Putting the consumer in a cereal ad, by Evan Selinger and Shaun Foster

Imagine it’s the near future. You’re walking along a city street crowded with storefronts. As you walk past boutiques, cafes, and the Apple Store, your visage follows you. Thanks to advances in facial recognition and other technologies, behavioral marketers have developed the capacity to take your Facebook profile, transform it into a 3-D image, and insert it into ads. That sweater you’re eyeing? In the display, the mannequin wearing it takes on your face and shape. The screen showing a car commercial depicts you behind the wheel. At a travel agency (let’s pretend they still exist—after all, this is a thought experiment!), you see yourself sunning on a beach, while the real you is bundled up against the cold. The ads might show you with an attractive stranger or a lost love (after all, Facebook knows whom you used to date). Or they could contain scenes of you and your happy family. No longer do you have to picture yourself in the ad—technology has that covered.

How plausible is this scenario? What would it mean if it happened? How would it change the ethical landscape of advertising? Would anybody care? We advise you to read some thoughts on these and related questions by Evan Selinger and Shaun Foster.

Here is some relatively startling news: a new study reveals that many college students put potential employers' social network policies above their financial compensation when deciding what job to take.

The study focused on 2,800 college students and young adults between the ages of 21-29. One in three of those asked claimed that a flexible social media policy was more important to them than financial compensation.

The upshot is that, apparently, the young people would rather have the opportunity to play on Facebook during the workday than to get paid more.

As Alyssa Rosengarden notes, many of those entering the job market have, for their entire (more-or-less-)adult lives, interacted constantly with their friends and families through social networking sites. So, in one sense, it is no surprise that they aren't prepared to relegate this interaction to the 5-10pm hours.

It is hard to say whether, on balance, we should take this as good news. On the one hand, it's nice that young people aren't prioritizing scads of money over regular interpersonal connection. On the other hand, it seems like what the survey has really uncovered is that college students would prefer a job at which they're not expected to work all day, and while that's hardly anything new, it's not the most attractive thing I've ever heard, either.

At any rate, it certainly comes to me as news. Perhaps to you as well.

Via.

EDIT: Hm, apparently they took the video down. Here it is.

The 1000 memories blog has a nice post that provides a kind of best guess approach to quantifying the world's existing photos. Their estimate: 3.5 trillion.

Interestingly, they note that Facebook is the world's largest photo library, holding 180 billion photos.

Read more about it here.

1. Nevolution: This is a mental public health issue

Image credit: Daniel Neville

Daniel Neville has penned a thoughtful piece about the ethical implications of video games that manipulate us and how these mechanics are holding back the artistic potential of the medium.

...[G]ame designers are using evolutionary needs for rewards and goals to cheapen the game playing experience. If there were no golden coins to collect, or princesses to solve, would the game still be playable? [Braid designer Jonathan Blow] made a big point about comparing the simple and addictive (yet ultimately empty) rewards based system of World of Warcraft to gorging on fast food...Blow questions if game designers have been designing games to exploit the need for fitness indicators and affordances. Rewards can be like food (naturally beneficial) or like drugs (artificial stimuli and the illusion of fitness indicators), games over use the drugs because they don't understand how to make a food.

Read More...

I quote:

One of the major themes for 2010 was using data not just for analysis or business intelligence, but for telling stories. People are starting to make use of the data (especially government-related) that was released in 2009, and there was a lot more data made available this year (with plenty more to come).

A couple of my favorites.

Driving Shifts Into Reverse

Hannah Fairfield, former editor for The New York Times, and now graphics director for The Washington Post, had a look at gas prices versus miles driven per capita. The chart could've easily been an x-y scatterplot, but the extra step was taken to connect the dots so to speak. Points were ordered by time, and turns were clearly explained graphically.

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

This weekender by Matt McKeon of the IBM Visual Communication Lab explored the changes of Facebook privacy policies over the years. It came right after Facebook had made another update to push for a more public profile. Click on the interactive, and see what becomes public and how many people can see your postings.

Good stuff! Check out the rest here.

I love this chart, created for a post at Fast Company by Doogie Horner, author of Everything Explained Through Flowcharts.

Here is his gloss:

This chart will hopefully help you view specific Facebook portraits within the context of the larger genre, and therefore lead to a richer, more complex appreciation of Facebook portraiture as an emerging form of banal, eye-numbing expression.

A nice diagram at Experience matters caught my eye today, when reading this post.

Although it looks to me like the author of the article conflates application insecurities (buffer overflows, unvalidated form input, improper exception handling, etc.) with what we used to call cases of social engineering (popularly represented these days by phishing), the main point here is worth heeding: our dumb behavior on social media sites leaves us vulnerable to cybercrime.

What's worse: in the age of the personal brand, where there may be good prima facie reasons to "add" contacts you don't recognize, those tinyurl-filled twitter streams become a minefield. I think it's incontestable that now more than ever, it's easy to make a dangerous mistake.

Here's Lindsay's nifty flowchart, which may be of some potential use for those remaining credulous internet users we all know.