Liberation v. Manipulation

One morning a few years ago as I was driving to work, I was listening to NPR (as always) and I heard a piece on the Marketplace Morning Report on the new economy of in-game/in-app purchases.  It was a fascinating exploration of how the game designers can manipulate the players psychologically, getting them hooked on a free game then dramatically increasing the difficulty until purchasing special perks are all but essential to reaching new levels.  Companies' use of player data analytics to tweak playing experiences for just the right combination of satisfaction and frustration to unlock users' wallets displayed the incredible implications of the ability to collect and parse massive amounts of information: knowledge is power.

And it got me to wondering whether the internet, which for a long time I'd taken for granted would be a democratizing force, might actually shift the balance of power even farther in the direction of large institutions.

On the one hand, the internet facilitates massive information sharing.  That allows people with mutual interests communicate and coordinate; it enables coalition building, opens pathways for open-source collaboration and the development of alternate economic models, and pushes transparency and

accountability to the extent that abuses of power can be documented and widely disseminated.  It makes it harder for a single hegemonic voice to define the narrative around any particular event; the government and even the mainstream media don't get control over what gets reported in a world where anyone can take a video with their cell phone and tweet it to a million people.  So in "hard power" terms, it would seem the internet puts more power in the hands of the people.

But on the other hand, the proliferation of information on the internet has a flip-side.  Processing and analyzing huge amounts of data and using that to inform decisions is a big advantage, and its one that's only available to gigantic entities like corporations and intelligence agencies.  It's depressing to think that if all of our modern lives pass through the servers at Google, and they have the ability and intention to study it so as to perfectly tailor their sales pitches to tug at our emotions, to shape our perceptions about the world, then we might always be one step behind.  Before people are prepared to mobilize for social justice, they'll be sidetracked by amazingly relevant Facebook ads or earmarked by the NSA.  

Maybe these are melancholy exaggerations, but they illustrate a point.  The advantage that information sharing gives to the disempowered that want to band together is counterbalanced by the ability of institutions to collect and leverage all the data that passes through the networks that connect us together.  It's a thorny problem; I'm not suggesting we forsake our wi-fi connections, but I don't have any other workable solutions, either.