cash cow?
Categories: DairyDiary
An excerpt from the article In the current issue of Cyberspychology titled ‘The Construction of the Virtual Self on Myspace’ by Slimkhan, Manago, and Greenfield reads:
“As youth present themselves in these media enriched environments alongside commercial products, brands, and celebrity omnipresent on the Internet, they may be increasingly constructing aspects of their identities as images or brands, thereby erasing the line between commerce and the self.â€
From my own experience of raising animals for slaughter I know that animal husbandry blurs the line between friendship and commodity. As a child I learned to come to terms with the fact that my friends/pets were also food. I used to name our sheep after all my closest friends and elementary school classmates, and then as we would sit down to a lamb chop dinner in the dark of winter we would wonder who we were eating that night. Social profiling’s integration with commerce parallels the farming industry. When you look at Gloria for instance you see a personality with unique traits but in the end her worth is economic. http://www.facebook.com/home.php?
The article quoted above states that social networking is commodifying people. Then is profiling a cow in effect reversing the equation? Cows are themselves commodities but dynamic enough to provide fodder for Facebook, thereby personifying a product.
