scary stuff... As marketers, retailers and governments map your desires in ever-greater detail, your purchasing decisions, your lifestyle choices, even your political preferences are influenced in ways you barely perceive. From the behavioural targeting that seeks to track your online life to the brain scans intended to trigger your purchasing decisions, the modern persuader’s toolkit claims scientific validity as never before.
Now a new generation of pervasive technologies is about to take influence to the next level. By merging real-time databases of your TV and web viewing, your past purchasing decisions, even your physical movements and facial expressions, the persuaders are hoping to understand and mould your personal preferences to an unprecedented degree. Neuroscience, too, is being used to study how to manipulate customer demand. Lucid Systems, a marketing-research company visited for this special wired investigation, promises its clients “the unspoken truth” about people’s innermost thoughts: “Objective scientific data to help you discover not just what people say, but what they... feel about advertising and marketing messages, brands and products – even before they are aware they are doing so.” These are the new hidden persuaders – corporations and public authorities intent on using technology to understand and alter your intentions below your level of consciousness. The use of science in the quest for consumers’ “buy” button is, of course, nothing new: 52 years ago, journalist Vance Packard prompted an outcry with his bestselling book The Hidden Persuaders, which warned that “many of us are being influenced and manipulated” by the new “motivational research” industry. Its operatives, Packard wrote, use “insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences” to manipulate “inner thoughts, fears and dreams”, typically “beneath our level of awareness”. Such manipulation, he concluded, was immoral, as it removed people’s “right to decide... what they want to do and who they want to be” > http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2009/06/features/the-new-hidden-persuaders.aspx > > _______________________________________________ > NetBehaviour mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour > > _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
