Social Class, Search Engines, and Social Media

Will Barratt, PhD
Adventurer

You are a social class based market share to some corporation. The more that advertisements can be focused on you the more efficient the work of the advertisement dollars. College students have been a marketable commodity for a long time. Back in the day of paper campus directories there were ads in the directories targeting students. Campus bulletin boards carried ads for paper magazines. And the ever-present corporate logos on clothing remains the beginning of brand/team/campus loyalty. Junk mail, paper based spam from back in the day, used to fill student mailboxes.

What has this got to do with search engines and social media? Everything. 

Campus advertising moved into the digital world because paper media is dwindling on campus. Further, the wide availability of digital media made it easy for the small business, craft hobbyist, or whomever to access focused marketing. 

The more that advertisers know about you, the more focused the marketing - or properly the more efficient the marketing dollars become. Your social media posts, and more importantly your friends and connections, provide a lot of information. Your search engine searches provide a lot of information.

The discriminant analysis math and relationship mapping are pretty cool in focusing advertising. And it only works if the advertisers know something about you. Advertisers can predict your interests only knowing a few bits of information, and a few of your social media connections. The advertising focusing information comes from search engines and social media filtered through research firms like Nielsen, P$YCLE, and many others; some marketing focuses on products, some on experiences, some on politics, some focuses on fund raising. You are a social class based market share.

If you want to know about your attributed social class, pay attention to the advertisements that you see. Are you targeted with graduate school ads? High end electronics ads? Health and fitness ads? Ford? Mercedes? Natural Light? 

If it's free (all of market research based social media is free), then you are the product. This is systemic capitalism.

Spending patterns of demographic groups are well known. Social grouping is a data based process driven by social class (education and occupation are nice proxies for social class). You are not just upper-middle class, you are a special variety of upper-middle class. Higher education researchers, like Alexander Astin, developed college student typologies 40 years ago. Imagine how sophisticated those student typologies are now - based on massive amounts of social media and search data.

Want to stick it to the system? 

If you are passive-aggressive then use a secure search engine like duckduckgo. Do not use a search engine that collects data on you, do not accept any cookies, and delete your cookies often. Use a secure browser like Firefox in Private Window Mode, or use Brave browser. Google Chrome in Incognito Mode has been reported to have been collecting information all along. Check all of your social media privacy settings. Use ad blockers, tracking blockers, and cookie blockers in your browser. Read more about privacy. There are appropriate levels of paranoia if you don't want to be someone's social class based market share. And, there are many additional levels of increasing security for the very privacy conscious, for example see the TOR browser. Be aware that even using the TOR browser will change your status with your ISP and "the authorities".

If you are aggressive then you can lead advertisers on false trails to muddy your profile - you are a social class based market share already, so you can only obscure yourself to a degree. Use Google Chrome, or Microsoft Bing, or Yahoo! Search, any Apple/Mac based browser, or other popular browsers (browsers are data collection systems that also provide search functions) to search for random stuff - like Florida Keys Camping, Katmandu hotels, pet clothing, or whatever. Confuse the algorithms with odd data. Have fun, create a social class marketing persona for yourself.

tl;dr digital marketing uses social class to focus ads for you based on information and analysis of your social media posts, personal connections, and browser searches.