The cyberspace of the Internet is the playground of designer capitalism.
To follow Althusser (1977), it is shaped by the ever-deferred “last instant”
of the economy; an open-ended system constantly informed by contingen-cies of its users and the marketplace. The global youth market, especially the Y-Gen in the United States has triple the spending power compared with youth in the 1960s. The Internet is a training ground for young entrepre-neurs and visions of teens becoming rich abound. Youngbiz.com provides interactive content information on Stock Optionz, Biz Startz, Careerz, and Money Smartz. An e-mail service is available to be in contact with like-minded teen entrepreneurs. The shadow side of this enterprise is the way an
“electronic body” of the teenager becomes established, which is then used for market demographics to continue the sell.
The most sophisticated development of this VR consumer “e-body” is done through the market strategy of a relationship between the customer and the cyber-company through two-way “conversations.” The goal of one-to-one marketing, which Amazon.com (for adults) and Bolt.com (for teens) are perhaps paradigmatic, is to become intimately familiar with the cus-tomers, to learn their preferences and become buying partners, to obtain detailed information about their tastes, desires, interests, and values. To track such information these companies use “cookies.” A cookie is a small piece of data (an identifying code) that is placed on the customer’s personal com-puter’s hard drive by a website to monitor and track information about the user. When buying a book from Amazon.com the customer is greeted by name, given new titles that s/he might be interested in, sent an “alert” when an author the customer has bought is published, and so on.
This form of marketing will only become more and more sophisticated as interactive television (ITV) and the “wireless web” grow allowing a broad-caster to further invade the home to become more precise in terms of what “a” particular customer wants (Montgomery, CME, 85–88). Bob Van
Orden (1999), vice president of product marketing of digital-subscriber net-works for Scientific-Atlanta Inc., claims that this form of collecting data and matching advertisements is like “direct mail on steroids” (145). Whereas direct mail advertising usually yields a 1 percent response rate, this new form of advertising routinely exceeds 20 percent. This is the dream of “friction free” capitalism as a direct access to the unconscious where the objet a of each customer’s unconscious could be materialized as a product in a perfect fit.
The future looks like a scene from the sci-fi thriller Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002). In the future everyone is ID-ed, there is no escape. One of the few ways is to surgically replace the eyes. Detective John Anderton (Tom Cruise) does just that to flee from the Law. But, whenever he runs past a VR billboard that “reads” his now “illegal” eye print, he is beckoned by the seductive (female) voice of advertising. The images on the screens automat-ically change so that he would look at the product that “perfectly” fits his lifestyle.
With the coming of cable and digital satellites many American homes have up to 150 channels, but 500⫹ channel universe is entirely possible. TIVO (www.tivo.com) is a digital video recording system where a customer can record and download from a variety of available programs to develop the kind of personalized television schedule s/he desires, to view the programs in the order and time of day desired. TIVO presents a perfect example of interpassivity. The little black box that sits on top of the television has a big hard-drive memory (projected to be twice the size of the average Blockbuster video store) with a scanning and searching capability like a com-puter. It can store a personalized television schedule by searching through the myriad of programs that are playing simultaneously on satellite television or cable. More to the point, it is able to track, record, and store the cus-tomer’s random scans as s/he surfs channels looking for something of inter-est. Eventually this “smart” devise gets to “know” the customer’s choices, predicting and offering its own choices to view. Programs may be selected, which the customer has never seen before but fit perfectly with his or her pattern of viewing and interests. In effect, TIVO’s little black box begins to take over the function of the customer’s enjoyment of randomly scanning and its idle pleasures. It becomes tailored and personalized to what the cus-tomer thinks s/he wants. Caught in a self-reflexive loop the machine
“relieves” the customer of the responsibility for his or her personal cultural choices. It begins to “enjoy” for him or her, like canned laughter. Add to this the ideal of micro-niche advertising to fit the customer’s lifestyle and we are not far removed from Minority Report. The communicative aspect of televi-sion as a public forum simply vanishes, as does so-called audience-research based on mass marketing. Marketers now have an inside look at people’s taste preferences and cultural choices that is unprecedented.
There are many websites to feed such a fantasy for young people.
Youngbiz.com encourages a rather detailed registration form to be filled out, which is used to profile its users. Teen.com converts the teenager into part of a marketing “Trend Team” to help decide what’s “in” and “out,” what’s
“hot” and what’s “not.” To be selected as part of the “team” a questionnaire was first sent out that probed teens most popular desires. From the 800 plus e-returns, 250 were selected who subsequently received gift packages of CDs, cosmetics, T-shirts, and the like (Montgomery, CME 2001, 33, 116 n. 118). Teens believe that they are deciding what their likes and dislikes are. In effect they are being used for market demographics to set up the next marketing campaigns, and developing brand loyalty (Klein 2000). Three of the more pernicious marketing strategies involve: “Online Street Marketing”
(teens are hired to post flyers and distribute leaflets on the street, music concert, sporting event, in order to create a “buzz” about a new product.
This same strategy is applied on-line through message board posting, e-mail, and AOL instant messaging); “Viral Marketing” (this technique uses an on-line version of “word-of-mouth” to promote a product or service. “Word-of-modem” product information is achieved with every communication by sending a clickable URL about the product) (see Montgomery, CME, 52), and “Branded Communities” (Montgomery, CME, 31; Klein 2000). E-com sites entice teens to remain loyal to them by having its users directly express and participate in the creation of the content on the Web. It appears that teens are simply talking to teens and are being supported by allowing them to post message boards, asking them for advice, or them giving advice, pub-lishing their texts, profiles, artwork, poetry, and especially creating a personal home page.
Designer cyber-capitalism in effect “steals” away the voice (zoë) from teens and uses it for its own “biotic” profit. The routine surveying and mon-itoring of chat rooms, bulletin boards, discussion groups—the very spaces of
“free” teen expression—enable marketers to find out what are the latest trends, hot products, desires, and teen obsessions. To quote a well-worn Borg line from Star Trek, “resistance is futile.” Whatever teens say is appro-priated into the designer cyber-mill of marketing. The Center for Media Study (56) reports the sophisticated marketing of Teenage Research Unlimited (TRU), Roper Statch World Wide, Zandi, Kalorama, and Cheskin Research who use focus groups, on-line surveys, and anthropologists to study teen subcultures. CME reports that Girl Games even hosts “slumber parties” for teen girls to build trust and get the inside view of their habits and values. What is most pernicious in this research is the way the contingent event of teen culture is used to stabilize the market. The so-called “explorers”, teens that are considered independent and highly influential in what they believe in are especially targeted to establish future trends. Ravers, Goths, Wierdos, and Freaks—collectively known as the “visibles” because they
“stand out” above the rest—are especially monitored. They are the likely trendsetters. Non-teens, typically labeled as “Nerds,” “Dorks,” and “Geeks,”
the abjected segment of teen culture provide yet another challenge for marketers because of their underrepresentation in the Net. Cyber-capitalism wants them ALL as ONE.
The Center for Media Education (CME) describes how several e-commerce sites have managed to tap into teens buying on-line despite the
difficulties of not being independent consumers. Most have to rely on their parent’s credit cards and look after the payment transactions. Nevertheless, an innovative new kind of website has emerged, known in the industry as an
“e-commerce enabler,” that has opened the purchasing door for teens.
Cybermoola.com enables teen e-commerce by allowing users to create pre-paid accounts. They can then use the money to purchase products from affil-iated websites. Rocketcash.com enables teens to shop without a credit card by having parents open an account for them and then shop at over a hun-dred on-line retailers. The most sophisticated is DoughNet.com. In this vir-tual bank account system, parents can set up on-line banking accounts and parent-controlled credit accounts for their children to use in on-line transac-tions. There is even a way to invest, save, and make charitable contributions to nonprofit organizations. It is also possible to earn “DoughPoints” for teens that have no money to spend on-line. These are earned by answering HarrisZone polls. There are now other companies (CDNow) that pay teens to post advertisements for company merchandise on their home pages.
Gaming sites on the Net are also available where teens can win virtual money or tokens that can be used to win cash and prizes.
Mobile phones (cell phones, “handies”) have become the toy-thing for teens and yet another way for cyber-capitalism to reach them. Cell phones have been extended now to become part of a wireless world of portable entertainment centers capable of instant messaging (IM), digital pictures, downloading and listening to music, playing interact video games on-line, and surfing on a truncated version of websites designed specifically for cell phone use. Voxx.com has an interactive site for teen girls, which delivers a recorded voice message from Jennifer Aniston whenever she is scheduled for an interview. gUrl.com, Alloy.com, Bolt.com and dELiAs.com all offer teens access to the Net, posting shopping information and upcoming events via cell phones and pagers as “bursts” of information for teens on the
“move” (Montgomery, CME, 83–84).
What has been the “free” use of cyberspace is potentially to undergo even a more radical antidemocratic change. CME report in their “new trends and future directions” that the Web will eventually shrink, reduced to a small sub-set of featured websites. The reason for such a possible massive shift is the ever-increasing move to wireless mobile communication devices, personal video recorder (PVRs), and interactive television (ITV) like TIVO discussed earlier. Here the myth of interactivity finds a heightened irony. Customers can create more and more of their own media experiences using customized PVR and ITV programming features. The cable industry is “designing and deploy-ing systems that offer only the illusion of online choice” (Montgomery, CME, 80, original emphasis). Like walled-cities, these are virtual gated com-munities dubbed as “walled gardens,” “walled jungles,” or “fenced prairies.”
The customer is supplied a defined range of approved Web pages with the cable company supplying the service assured that its range of brands and advertising will be the only ones that the customer uses for as long as the cable service is paid for. In effect, the customer is captured and held as
a “willing” hostage to what the cable company offers. As the Web’s shrink-age continues, the CME report continues, so will the number of companies controlling the most popular Web content as the pressure to consolidate grows (as part of the so-called dot-com shakeout).