Persistent Pursuit of Personal Information: A Historical Perspective on Digital Advertising Strategies

While much about digital advertising appears revolutionary, it would be wrong to accept the notion that customer surveillance is a modern phenomenon. Although the internet's technological advances have taken advertising in new directions and the practice of "data-mining" to almost incomprehensible extremes, nearly all of what is transpiring reflects some of the basic methods developed by marketers beginning a hundred years ago. In this essay, I argue that the emerging nature of digital advertising has important consequences for how scholars think about internet policy issues as well as how media scholars think about the changing relationship of advertising to content production.