Fear the quizzes
Sunday, September 13, 2009 by alice
Are you one of those maddening people taking Facebook quizzes to see ‘what does your star sign says about you’, or listing the ‘5 things you could grab from where you’re sitting’? The advertisement industry thanks you for your obvious spare time and lack of more interesting things to do.
What at first may sound fun to some is known to be a rather brilliant marketing strategy with the goal of figuring out what the consumerist society is after.
According to the article ‘The Hidden Secrets of Online Quizzes’ http://tech.msn.com/news/articlepcw.aspx?cp-documentid=19904552, those quizzes are there to get information out of the public, and as Debra Aho Williamson puts it, they also help people to pay attention to the ads.
One may have a profile picture that doesn’t reveal who they are or they might put Pulp Fiction as their favourite movie even though they’ve never seen it, but the fact is that we cannot escape the fact that our online personas are a direct reflection of ourselves.
As Helen Kennedy puts it in her text Beyond Anonymity, or Future Directions for Internet Identity Research, ‘online identities are often continuous with offline selves and not reconfigured versions of subjectivity in real life’.
While the validity of our online selves is still being discussed amongst academics, publicists have figured the puzzle (or should I say quizz?) long ago, and every information you give is for them another golden nugget.
People may join Facebook or other SNS either to fit in or even differentiate themselves from others; no matter why they do it, as we might do it for different reasons, every information counts and reflects who we are, weather we want it or not.