I have my doubts about Google’s new plan to better target advertising to meet our transient interests. As yet another manifestation of the idea of only showing us the ads we want to see, when we want to see them, it will inevitably stumble over the reality that we often don’t use the Internet in ways that fit advertisers’ assumptions. Machines get shared, people use multiple browsers, and, increasingly, web users are savvy about being able to block ads, regardless of how targeted they may claim to be.
We’re in an arms race with advertisers (and spammers, their less- reputable cousins): As fast as we improve ad-blocking technology, they improve their ability to get past it. This will only get worse as the Web becomes something we carry with us as a constant presence. But what happens when you combine increasingly immersive digital tools and aggressive competition between advertisers and filters? Unintended, and potentially quite unsettling, consequences.
Technologists and futurists call the mashup of digital info and physical space “blended reality.” Apps in development for the iPhone and Google’s Android platform are early indicators that a seamless blending of atoms and bits may soon be available to us. And just beyond that, personal heads-up displays, digital glasses, and other forms of wearable immersive systems, all of which exist in prototype may give us a view of reality seamlessly blending the Internet and the physical world.
Along with the Internet-blended reality, of course, likely comes advertising (and spam and viruses). These can be blocked, but the most effective steps we could take to put a lid on digital junk would ultimately undermine the freedom and innovative potential of the Internet. The more top-down control there is in the digital world, the less spam and malware we’ll see—but we’ll also lose the opportunity to do disruptive, creative things. Consider Apple’s iPhone App Store: Apple’s vetting and remote-disable process may minimize the number of harmful applications, but it also eliminates programs that do things outside of what the iPhone designers intended.
Blended-reality technology could play in a limited, walled-garden world, but history suggests that it won’t really take off until it offers broad freedom of use. This means, unfortunately, that ads, spam, and malware are probably inevitable in a blended-reality world. We’re likely to deal with these problems the same way we do now: Good system design to resist malware, and filters to limit the volume of unwanted ads. All useful and necessary, but there’s a twist: Filtering systems for blended-reality technologies may allow us to construct our own visions of reality.
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IEET Blog