Don't Take This Personally, but It Doesn't Mean You're Special
By Catherine Getches
Sunday, May 29, 2005
As a twin, I think I have an unusual appreciation for the desire to be unique. When I was 10, this drive even involved breakfast: I challenged my mom's homemade-everything, health-food-only policy and begged for brand-name, boxed cereal. Even if I couldn't convince my mother that Trix really were for kids -- Grape-Nuts and Cheerios were as close as I got -- in my mind they fortified me as an individual, at least in the General Mills sense of things. I ate one kind of cereal and my sister ate another, and I was way too young to see the irony of using a brand name to make myself special.
Luckily, I got past that clueless phase. But these days it seems that most of American society is sinking into my preteen mindset. From what I see, 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 MyQueue on Netflix and add or delete from MyShoppingCart or MyAccount on almost every e-commerce site.
What's better than reading washingtonpost.com? mywashingtonpost.com, of course. It's such a relief to know I can opt out of any news I don't want, and restrict my intake to an intellectual diet of Britney Spears and basketball.
It's as if that seagull from "Finding Nemo" is in charge of promotion: "Mine! Mine! Mine!" I guess it's supposed to mean something to me that I can customize a pair of Nikes with my own ID (as long as I don't choose "Sweatshop Slave"), 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 sometime bizarre.
Or even creepy. Last year, the libertarian magazine Reason sent its 40,000 subscribers a custom-designed June issue, each with a satellite photo of the subscriber's very own neighborhood on the cover. Maybe it's just me, but I find it hard to get pumped about technology that makes me want to pull down my shades.
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: For $55.95 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!"
My husband tells me that everyone likes his own brand best. But what brand is that? Take those customized cell phone ring tones -- possibly the only way to make other people's irritating conversations even more irritating. Somehow I find it hard to believe that anyone feels the thrill of ownership when she hears her digitalized rendition of Beethoven's Fifth, "Hava Nagila" or the racetrack bugle call.
Even the federal government's getting into personalization. The Department of Agriculture 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. And the Postal Service is convinced that customers will pay up to three times more for "an exciting new product that lets you take your own photographs and turn them into real U.S. postage!" (At least now that they've worked the kinks out: No Unabomber or Monica Lewinsky photos.)
In a sense, I understand what provoked this MyMyMyMentality, at least online. 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 ("Catherine, are you alone?" or "Getches: Are you big enough to make her happy?"), 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 log-ons 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. On the gossipy New York Post Web site, for example, you must now enter your income level and home address just to read the daily dish.
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 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: Let's just say a lot of awkward itches would go untreated.
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. I don't know about everyone else, but part of the allure of going online has always 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 really like personalization technology that connects people to other people. Amazon and Netflix, for example, use something known as 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) -- essentially letting us recommend movies to each other online.
I'm not saying I'm not slightly surprised that a good friend of mine recently rented three DVDs' worth of "Miami Vice," but at least the service encourages kinship rather than isolation. Like the old local brick-and-mortar bookstore or video boutique, these marketers have figured out a way to know their customers and then help them get to know their products.
But that's the exception, far from the rule. 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.
Author's e-mail:getchesc@yahoo.com
Catherine Getches logs on as anonymously as possible from her home in northern California.
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