by recommending the services of Conqa, you know, for all the buildings I’ll be putting up.

A little quality assurance never hurt anybody, right?

Kid Cudi: Facebook v. Twitter

Twitter and Instagram are social media platforms that are used by celebrities to connect with a global audience. Californian rapper Kid Cudi interacts with the respective architectures of these platforms to communicate with his fanbase. Ultimately, they afford Kid Cudi a means of sharing personal insights with fans and an marketplace for promoting events and merchandise.

Both platforms have mobile apps and thus afford communication between celebrities and followers to occur instantly and virtually anywhere. Instagram only allows post to be made via mobile applications whereas twitter allows posting from any point of internet access.

(instagram: @kidcudi)

Instagram’s primary mode of communication consists of sharing photo and video content with followers. Upon review of Kid Cudi’s Instagram profile it is notable that the majority of his posts are self taken images, reflecting the constraint of Instagram’s features mentioned in the last paragraph. Through this restriction, Instagram promotes impromptu and personal posting, providing fans intimate insight.

Kid Cudi’s Twitter profile paints a different picture completely. Unlike Instagram, Twitter’s main communicative feature is text based. Limited to 140 characters, users can post ‘Tweets’, text posts which appear in the Twitter ‘feeds’ of followers. Posters can also ‘retweet’, hashtag content and use the ‘@’ symbol to direct their tweets to any of Twitters 974 million profiles.

(twitter: @kidcudi)

As pictured, Twitter’s architecture affords Kid Cudi a platform to acknowledge and reciprocate support from his fanbase by retweeting and, also, an avenue to market his music to a targeted audience.

Utilising the affordances of both platforms increases Kid Cudi’s audience and diversifies his social media presence, constructing more possibilities for engagement with fans.

The #memehistory of the First Photograph

As a “digitally literate netizen” I felt it my responsibility to engage in what Nicholas John describes as “the constitutive activity of web 2.0 sharing“, so, I created and shared a ‘meme’. Uploading it to the social media platform ‘Twitter’, using the ‘#memehistory‘ meme, I was able to poke fun at modern selfie culture and, simultaneously, the inventor of the camera, Joseph Niepce (1765-1833).

The advent of technology since the early 17^th century has continually stretched the bounds of consumable and producible media. With great technological change has come immense social adaptation and in today’s world we can observe this via the small devices we carry around in our pockets to photograph ourselves (…among other things of course).

‘#memehistory‘ refers to the usage of memes to explain and satirize significant historical events and ideas.

The #memehistory format creates a lens through which digital natives can connect ideas which are familiar to them – like tweeting pictures of Kermit the Frog – to historical happenings many young people feel far disassociated from. The format achieves this by utilising a modern and highly influential mode of humour referred to as ‘Black Twitter’ jokes and transposing them onto an image linking the two ideas.

By adding a caption to this image of a man photographing himself in a mirror with a large, antiquated camera – and posting it to social media platform, ‘Twitter‘, with a hashtag –  I am commenting on how the vanity of mankind has evolved in response the technological advancements of media and juxtaposing the modern motif of the ‘selfie’ with the idea of a photograph that was captured in 1827 to humorously reference the gradual change in social norms afforded by technological revolution.

 

Carter Simpson, MDIA104

 

(Image credit: chan.tymoon.eu/)