Money Makes the World Go Round

The Internet is the quickest, largest source of information available to anyone who has access to it.  As creepy as it may seem, it is fairly common knowledge that the actions of Internet users are constantly monitored, but this is a good thing.  The monitoring is more like studying.  Analysts use the information the same way economists do: to hypothesize what is needed to meet the demand.  But what motive do they have to do Internet users such a favor?

Suppose Internet users were consumers in a “cyber-economy” and the analysts were educated businessmen who wanted to create the best “products” possible. Oh wait…that is exactly how it is!  Money is the driving force behind social media. Websites have the capability of offering a huge income at virtually no expense and are relatively self-sustaining once created.  High traffic websites can make enough money off of ads alone to make using their page free to everyone, which generates even more traffic. No matter how useful the “product” may be, the intent is profit. 

Blakely introduced the topic claiming social media mirrors a very distorted view of our lives while showing images of popular magazines of iconic celebrities of our day.  Those images focused on the entertainment industry, not the average person’s life.  Blakely substituted popular culture interchangeably with social media, but they aren’t the same thing.  Popular culture is the spawn of the desires of the common man.  The intent of those desires does not matter. What matters is that it is popular.  Social media is the means by which popular culture is most popularly viewed and profits increase with higher social media traffic.

Ad companies used to target certain age ranges, genders, ethnicity, and the popular topics associated with each.  Johanna Blakely presented that the problem with the Internet is that analysts have a hard time determining who is searching what.  But is this bad thing?  Now analysts do not have to hypothesize about the interests of certain groups.  They can target common specific interests.  Instead of the Internet forcing the death of demographics, it rather forced them to evolve.  Blakely proposed that all of social media will undergo the same evolution eventually.  For example, her theory says the movie industry will evolve from target genres such as action, comedy, or horror to more complex plots based on popular interest.  This has already began on a slower scale such as romantic comedies, but it is an unfair assumption to claim that all of social media will respond the same way the Internet traffic has.