This is how the Internet looks to the advertising business today:
This is how they approach it:
And this is the result:
Fred Wilson calls that result “data pollution.” (See here, starting at about 23 minutes in.)
What’s wrong with this view, and this approach, is the architectural assumption that:
We are consumers and nothing more. Fish in a bowl.
The Net — and the Web especially — is a container.
Advertisers have a right to target us in that container. And to track us so we can be targeted.
Negative externalities, such as the miseries we suffer as a consequence, hardly matter.
This can all be rationalized as an economic necessity.
Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, writes that marketers need to recognize that people are human and marketers need to get human too.