We started this class with the mass market. We discussed the transition from broadcasting to the modern television that has over one hundred channels today. “They had to provide television that appealed to everybody,” Professor O’Malley reminded. We were shown the married couple in different beds again, following the guidelines (but not laws) of public broadcasting in the past.

Professor O’Malley called the 1990’s “The Age of the Mass Market”. He actually used food in this instance to give an example, and how it really became diverse during the 1990’s due to development of markets at the time. It’s pretty cool to hear how an aspect of our current life had a journey to become what it is today. We also had food brands in the 1960’s that “appealed to everyone”. National brands, as Professor O’Malley said.

I have to say, it’s interesting to see the United States’ “Most Wanted Painting”, and how it’s a mass market product that assess what people like. Nothing great, but nothing offense. It looks boring to me, like a painting in the corner of a museum that everybody glances at before moving on.

It’s interesting to see what people do to merely be good enough, to not offend anyone. Digital media pretty much breaks that, since they can track people more closely. “The Mass Market has been fractured”, Professor O’Malley stated, “They can track you much more precisely.”

It’s weird to hear how Google managed to use crowd sourcing to rank things. Collaborative filtering is apparently what it is called, but I can’t really wrap my head around how they manage to do this. I do think it’s interesting that they use different methods to differ what is mass market and what is used for specialists. The methods that Google used is why it managed to blow all the competition out of the water.

Professor O’Malley then used many different examples of how many people use data that they keep on us to push us towards things that we already enjoy. Professor O’Malley told us about the store that he goes to in order to buy groceries, and how they have data on him, on what his family enjoys eating. Granted, it’s something that I already know, the ways they keep tabs on data, but it’s somewhat unnerving to hear it said out loud like that. It’s something like how YouTube keeps tracks on all the videos that I watch, and take into account what I enjoy and recommends videos for me to watch. To me, it’s just another part of a website that I frequent, but I wonder how other people tend to see these practices, especially older people.

We were then show Claritas, and how they used zip codes to tell others about the population. That feels like 1984 levels of information keeping, but I guess it’s perfectly fine in the eyes of the government (which makes it even more uncomfortable to me). This lead to a discussion how zip codes and other aspects of our lives like music reinforce our preferences, because so many organizations keep us on the same tracks regardless of what part of our lives we’re talking about.

It was an interesting class to listen to, but I have so many other things on my mind that it’s hard for me to properly sum up my thoughts. I think it’s an important discussion, but I don’t really know if we’ll find an answer to it at any point.