Some time ago, I wrote a post called “The changing face of identity”, where I pondered the relevance of Sherry Turkle’s work on the status of identity in the age of the internet for virtual social spaces like Facebook. At the time I surmised that such spaces would not leave human social identities untouched. Judging by recent articles in TIME magazine on Facebook, my guess was right, but more importantly, it enables one to see an unexpected side of the social networking site.
So, for example, Steven Johnson’s piece, called “In praise of oversharing” contrasts Josh Harris’s experimental “art project” of the 1990s, where, first, a hundred-plus people, and later, just he and his girlfriend, lived together in an underground bunker, every moment of their lives recorded on film by a network of webcams, with the kind of “oversharing” made possible by Facebook on a large and ever-growing scale (it has just registered its 500 millionth user). In the case of the former, Johnson argues, we witnessed a case of “extreme” exposure — with every quarrel and toilet visit filmed — which hardly anyone would voluntarily submit to or choose, while the latter represents a shared space of limited public exposure — one that is subject to users’ own decisions about what and how much of it they wish to share, and with whom.
Still — and this is the important thing, as far as I can judge — for Johnson the growth in Facebook membership, as well as its popularity, is an indication of people increasingly feeling at home in what is neither the secluded space of privacy, nor the public space of prominent or famous public figures, but something in-between, which has not as yet actualised all its potential (whatever that may be).
There is more to it than this, however. Another piece in TIME — this time by Dan Fletcher — on the phenomenon of Facebook affords one a glimpse of another, less often discussed side of what may, to some, seem to be no more than an innocuous, socially useful internet site, where one can keep track of events in your friends’ and family’s lives. Moreover, privacy controls on Facebook allow you to set limits to the amount of information and the identities of the people you want to give access to it, in other words, to control how public you want information about yourself and your family to be.
There’s the rub, because no matter how “safe” and personally useful Facebook may appear to be, the company has on more than one occasion introduced innovations that were met with dismay on the part of users, and its privacy controls have been described as “less than intuitive”, if not downright “deceptive” (in Fletcher’s words), which seems to me another way of saying that they are not exactly user-friendly.
Why would this be the case, if one may reasonably expect the company to ensure that such control settings are relatively easy to operate? It may be silly to see anything sinister or ulterior in this, but judge for yourself in light of the following. Among the innovations referred to earlier, was the 2007 introduction of Facebook Beacon, which, by means of default settings, automatically sent all users’ “Facebook friends” updated information about their shopping on some other sites. At the time, CEO Zuckerberg was forced into a public apology for such unwarranted invasion of users’ privacy.
It did not end there, however. Following his hunch, that the amount of information that people would be willing to share (and that Facebook as well as other companies could benefit from) is virtually unlimited, Zuckerberg introduced a far-reaching enterprise called Open Graph last April. It allows users to comment on anything and everything that they like on the internet, from merchandise to stories on news sites — presumably on the assumption that you would be interested in your friends’ preferences, and vice versa.
The catch is that it is not only one’s friends who are interested in this. As Fletcher points out in his article “Friends without borders”, Facebook is able to display these predilections on the part of its users on any number of websites. Not surprisingly, in one month’s time after Open Graph’s launch, in excess of 100 000 other sites had integrated its technology with theirs. Three guesses why.
Small wonder that Facebook has had to look at its privacy controls once again, in order to “enhance” them, after the Electronic Privacy Information Centre lodged a complaint — relating to confusion regarding Facebook’s ever-changing policy, as well as its less-than-clear privacy controls design — with the Federal Trade Commission in the US.
It is easy to see in all of this merely a misunderstanding of Facebook’s “mission”, described by Zuckerberg as aimed at making the world “more open and connected”. I, for one, am not so sure, though. It seems pretty clear to me that the company is pushing users as far as it can to expose their likes and dislikes to other, customer-hungry companies, and benefitting financially in the process, of course. Few people would find fault with Facebook’s attempt to profit from its users’ buying preferences, but there is more at stake than that, as I shall try to show.
The philosopher Michel Foucault had observed that in the premodern age the individuals whose identities were fleshed out to more than life-size were royalty and nobility — the king and queen, for instance, were highly “individualised” because of their elevated station in society, while ordinary people, at the bottom of the social ladder, were largely left to anonymity.
What has distinguished modernity, and today, postmodernity, in this respect is the increasing level of individualisation of people who are perhaps furthest removed from royalty, such as criminals and individuals with a distinctive medical or psychiatric condition.
As the “panoptical” age of disciplined, docile bodies (as Foucault has described modern people whose lives are constantly subjected to procedures of “normalisation” and infantilisation) has unfolded, however, even those “ordinary” people who did not fall foul of the law, or became assimilated into medical and psychiatric institutions, have had their identities progressively assigned to educational and governmental data banks and population registers in a process of “normalising judgment”. The consequence has been that virtually every citizen in contemporary “democratic” states has become as highly “individualised” in terms of personal attributes — birthplace, domicile, educational qualifications, criminal record, and so on — as royalty and the aristocracy were in earlier ages.
Had Foucault still been alive today, I’d bet that he would have looked upon virtual spaces for social interaction and information-distribution, including Facebook and YouTube, as a phenomenon that has taken the process of individualisation a few steps further. Not content with the amount of personal information that one is already obliged, by law, to furnish to governmental, educational and commercial institutions, people have more than lived up to the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s bet, that they have an expandable appetite as far as sharing information goes.
The difference with Facebook is that, by contrast with obligatory information given to the state, the information shared with friends and family is voluntary, and that it is selectively posted with a view to promoting something — either optimal informedness among family members, or one’s personal standing among your friends, or perhaps one’s professional interests, by using the space for sharing important information (such as lecturers disseminating reading matter among students). But Facebook has not exactly made sure that information about users’ lives is restricted to this; in fact, quite the opposite. The very fact that the default settings on users’ privacy controls is automatically on “maximum exposure”, so that the responsibility for adjusting them rests on every user’s shoulders, is already quite telling in this regard.
It may be that, at this stage, the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which Facebook has succeeded in exposing users to more (potential) attention from other companies than they probably anticipated, have no more than financial or economic objectives, but the potential for extensive social control or psychological manipulation is vast.
Fletcher points out that, if Facebook users were to be regarded in terms of nationhood, the website would be equivalent to the third-most populous country in the world. One could also think of Facebook as an ever-expanding virtual neural mapping of the world, connecting more and more people in informational and communicational terms — potentially more insidious and less “democratic” than the “rest” of the internet.
In other words, one should remember that the possibilities opened up in this way also have a downside, namely that — as some of the developments discussed above suggest — the very communicational advantages represented by it may be (and have been) turned against the interests of its users. Initially this may assume the guise of commercial manipulation, but it is not unimaginable that the networking site be used, very subtly, for more politically motivated purposes.
Agreed, Facebook has angered millions with its lax approach to privacy. Which is why Zuckerberg is now generally hated on the web. It is pretty obvious he does not care much about privacy, but will do as little as he can get away with.
Care to explain more about what ‘political motivation’ could underlie this? Do you mean something motivating Zuckerberg, Facebook as such or some more systemic element?
Great post.
You could argue that it is individuals own choice to decide to subscribe to Facebook and their responsibility to read the fine print.
However, as you point out, how many people do that and to what extend is Facebook really committed to being as transparent as possible?
You make another good point in terms of the technological implications of Facebook.
I recall that at one stage the US government wanted to monitor libraries – all in the name of the “war on terror”.
Security services would have a keen interest in Facebook technology and you wonder if they have already approached Facebook.
In fact I am sure private detectives/police detectives have used Facebook very successfully.
But then again, as you also point out, governments already have so much personal information and is increasingly asking for more in the name of national security…
Deep web browsers and other software enables anyone to mine these databases.
Even without the “Facebook” technology most people get telephones calls from all sort of funny companies that got your details from some form, list or box that you ticket.
I think Facebook is just part of a much bigger debate.
It seems like most technology it has good/bad implications. Email (internet still does) also elicited similar concerns initially.
The question is will we adopt/embrace this technology in the future and shrug it of as inconveniences that can be resolved (more privacy protection, law suits, more regulation etc…) because of the benefits?
I hate the fact that you can’t delete your account. You can only “deactivate” it. They keep all of your information.
I don’t really get your point. how is it more capable of indoctrinating people than magazines, billboards, television and radio? especially if you can control the content and comment and dismiss that content you do not deem fit or relevant?
Isn’t that the very reason we are becoming more individualistic? we have choice. our opinions matter. dogma is going the way of the hand written letter. I can choose to ignore your opinion and formulate my own. Isn’t that the point of freedom of information and expression.
Do I mind that they are monitoring my likes and dislikes? of course not. now I get exposed to things I’m interested in, not bombarded by things that I’m not interested in. How exactly are they then indoctrinating me by doing this?
Your conclusion is in contradiction to the points you raise.
If the Facebookers are indeed, in a way, the third largest nation on earth, they should collectively organize themselves in Facebook-unions and campaign for more democracy and more transparency, since their very lives are being made more transparent in a foxy kind of way. We are careless about the things we do not pay for, not realizing that more worth than we would have allowed, had we only knew, is being extracted from us.
Thought-provoking post, Bert. It seems to me that what MV is misunderstanding about your argument, is that Facebook is a double-edged sword – on the one hand it gives people a lot of what they want, and in so doing it really provides a valuable service, but on the other hand it gathers a colossal amount of information together, information that can be used unscrupulously by anyone from corporations to governments, to strengthen what is already prodigious levels of control over our lives. It’s not that Zuckerberg has these sinister motives (he’s probably only interested in profit), but that he is probably unwittingly extending the information required for turning people into Foucault’s docile bodies more effectively than ever before. In doing so, he is eroding the fabric of democracy even further. My worry is this: how do we, short of a genuine revolution of sorts, regain what democracies have lost in the era of information-overload? And don’t misunderstand me – I think you are right about the double-sidedness of Facebook – the same is true of information; on the one hand it is great, on the other, it is grist for the mill of those agencies intent on controlling citizens. Who would have thought that Big Brother could have such a benign appearance?
As usual a great post Bert.
Given its relatively recent genesis, there is mixed evidence of how social networking sites are evolving & whether they are necessarily tainted by their sinister potential. When telephones became widespread from the 1880s onwards, they too were accompanied by concerns regarding their political, social and ethical implications.
Conversely, there is evidence of viral anti-marketing via Facebook, where ripples of acquaintances have staged boycotts of companies & products via ‘the network’.
Today, in our globalising, mediated, busy & dangerous world, people are increasingly choosing to communicate remotely, asynchronously & on a one-to-many basis. It doesn’t suit everyone, but half-a-billion people are into it.
An interesting factoid about Facebook is that in the US it scores lower on customer satisfaction than the Federal Tax Department. In surveys, subscribers actually express ‘hatred’ for Facebook. For me this reveals some of the motivations for Facebook membership. People join because other people have joined, not because they really want to. They just don’t want to be left out! In this sense it’s equivalent to other types of contagious phenomena such as fashions & viruses.
To keep in contact with you I could send you an email, text, letter, telephone you – but no I slap it on my ‘wall’ for all & sundry to gawk at. Facebookies engage in a voyeuristic exchange of trivia to broadcast the estrangement & loneliness that is symptomatic of our era. Facebook made it both possibe & acceptable to do so.
Is Facebook just another telephone?
Facebook is a marketing tool masquerading as a social network; like all other marketing tools, the very notion of privacy is antithetical to its purpose. The internet as a whole could have been an empowering technology; instead it’s become a tool of control. Time to relocate to the offline world, methinks.
This reminds me of the dystopian phantasies that some Christian sects were propagating in the seventies and eighties, apparently based on the Book of Revelations. At the time I laughed at it, now not so much.
JP – Maria has it right when she says that it is improbable that Zuckerberg has any sinister intentions; in the terms you employ I would say the potential for political manipulation or control is systemic, more or less along Foucaultian lines. Just as the phenomeon of the ‘examination’ enables the state and other agencies to hierarchize one’s social position – because of the ‘normalization’ built into examination results – so, too, Facebook could (and already does) provide information about users that goes way beyond mere commercial use or exploitation. It is not far-fetched that the personal preferences revealed on Facebook could comprise the basis for a categorization of people, by the state or other institutions, according to some character-profile compatible with these preferences, which could easily be factored into the biopolitical production of the contemporary subject. But sure – as Master Bates also intimates, Facebook is a pharmakon – a poison and cure at the same time. It also reminds me of something that Leonard Shlain says in ‘The alphabet versus the Goddess’, namely, that ‘everything of great consequence casts a shadow’. He was referring to the invention of the alphabet, but it is also true of all forms of recently invented communication/information technology, including Facebook.
Would the anti-apartheid movement have succeeded, if its members had all been on Facebook? How would Facebook technology have helped the apartheid era intelligence services and political structures to identify and neutralise “dissenters” and identify activist meetings, etc. Facebook is all very well under democratic government during peace-time. If the political landscape changed (think Stasi in East Germany or the hundreds of thousands of new ïntell officers at work in the US – monitoring fellow Americans for “”anti-American”" behaviour – according to a Washington Post article) .
I agree, Faceboook is a marketing tool and Facebook Inc is not an altruistic outfit sprinkling magic dust all about. It is a corporation: its bottom-line and core interest is profit motive. Read Joel Bakan’s brilliant book “The Corporation”" to understand Facebook’s structure and motivations.
Spot on, Bert, as ever. I find all ‘social networking services’ highly questionable in terms of genuine utility and in the potential for abuse by corporate and covert intelligence gathering by governments. As de Toqueville observed in a nascent America, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”. He saw the dangers in complacency and the unquestioned acceptance of the status quo in democratic societies.
The idea that ‘privacy’ is an almost universally accepted principle is dangerously naive as Facebook demonstrates.
As for ‘individuality’ on social networks: rubbish. Inevitably, mass movements result in pressures to conform in greater or lesser ways, usually to the detriment of those who do not hold public power. As Master Bates observed, many people join these networks under pressure from friends and family or from the desire to ‘be part of it’–the very antithesis of individuality.
Until recently, the defining characteristic of humans (apart from language) was the ability to use tools. We now know that other primates use tools, too. In the film “2001″, a pre-hominid plays with a bone, idly digging in the dirt and swinging it up and down–until it hits another bone. And breaks it. The creature is curious about this and repeats the movement, deliberately this time and gets the same result. This happens repeatedly with greater force each time. Finally the creature understands that what had been useful to dig in the dirt (a tool) could also be used to hit things (a weapon). TBC
The lesson we have yet to learn is that every tool can be adapted and used as a weapon. Right now we are being observed from space by satellites humans put there. Do we know precisely what is being observed, recorded, analysed? No.
Did Google ask our permission to broadcast Street View, real time images of traffic, buildings, pedestrians. etc.? No. When objections were raised, it was too late, the precedent had been set and no doubt further intrusions are on the way.
“Reality TV” has created a voyeuristic phenomenon, the inevitable extension of ‘social networking’ into ‘entertainment’. If we don’t value our privacy enough to protect it, why should others do it for us?
My forebears fought and died in several wars on three continents to establish or regain, and later to protect, the right to freedom from intrusion that we call privacy. Humans may be social creatures but we are not (yet) hive creatures, indistinguishable from one another. If we think boredom is a social problem now, imagine what it would be like to live in ‘group think’ where all is known and nothing is significant.
Facebook and its ilk invite us to betray ourselves, indelibly, because you can’t ‘erase’ or ‘delete’ from the internet as you can from a computer. (The day is coming when that will no longer be possible either.) Every personal revelation is potentially useful ‘information’ for someone whose interests are not ours.
Facebook is e-mail minus privacy. Freedom, sold out.
Welcome to the New World Order!
Great article, Prof. Have a look at Prof Rosen’s article, too: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html?hp
It links with the point Siobhan made above. Fascinating identity politics and psychology issues arise when people are uncritical users of this technology.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Orwell
No.
Facebook is an avenue for personal public exposure… opening an account then wanting to be private and secretive rather defeats the whole object.
RICA is yet a further method of social control; if you dont agree to further bureaucratic snooping into your private business you don’t get access to Facebook or anything else on the WWW
Excellent points Prof. My first contact with Facebook was my last because it reminded me of a sci-fi that portrayed a world of benevolent control through in-groups and out-groups basically peer pressure used as a form of control. The point that Master Bates also raise.
The control is never obvious but the available activities guide the users actions nevertheless.
My second aversion to it is that it seems to reduce real life to a Gibson-style synthetic imaginary life, which, I am sure, can only give rise to a whole gamut of new personality disorders. Nothing on the net is private or sacrosanct to some. A lesson that is worth learning.
The last annoyance is perhaps purely personal but, I feel that Facebook as changed the meaning of the word friend from: a person one can trust and who’s company one enjoy to: a person who makes one’s (virtual) character more popular. I call to the Facebook version “fwends” to distinguish.
That said, other than the youthfull facination with popularity, if one wish to join serious discussion groups these days, simply wish to throw around ideas,well, they’re on Facebook, the global club, so, Blackberry here we go. It is probably geriatric of me, but I cannot help but feel I am caving in to the identity snatchers and selling out.
@mv – Have you not noticed how lately some things are just so YOU that you had to buy it?
Siobhan – An excellent extension and amplification of my thoughts; thank you for that. Your remark about not being able to delete anything on the Web, reminded me of the flipside of that, namely that those who have access to the gigantic databank comprised by the Web, are the only ones who COULD erase everything about you. In fact, in an age where 18th-century philosopher Berkeley’s ‘Esse est percipi’ (‘To be is to be perceived’) first became ‘To be is to be televised’, and now, ‘To be is to be-friended on Facebook’, the sci-fi movie, The Net, with Sandra Bullock playing someone whose identity was erased…on the network/internet/Web that is the repository of all our 21st-century identities, does not seem so far-fetched.
X Cepting – Thanks for reminding me of the prophetic nature of Gibson’s work. In an uncanny way he anticipated the connected world in which we live.
Mistral – Thank you for that valuable link.
Just to accentuate, by way of example, on the points you have just made in your article, I have about 20 or so people that I last spoke to over a 5-20 years ago. Some of them deliberately cut me off for one reason or the other while some of them happened to pursue their careers while I was also focusing on mine. But I have managed to trace all of them with a great deal of success and to the point that I actually now have more intimate details of these people which I am convinced they will be surprised I know. Facebook has limited the choices of what you want or don’t want to share with the public in a veru big way. I was taken aback by your topic because I was and still am a keen reader and researcher on issues of globalisation, especially the emergence of “borderless societies” and “virtual communities” which are all hallmarks of globalisation. Facebook has, twitters, etc have indeed, put a new dimension to the concept of globalisation, the Internet, and the concepts of “borderless society and virtual communities’ in particular. This has also added limitations to the way in which people volunteer or refuse to volunteer private or even sensitive info that may damage their interests. I hev seen pple getting fired ove what they said on Facebook coz they never realised that it was in the public domain. Interesting, isn’t it!
@Bert Identity erasure and/or identity theft are the primary reasons I have avoided even logging on to any of the “social networks’. Recently, I had the rather frightening experience of having my e-mail address book hi-jacked by a group pretending to be a pharmacy selling guess what…Viagra and a host of other ‘sexual stimulants’. This group then proceeded to send e-mails– ostensibly from me–to everyone in my address book. Then, mysteriously, all of my Sent e-mails disappeared and suddenly several other people’s names appeared on my e-mail account, people I have never met! The e-mail service are trying to trace the source of the problem but it ‘happens every day’ so the likelihood is that it could happen again. This time I’ve chosen a service with heavy duty encryption.
Back to the issue: Privacy and individuality are inextricably linked and form the basis for every right we cherish: sanctity of the person, freedom from arbitrary search and seizure (including e-mail snooping by government, corporations, etc.), freedom from intrusion into one’s dwelling, freedom of thought and expression, all of which can be subsumed under one primary freedom: the right to dissent, to say NO. What we say NO to defines us. It sets limits on conformity and makes protest against injustice possible. Without NO we have only co-erced assent in a totalitarian society enforced by universal surveillance. The seductive appeal of “Social networks” help make that surveillance possible.
@ Mistral Thanks for the link to that timely article by Prof. Jeffrey Rosen in the NY Times Magazine. It was well worth reading.
An interesting aspect of the article is the proposal of technologies that would allow for permanent erasure (not just deletion) of self-posted material that one later regrets having ‘shared’. Helpful as that might be, it also raised the spectre Bert alluded to from the film “The Net” where one company gains control of a technology that can ‘erase’ our identities and/or transfer them to someone else.
Equally scary is the company that offers to ‘rehabilitate’ your tainted reputation by flooding the web with positive information and using SEO viral tactics to propel the positive info to the top of Google. The potential for such viral tactics to be used by governments and corporations to control all access to information would render the internet impotent as a tool for open communication.
Right now, the ANC’s draconian “Protection of Information Act” would make media whistle-blowing on corrupt or incompetent government officials a crime. Imagine if government had access to a technology that would completely block any content other than approved (censored) information. Jackson Mthembu said today the ANC does not need to change the Constitution to pass this law. He’s right. They just need to ignore the existence of the Constitution as they have in Zuma’s case, in the Pikoli case, in the Shaik parole case, etc.
Personal privacy and public transparency are colliding.
There is a fundamental difference between public openness and accountability where human, constitutional and legal rights are concerned, and the decision, by individuals, to share information on their private lives with others on something as “public” as the Web. The former should NOT be limited by any oppressive law; the latter SHOULD be limited by the individuals concerned, lest they expose information about themselves that could be used against them.
@Bert, pharmakon indeed! Derrida notes in his essay on Plato’s Pharmacy, “A text is not a text unless it hides from the…first glance, the law of its composition & the rules of its game.” What kind of a text is Face(book) & what are the rules of its game? (& how does it differ from, for instance, blogging?)
Is your question regarding the sinister potential of Facebook a manifestation of the remnants of Platonism, & of our false nostalgia for presence, privacy and personality. What if, as Zizek seems to argue, we were instead to embrace this latest mutation of the text & exploit its ambiguous potential?
Take for instance a Facebook Group who are engaged in exploring to what extent Facebook is a means of social control,
(see http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4689162771).
Perhaps we need to redirect our paranoia & rethink the territorial coordinates of personhood, privacy & political action.
A little poison can go a long way in a network.
Take one facet of this ‘poisoncure’; the rules of this ‘novel’ textual game depart from all three components of auto-bio-graphy. The text is not actually written, (like reality tv, it is not reality, it is reality tv), there is no discernible author, (you login to request Facebook ‘author-isation’ ), the transient, ‘private’ sentences are of no consequence (words minus memory, just plain twittering noise) & its manifestations are wholly virtual (material for data mining, requiring augmentation to have meaning / commercial value)…
To retreat may be more dangerous.
It is interesting to see how rapidly avenues of communication expand and turn into super highways. Facebook is one of the more successful sites. There are many more of these social networks out there, many of them are quite hardcore. My comment on social networking is that the reason I think it has become so popular is that in our modern world people have become more isolated in their homes – instead of socializing with neighbours people sit in front of TV’s and internet. The sense of community that we as a social species needs has now received a cybernetic implant. People used to ask if you had a cellphone, now they ask if you’re on facebook. It is easy to think that, architecturally speaking, it is now possible to put less emphasis on creating good spaces in buildings where people “bump” into each other or sit as neighbours etc. I’m not saying that is at all a good idea, but I wonder how these technologies affect our experience of life on a phenomenological basis. I know people who are friends and know everything about each other and speak (chat/voicechat) at least once a day but have not physically seen each other in over a year AND live in the same city. Leonard Shlain commented on how communication via keyboards exercise both hemispheres of the brain unlike writing that favours the left…I assume this means we are becoming a more balanced society because of things like facebook.
What may be particularly noted with regard to Foucault, is that in antiquity the only ‘individuals’ to be documented were leaders or icons, such as Virgil’s Aeneas or Homer’s Odysseus whom concomitantly represented ‘the masses’ at the same time. Later on, during the rampant spread of attrition and plague during the Napoleonic wars, social control started tofocus on persons who were either dissident or a pestilential liability, resulting in the documenting and categorising of each member within ‘the masses’ to an impressively meticulous and diverse level which gradually turned to every member of society, creating the panopticon effect in that each individual is a potential offender and so may be potentially monitored at any time. -This only became perfected through the ages as cultures of beaurocracy flourished the world over, often with an overzealous enthusiasm as with such notable organisations such as the Gestapo and the NKVD. What seems tobe the case nowadays with the technological age permeating every facet of society, isthat social control has reached its zenith in that bodies of authority no longer have to go through the pains of pigeonholing individuals as doggedly as was the case in the past. Today, individuals vociferously categorize and classify themselves, with personal narratives on Facebook abounding to such meticulous points that only a stalker and more often than not, marketing companies would find appealing. And certainly, as far as social control and intrusion goes, marketing companies have certainly replaced their jack-booted, thumbscrew toting forebears in that regard.