The Digital Past

Crowd sourcing, things like Wikipedia and Google, break the structure of the mass market. It’s all based around the idea that information wants to be free, so these websites make much of the information everyone looks for free and accessible. Then comes in websites like Amazon, who use crowd sourcing to fairly accurately predict things that people may like or want. Other websites do this too, especially when it comes to ads on social media, like on Facebook or Instagram. If I view a website or had added stuff to a cart, that website now appears in a lot of ads on my social media so I see it a ton, with the hopes that I would buy it. I always find this extremely creepy, but it’s a smart marketing tool. Then there is the Amazon Alexa, which while they are extremely helpful for some people, I don’t want to be listened to or tracked. Yet this one, tracks domestic habits and things you ask, then sends you offers on things it believes you would want. Again, creepy, but a very good use of crowd sourcing and marketing. We also looked at this website, “Claritas,” and looked up our zipcodes, where it showed the typical demographics of them. From there, places use these demographics to send people in these zipcodes things they would want, and then also puts those types of products in those stores. Again, major crowd-sourcing. I will say that for my zipcode, 20852, it seemed extremely accurate. Like Professor O’Malley said, this could be very corrosive of nationalism, as it seems more that our lifestyles are more important to us over where we are a citizen of. Which is sadly true, because yes I am an American citizen, my lifestyle is something I think about all the time. It’s extremely interesting to think about how much crowd-sourcing actually impacts our lives.