Now, for today’s item: it is the opening chapter of an important new book from an old friend of RoadMAP’s, Professor Joseph Turow.  He takes a long and sophisticated look at evolving digital advertising industry and its data collection technologies.

In this excerpt from his new book, The Daily You, University of Pennsylvania professor Joseph Turow takes you on a tour of the industry that’s trafficking in the data you generate every day on the Internet. You don’t have to be a privacy stickler to be worried.

At the start of the 21st century, the advertising industry is guiding one of history’s most massive stealth efforts in social profiling. At this point you may hardly notice the results of this trend. You may find you’re getting better or worse discounts on products than your friends. You may notice that some ads seem to follow you around the internet. Every once in a while a website may ask you if you like a particular ad you just received. Or perhaps your cell phone has told you that you will be rewarded if you eat in a nearby restaurant where, by the way, two of your friends are hanging out this very minute.

You may actually like some of these intrusions. You may feel that they pale before the digital power you now have. After all, your ability to create blogs, collaborate with others to distribute videos online, and say what you want on Facebook (carefully using its privacy settings) seems only to confirm what marketers and even many academics are telling us: that consumers are captains of their own new-media ships.

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The Atlantic

According to a new report from Pew, the Facebook users who have the most friends, were tagged in the most photos, and received the most wall posts, were more likely than average users to attend political rallies and meetings offline. Additionally, those who used Facebook’s “groups” feature were also more likely to try to convince other Facebook friends to vote for certain candidates. (In general Facebook users were more likely than average Americans to vote in an election.)

It makes sense that an overall pattern of engagement extends beyond Facebook to the greater world. And this was true before Facebook too — people who are more social, more engaged, also have higher rates of civic participation.

But because Facebook is now where so many of those people — these highly engaged citizens — spend their time and communicate, the Facebook game is rising in importance for political campaigns. Voter contact — asking someone personally to vote — is thought to be the most effective way to get people to the polls, and it’s all the more so when the people making the contact are friends not strangers. Facebook, with its dense and active networks, offers campaigns a more efficient way of making those contacts. On Facebook, there is the potential to reach more people, whom they assume to be friends, without sending people into the streets to walk door to door.
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The Atlantic

In January 1912, the United States emerged from a two-year recession. Nineteen more followed-along with a century of phenomenal economic growth. Americans in real terms are 700% wealthier today.

In hindsight it seems obvious that emerging technologies circa 1912-electrification, telephony, the dawn of the automobile age, the invention of stainless steel and the radio amplifier-would foster such growth. Yet even knowledgeable contemporary observers failed to grasp their transformational power.

In January 2012, we sit again on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century. All find their epicenters in America: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.
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Wall Street Journal