The Role of Voice in the Void.

The ability to communicate.

This ability is one of the features of the Internet that draws us as a society in, allows us to create communities and maintains our relationship across long distances of space and time. For the Internet to continue to grow as the central backbone of communication & society in the world, there must be an increase of trust online that businesses will not sell out their customers and that people aren’t merely salespeople for anybody willing to pay them. Both of the points have come into question over the last couple of weeks.

As more and more people are feeling comfortable with online shopping and e-commerce, some businesses have taken advantage of this comfort level and added a new system to generate revenue. This system is the web loyalty program. To the best of my knowledge, the web loyalty program provides the person signing up for the program a coupon and sometimes the person will receive new offers from the program. However, for the most part, the people were not aware that they were signing up for a monthly service. No credit card information is being inputted during the time they click on the ad for the web loyalty program. The user types in their email address, and that’s it. The problem occurs that the ad appears after the user has completed a purchase with a company and have previously inputted their name, address and their credit card information. According to the service and the advertisement the user clicks on, by input their email address the person agrees to sign up for the service and pay the monthly service fee of $9 to $12. This “fine-print” loophole breaks one of the basic protections of online retail, “you won’t get charged if you don’t put in your credit card number.” By online retailers giving customer’s credit card numbers and demographic data to their partners, they are failing to protect the best interest of their customers.

The second issue comes in the form of advertising in media streams like Twitter. Users are crossing a fine line between offering recommendations to their followers because they enjoy the products they’re mentioning and becoming pitchmen for the businesses that sponsor their content. Typically, by adding a hashtag like #ad, the user could inform their audience that the following tweet was paid for by the sponsor. The ethical standards of those putting content online are definitively more varied and can be lower than their traditional media counterparts. For being a free service, people are entitled to say what they want, and I can choose not to follow them.

However, I’m afraid that this could lead to the Internet becoming a realm of product placements and neon signs flashing “Buy Me Now!”