These days it seems more and more people are buying into the idea that mega-companies can mass-produce human individuality.
In the online universe, there's so much fake Me that I'm getting sick of Myself. I can now redesign my access to most Web sites so that I look at My Weather on My Yahoo! or start a virtual library of My Search History on My Web. I can control, amend and adjust My Queue on Netflix and add or delete from My Shopping Cart or My Account on almost every e-commerce site.
I guess it's supposed to mean something to me that I can customize a pair of Nikes with my own ID, or that I can get a Carrie-style necklace with my own name at Wal-Mart. I'm drowning in personalized marketing gimmicks, often misplaced and sometimes bizarre.
Every day brings a new slew of customize-me bids. Williams-Sonoma will hand-forge a branding iron with my monogram, so I can "personalize steaks and chops." My latest favorite came just before Mother's Day, when Personalization Mall e-mailed me my "very own" "exclusive" offer: I could order six "personalized roses," with the greeting of my choice screened onto the petals of the most cliched bud in the florist's shop. To think I could have moved my mom by imprinting something really unique, like "Happy Mother's Day!"
Even the federal government's getting into personalization. The Agriculture Department now fights the McDonald's-on-every-corner culture with a high-fiber, low-fat campaign on MyPyramid.com, where you can build your own dietary guidelines. The Postal Service is convinced customers will pay up to three times more for "an exciting new product that lets you take your own photographs and turn them into U.S. postage!"
Once the Internet made communication anonymous and faceless, and location irrelevant, online marketers faced a whole new challenge in attracting buyers and keeping their loyalty. The tactics they've adopted are familiar - they were created by spammers years ago. But while I'm used to casually deleting unwanted e-mails that are personally labeled and crazily off base, it's a different breed of weird when my bank site thinks that "Hello, LastNameFirstInitial!" is going to make me feel warm and fuzzy about our relationship.
What I really feel is that I'm being watched. Thanks to "cookies," the personal trail of browsing and clicking-to-buy crumbs that our logons leave behind, marketers already can discern our individual reading habits, vacation preferences and the color of the roots of our hair. But they want more, posing increasingly intrusive questions just to give us full access to their products.
This Internet trend irks me for the same reason that I prefer waiting to pick up drugs at the pharmacy to standing in line at Starbucks. There are just some places where it's nice to be a number. I need everyone within earshot knowing the contents of my cup the way I need the grocery store clerk getting on the loudspeaker and commenting on the absorbency of my toilet paper. Imagine if they announced your prescription the way they do your grande, double shot, half-caff, skinny mocha with extra foam.
It wasn't identity theft or spam avoidance that originally provoked me, years ago, to enter fake names and false e-mail addresses on these nosy Web sites. Part of the allure of going online has been to enjoy the privacy of anonymity, not to prove that I'm MyOwnPerson. (Not affiliated with MyOwnPerson.com.)
I admit that when I log into My Yahoo!, it's nice that it goes straight to my local weather and movie times. And I like personalization technology that connects people to other people.
Amazon and Netflix, for example, use collaborative-filtering technology to match customer profiles and suggest books or movies accordingly. With Netflix, my friends and I can opt to share access to "Movies You Both Hate" (or love) - letting us recommend movies to one another online. At least the service encourages kinship rather than isolation.
But that's the exception. Self-expression isn't supposed to be a selling point. Next time these marketers want to use MyPersonality to sell me something, I'd thank them to remember it's none of TheirBusiness.
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