I see this all the time. And what I think when I see it is that someone has been bought and then sold all of their friends for the possibility of winning some bauble...
Oh, I am sure that some people genuinely like whatever it is they have forced onto my newsfeed, and some people genuinely liked it but only came out of the closet with the possibility of a treat. Some people only care about the prize, and some people like me, will refuse to like whatever it is as soon as you start treating me and my relationships as commodities that can be bought and sold for advertising, regardless of whether we like it or not.
This of course puts me in conundrum, because I am working on starting a business in videography... And as such I am forced to wrestle into practicality the ethics of advertising and marketing and sales in general. The problem is basically that I loathe these fields from the very centre of my being and would literally be more comfortable being a criminal defence lawyer than working in advertising. So perhaps I will begin studying for the LSAT...
I know that to level a critique against advertising is easy and demands something more... I also know that many small local companies are doing good work and working hard within the system we have inherited. I just happen to hate the system and I know this means I need to not merely be critical but propose an alternative style or approach. I think what I want is a more genuine approach that doesn't appeal to people's self interest and rest its presuppositions of utilitarian moral theory. Part of the reason advertising particularly relational advertising works is because people trust their friends - they want to trust their friends... and it is actually relationally damaging to take the perspective I have because in my cynicism I run the risk of interpreting peoples actions very negatively, which may or may not be fair. This ironically betrays that my position also hold utilitarian moral theory as a presupposition and therefore finds it difficult to believe that people "liking" links or pages for prizes has anything other than self interest in mind and therefore find it offensive.
I have a friend who asked me what I thought about trying to apply this model to a manufacturing situation. I said I thought it would be difficult... North Americans don't like flexible pricing or haggling over products. Furthermore, we have been trained to think in utilitarian terms and so to do things differently one must simultaneously risk losses and present "pay what you want" in terms that push people out their utilitarian thinking patterns... For independently wealthy and famous creators of digital media with online channels of distribution these are of course not really risks or challenges at all. For anyone operating in material production and on a smaller scale the risks, of course, increase exponentially. I am sorry that I discouraged my friend rather than trying to imagine with him how to not just pitch his product but a different way of thinking about and doing business.
We write on this blog as a gift. We have created art and video as gift. How do we re-imagine our lives and jobs and businesses genuinely as gift? How do we recenter our live around trust rather than fear?
Gift Economics. Give.
