Rosa Jin

Recently, Maddi Koop posted “You Are What You ‘Like'” on her blog, a look into data mining using a person’s ‘Likes’ on Facebook, and how consumers can be targeted according to their publicly stated tendencies, interests, and lack of interests. I largely agree with Maddi’s approach to liking or not liking pages on Facebook, and have to commend the engineers behind such data mining businesses on their ability to weed out the extraordinary and uncharacteristic Likes, amongst the vast number that actually do fit with the consumer’s preferences.

 

That being said, imagine this.

Would it be feasible for a consumer and/or group of consumers to boycott the system? If enough profiles (thus consumers, from the perspective of businesses) like specific pages, related or unrelated to their actual interests, could this not lead to the creation of a new market segment, to which products or services might be tailored toward? A little imaginative, yes, but it is important to note that such data mining should not be a main point of reference for businesses in the development and marketing of their products.

The issue with technology as such a prevalent factor in our day-to-day lives could also be the reason for wasted resources – by relying on technology to sum up and draw conclusions from data, as opposed to live, interactive research, we run the risk of drawing false conclusions, of dismissing intuition or human experience in favour of the ‘facts’ being presented to us.