The Power of Social Media and Advertisements
Have you ever found yourself wanting to buy or even actually buying an item you saw in an ad on social media? I know I definitely have. On Instagram for example, as I scroll through my home feed each day, an advertisement appears after every few posts. When Instagram started using ads, they were pretty random and I found them to be a distracting interruption to my feed. However, as time progressed, Instagram’s algorithm seemed to learn more about what I liked, through my activity on Instagram and Facebook. They knew which stores I had looked at online, items I had added to my cart, and ads I had been interested in the past. Slowly but surely, more and more relevant ads began to appear on my feed.
It has gotten to the point where I am genuinely interested in each individual ad I receive on social media. Sometimes, I even find myself more interested in the ads than in the actual posts from people I follow! If I’m actually interested in the product I may find myself clicking on the website for the product or service. Then I’ll usually see a variation of the ad again a few days later. This keeps the product in the back of my mind, reminding me that I was interested in it before. The cycle continues, and at some point, I’ll have seen the ad enough times that I actually find myself wanting to buy the product. Sometimes I do, but most of the time I don’t. But because I sometimes do, Instagram and Facebook acquire information about what I like versus what I will spend money on.
The internet is constantly collecting information on its users in order to do things like create targeted advertisements and understand what consumers like and dislike. The internet knows everything about us. As explained by Castells (2007), “power [is]… the structural capacity of a social actor to impose its will over other social actor(s),” and the internet and social media have an immense amount of power over its users — through advertisements, information collection, browsing histories, and even listening to our conversations.
Counter-power is the capacity of a social actor to resist and challenge power relations that are institutionalized (Castells 2007). Sometimes I find myself looking for counter-power, purposely looking away from my phone, computer, or TV when ads appear, just so they “can’t get me”. I try to avoid being influenced by advertisements as much as I can, but sometimes they are unavoidable, which I find pretty scary. I try to resist the power that social media and large corporations have over me, and I know the only way to escape is to delete them entirely. But even then, ads will always appear on websites that I browse and when I watch TV. The only way to completely resist the power of ads and social media is to discard all technology, which essentially would ostracize me from society and any possibility of having a job or social life. Even with this, you will see ads on billboards and in newspapers. There is no escape, and at this point, I have grown to accept the power that technology has over me, even though it is terrifying.
