Utah Senator Orrin Hatch looked puzzled. “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” he asked Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was testifying before Congress about the technology giant’s use of Americans’ personal information.
“Senator,” Zuckerberg said with a slight smile, “we sell ads.”
“I see. That’s great,” Hatch concluded.
It was an odd and revealing moment, one that perfectly encapsulated how little Americans know about our media system, and how easy that ignorance makes it for the leaders of the world’s largest data analytics company to mislead us. For Facebook doesn’t simply “sell ads.” It sells behavior effectiveness, packaging people into groups based on how they will act in the supermarket, for example, or at a car dealer, or in a voting booth. And to predict how its users will behave, Facebook accumulates data provided by those users themselves.
The science of tricking individuals into monetizing themselves for sale to advertisers is a very different thing than just “selling ads.”
Facebook has been selling user information to advertisers since long before the recent public revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s microtargetting during the 2016 elections. But the kind of audience surveillance Facebook engages in, historically speaking, has been the norm in our commercial media system. Except for the specificity of the data, and the grandiose (and questionable) claims of effectiveness, Facebook’s leveraging of detailed analytics to produce predictable behaviors should surprise nobody. Many of these same issues concerning privacy and surveillance arose with the development of Western Union’s monopoly on the telegraph in the late nineteenth century, and the growth of American Telegraph and Telephone (AT&T) in the early twentieth. Both corporations spied on users and tabulated behavioral data to maximize commercial sales. When broadcasting over the radio emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, the need to understand audiences in new and more complex ways became imperative. Because advertising underwrote radio in the United States, broadcast corporations had to sell more ads, and to sell more ads, they had to convince advertisers and their agencies they could influence consumer behavior more predictably.
The era of audience exploitation began in earnest thanks in large part to the experiments of Dr. Frank Stanton. In the fall of 1934, Stanton was a graduate student in the Psychology department at the Ohio State University, and he was fumbling for a dissertation idea. He knew that he wanted to study radio, which had transformed American life over the previous decade, but he wasn’t certain as to the best method of investigation. Stanton’s advisor, Harold Burtt, was an expert on educational psychology and he had always been fascinated with radio as well. In 1924, for instance, Burtt had conducted a novel experiment through the facilities of WEAO, Ohio State’s campus radio station. In a fifteen-minute program, Burtt attempted to transmit his thoughts telepathically through the ether. There’s no record of whether his experiment worked, but its mere existence illustrates that he shared with Stanton an enthusiasm for probing the psychological properties of new media.
Stanton and Burtt eventually settled on a plan. Stanton would improve the accuracy of audience metrics by secretly recording radio listening and matching it against self-reported surveys. Using his skills as an engineer, Stanton built a small recording device that could be attached to any radio. The device would be activated when the radio was turned on, and a small stylus and wax ribbon within would record the station being tuned in. Between March 1 and May 4, 1935, Stanton placed the device in 58 homes in the Columbus, Ohio area. Once the device was removed, Stanton interviewed the households, and left a short questionnaire to be completed and mailed back to his office. He then correlated the three pieces of evidence to develop what he termed the “objective listening record” of each household.
Stanton didn’t tell his subjects what he was doing until the experiment was completed. In fact, he lied to them. The device, he said, would simply measure how much electricity a radio used in a given period of time. Only after the device was retrieved, the survey completed, and the questionnaire returned did Stanton inform his subjects of the ruse. He claimed they loved it. None of his subjects “reacted unfavorably” to the revelation, he reported, and “tremendous interest was shown in the whole problem. In many cases it was difficult to terminate the conversation” about the experiment.
Stanton’s dissertation (‘‘A Critique of Present Methods and a New Plan for Studying Radio Listening Behavior’’) proved immensely useful to the radio industry. He had corresponded with CBS vice-president Paul Kesten even before the dissertation’s completion, and Kesten—who had a background in advertising—recognized the significance of Stanton’s work immediately. Kesten invited Stanton to CBS headquarters to present his findings, and soon afterwards the young scholar was hired by the network. He moved to New York City in the fall of 1935, and within three years he became director of research at CBS. By 1946, he was named president of the network, and he would hold that job until 1971. His record in the political economy of American broadcasting remains unmatched, and his legacy continues to resonate in every media debate today.
What Stanton’s original study discovered, and what proved immensely influential in both advertising sales and future scholarship on the media, was that audience members either misremembered, or lied, about their radio usage. Not only did his subjects significantly underestimate the amount of time they participated in the commercial media system, but they also provided answers about their media consumption that were demonstrably inaccurate. Audience members said they preferred educational and high culture programming, but what they really listened to were popular culture and entertainment shows. This finding would become so commonplace over the ensuing decades that every audience measurement system (including the Hooper and Nielsen ratings) would be structured to account for it. Broadcast advertisers learned from Stanton’s original scholarship that it’s far more effective to learn what media listeners and viewers actually do than to believe what they say. And to learn their behavior, it’s best to watch them very closely—preferably without their knowledge that they are being watched.
Once the broadcast audience was properly monitored, measured, and packaged, advertisers could feel more secure in their purchases. And the precise object they sought to purchase wasn’t simply an audience—it was audience behavior. Once reliable audience behavior could be accurately predicted, broadcast advertising exploded.
In the 1970s, Dallas Smythe, an influential economist and communication theorist, used this understanding of audiences to describe what he termed the “blindspot” theory of commercial media. Smythe named the the blindspot theory because the process of selling our attention and behavior requires that we cannot see it, for if we do, as Stanton discovered, we will not provide accurate accounts of ourselves. So the commercial media provides us with a “free lunch,” to entertain and amuse us, whether we call it “America’s Got Talent” or Facebook, that misdirects our attention from our own exploitation. We’re the product. And we remain an incredibly lucrative product. With its sophisticated data harvesting system, Facebook’s ability to sell our behavior to political consultants and consumer product advertisers has made it one of the most profitable media companies in history. Whether Facebook’s actual behavioral influence matches its claims or not is debatable; what’s not debatable is that advertisers expressed confidence in the reality of that persuasive power by purchasing $40.7 billion of targeted advertising from Facebook in 2017.
Those billions are a material reality that simply would not exist without the exploitation of our personal data. And to obtain audience data, whether it was from Frank Stanton’s radio listeners in 1935 or Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook users today, the use of subterfuge remains essential. We aren’t supposed to know that our media monitors us, and that we’re all working to improve Facebook’s profitability every time we log in. The blindspot isn’t incidental to the commercial system – it’s integral.
Without media literacy and a more widespread understanding of the system as it’s operated both historically and today, the blindspot will persist. And Mark Zuckberg will be able to get away with telling an uninformed Senator such pithy and misleading statements as: “We sell ads.”