[joshstrike]

You can make distractions for the masses or you can consume them; ya can't do both. If you have a thousand telephones that won't ring, then social networks are a great way to get suckers to sell your garbage to each other with as little effort as possible. They're the internet equivalent of reality TV: The content creates itself, so it's cheap to run; product placement through aspirational, voyeuristic relationships are the paradigm; topics are vapid, memory is fleeting. Gen X mostly understands this, but we're basically irrelevant to the marketers -- actually, in most cases now we ARE the marketers, which might explain why we have a better handle on it. But Gen Y seems to have an impossible time grasping the idea that they're being used by all these neat little tweets and likes. They've got an insatiable appetite for short-attention-span candy. It's easy fishing if you want to profit off it; they're like a bunch of trained goldfish in a perfectly transparent tank. Total advertising saturation has apparently done to our culture what it was intended to do: Replace genuine interaction with a series of tailored sales pitches, in a Truman-Show-like fashion.

I guess the question now is, what do we do with 30 million kids who can't write a complete sentence? And the correct answer is: War.

[mkr-hn]

You sound awfully cynical about this. I see the data collection as part of the service.

They provide a way for people to communicate easily, refine searches and ad displays to interests, and they get to sell the aggregate data.

It's not exactly a bad deal. I certainly don't miss the days of poorly targeted everything.

[joshstrike]

How can targeted advertising be a service? It would only be a service if you wanted to buy something but you didn't know what until you saw an ad for it.

I think it's bizarre that anybody who grew up after the '50s would buy anything based on an ad... and yet... I make a living in advertising because it's true.

I'd rather live in a world where it wasn't.

[mkr-hn]

The targeting is the service. They're going to be there anyway, so they might as well be something relevant (or at least inoffensive).

[Vivtek]

Also, they should get off your lawn? "The kids" have never been able to write a complete sentence. Until they get to the point where some of them need to - at which point, they do fine.