Publisher's Weekly Review
University of Pennsylvania professor Turow analyzes the relationship between Internet media, advertising, and target demographics. His position on the digital age is generally positive, but the ethical and social implications of personal information being used by companies to determine who is a "target" and who is "waste" have him worried: "We have a serious social problem," Turow (Niche Envy) says, refering to the results of this new media information gathering phenomenon as "social discrimination," since its effectiveness is based on valuating an individual's potential worth to a particular company or political campaign. Turow examines the psychological consequences of this surreptitious information gathering, and asks the crucial question: "[W]hat, if anything, can you do about it?" While Turow's thesis intrigues and is both socially and politically relevant, at times he gets bogged down by facts and figures. Nevertheless, he has produced an important and insightful book. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Turow explains how the Internet today, rather than enhancing consumer power, diminishes it because of a customized media environment created by companies owned by marketers that secretly research the online behavior of vast numbers of users. Websites, advertisers, and others are continuously assessing the activities, intentions and backgrounds of virtually everyone online; even our social relationships and comments are being carefully and continuously analyzed, and Turow considers this a type of social profiling. As companies follow our digital behavior, potentially including mobile phones and TVs, the companies' claims that we are anonymous is irrelevant. Turow offers steps to offset the new rules of advertising that are secretly reshaping our world, steps including the need for teaching basic digital technologies to children, beginning in middle school, and a privacy dashboard that shows what information the advertiser used about you to create a specific ad. While reading like a classroom text, it is excellent, readable, and contains important information for a wide range of library patrons.--Whaley, Mary Copyright 2010 Booklist
Choice Review
Turow (Annenberg School, Univ. of Pennsylvania) examines the changing nature of the advertising industry, largely impacted by digital profiling and media personalization. He charts the history of media-buying agencies, content farms, and marketers in their race to deliver customizable content that is commercial (e.g., advertising, digital coupons) or noncommercial (news, entertainment) to a largely unsuspecting public. In the "long click," individuals with appropriate reputations are targeted, monitored, and surrounded with carefully selected information before receiving attractive offers designed to entice favorable actions. Customer profiling and privacy concerns are hardly new issues; less well known is how widespread the ability to peek into lives and infer behaviors has become. Turow describes how browser searches, smartphones/tablets, and social networking allow personal information to be shared, gleaned, and mined to separate consumers into reputation silos. The result? A sort of digital caste system in which different offers and access to premium brands are based on a person's financial attractiveness or social risk. Enhanced consumer power based on shared information? This rigorous and detailed account of social profiling raises timely, thought-provoking issues and concerns. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers, students at all levels, faculty, researchers, practitioners. S. M. Mohammed SUNY Fredonia
