Facebook is trying to tell me who I am... say what?

Social Media is now the most used way to communicate with everyone you know. While many different sites are becoming ever more popular, none of them compare to Facebook. Facebook is used by billions of people every day. Not only do people use it for personal use, but for business too. However, a statement in Gandy’s article explains, “social networking has an ideological character: its networking advances capitalist individualization, accumulation and legitimization.” This just means the business which social mediums, such as Facebook, to advance themselves in the consumer world.

 Now that Facebook insights allows for business to type in keywords to find on everyone’s profiles to show up on the sides of their news feeds, business are once again able to regain the customers they lost because of social media. What I mean is more and more people stop listening to or viewing commercials on the television or on the radio or in the newspaper. If you want to attract new customers you have to do it online. I have a perfect example of this. I have on my profile that I am catholic and I use to be single so the ads which would pop up on the side of my news feed were about Christian Mingle, a dating website for Christians. Now that I am in a relationship the ads have switch to engagement rings (I have only been in a relationship for 6 months). This is how business collect new customer, they get to type in keywords about their businesses and if they match with keywords on your profile you probably will see an ad about it sooner or later. This is another example; I am supposed to graduate in a few weeks and Facebook ads pop up stating “You’re almost an alum!” 

These ads just tell someone that the digital me should be getting married and is going to be a college graduate soon. The most recent way for advertising is how they now have the ad show up in your news feed. You are going along reading about how horrible or great someone’s life is and then suddenly you see this: 

How rude right? Then it is says your friends like this so we think you will too (this is a big assumption if I have ever seen one).This is just another way of getting us consumers to buy something by telling us who we are or who we should be. Sometimes I laugh at the ads listed for me, especially if they talk about babies or marriage, because I feel as though the Internet is trying to speed up my life and I am only 22 years old.