Agency & Control Revision |
Contact Info |
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Below is a revision video I made for another school, but I used the PPT I made for you guys and used at your presentation the other day, so the message is much the same. It's also there to download in the PowerPoint section on the right.
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If you've got more questions, or would like help with practice answers, etc. I'm happy to help.
Ashley Hall - halla@bialik.vic.edu.au |
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PowerPoints |
Government Control and Popeye
The story goes that the US Government were responsible for promoting spinach consumption in Popeye cartoons to try and encourage more spinach consumption as a high-iron replacement for meat because there was a meat shortage during the great depression and because the kind in Popeye was a canned good it had a longer shelf life as well.
This article is more focused on the bad science and less on the spike, as it was later determined that spinach isn't as high in iron as first thought: (https://www.neatorama.com/2015/10/01/Popeye-and-the-Great-Spinach-Myth/)
This article discusses the 33% spike in sales of spinach after the Popeye cartoons came out: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/spinach-typo-popeye-2014-1?r=US&IR=T
Another article also says this: In the comics, Popeye originally derived his great strength from rubbing the head of the Whiffle Hen. This gimmick, of course, was soon changed to spinach (by 1932). Spinach not only gave Popeye superhuman strength, but also endowed the sailor with abilities like virtuoso dancing or playing piano. The Popeye cartoons were so popular during the Depression, sales of spinach in America increased by 33%, and it briefly slotted in as the third most popular kids food after ice cream and turkey. “Popeye” spinach is still the second largest-selling brand of spinach in America. (http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/12/popeye-facts/)
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Reddit Comment:
I remember reading about this some 20 years ago in The Bathroom Reader. According to that, spinach was chosen because of an error. A German chemist, Erich von Wolf, discovered how much iron was in spinach - 3.5 mg per 100g. However, when he wrote his findings, he placed the decimal one spot over and people thought that spinach contained 35 mg per 100g. When Popeye was created, the writers used spinach as his "superfood" because of its supposed high iron content. In reality, Popeye's superfood could have been beets or cabbage or any other green, leafy vegetable as spinach isn't really any better than other green leafy veggies.
But then I figured, "Hey, I read that 20 years ago, I should double check and find some sources, just in case."
According to this article (http://www.wired.com/2012/09/opinion-errors-knowledge-crowdfixing )from Wired magazine a few years ago, a scientist wrote a paper in 1980 that restated the story. In the article, he mentions that in 2009, another paper (https://web.archive.org/web/20141228033844/http://www.bestthinking.com:80/articles/science/chemistry/biochemistry/the-spinach-popeye-iron-decimal-error-myth-is-finally-busted )was written that traced the origin of the story. The author of the 1980 paper was unsure of the source of the story, being so long ago. The 2009 author found another professor had talked about the misplaced decimal in 1973 and thanked another professor (whom couldn't be found) for this information in a 1977 letter.
Long story short, the real value of iron in spinach was known by 1892 and the US government was publishing information about it by 1907 so writers of Popeye would have known about it before they started.
This article (https://www.neatorama.com/2015/10/01/Popeye-and-the-Great-Spinach-Myth/ ) claims that the US government got Popeye to eat spinach in the 1930s as a way to encourage Americans in the Great Depression to eat spinach as both an iron-rich replacement for more expensive meat and as a canned food. It mentions that spinach became a very popular food around then. The article also pushes the same debunked story of the misplaced decimal point, so how accurate is it? This website (http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/12/popeye-facts/) mentions that Popeye didn't get strength from spinach at first, but from rubbing a Whiffle Hen. It wasn't until 1932 that Popeye began eating spinach.
I've found a couple articles that mention that spinach is becoming more popular these days, surpassing the popularity that it enjoyed in the 40's (https://wayback.archive-it.org/5923/20110903060247/http://ers.usda.gov/News/spinachcoverage.htm )and 50's (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9175-2005Mar29.html?noredirect=on ).
So what does all this mean? We can safely assume that the creator of Popeye did not choose spinach because of the German-Iron myth, at least not without knowing that it was false. The Guardian claims that he did, (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/dec/08/ec-segar-popeye-google-doodle ) but without a source, we cannot be sure that the Guardian is any more accurate than any other source. There is some evidence that Popeye didn't begin to eat spinach until 1932 and that it could have been pushed by the US government. Spinach reached it's zenith of popularity in the 40's and 50's, possibly attributed to Popeye, so it would make sense that the USDA or FDA pushed for it. Whatever the case may be, if you want to be strong to the finish, you should probably eat some sort of leafy green vegetables.
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From the same Reddit thread, there is a good quote about editorialising and Popeye speaking directly to kids telling them to eat their spinach cos it will make them strong is good:
From about the 1970s, there was a factoid going around - which has been repeated in a deleted comment or two here - about how there were errors in the calculation of the amount of iron in spinach, and how that error was never corrected. This, allegedly, meant that the makers of Popeye thought that spinach was an especially good source of iron and that this was the reason why Popeye eats the stuff. This factoid was very popular: it was spread by some heavy hitting medical journals, including the British Medical Journal and The Lancet. The factoid is also untrue. It appears to be based on a serious of misinterpretations and Chinese whispers, and it's been spread because skeptics enjoying having a good story to tell about why it's good to be really careful with data.
The people pushing the factoid are absolutely correct that spinach is not an especially good source of iron, but scientists did know this in the 1920s and 1930s. While there had been an error in calculations of the amount of iron in spinach in the 1870s, it had long been rectified; American government health advice of the period had more correct iron levels, and did not appear to see spinach as a meat substitute but rather as a vegetable worth eating for its vegetable-ness. Mike Sutton's paper on the myth, for example, cites a 1935 science newsletter with the title Spinach Overrated As A Source Of Iron, for example, which explicitly mentions Popeye in passing.
And it looks as if the spinach has lots of iron thing was never strongly pushed by the Popeye character in E.C. Segar's cartoon. Segar was the cartoonist who originally created Popeye as an incidental character in his long-running cartoon strip in 1929. He did not seem especially fussed about iron in the Popeye cartoons of the era according to Sutton, who claims to have read every strip of the comic from the 20s to the 30s.
Instead, Segar's motivations for having Popeye eat spinach was more of a generalised 'eat your greens, kids!' thing. Sutton, for example, reprints a 1932 Popeye cartoon where a woman sees Popeye eating raw spinach and exclaims "Good heavens! Are you a horse?!" (the implication in the cartoon being equivalent to the way that meat lovers today might call salads 'rabbit food').
Segar has Popeye reply, "Spinach is full of Vitamin A's and tha's what makes hoomans strong an' helty". Popeye's advice about the vitamin content of spinach is basically still pushed by the NHS's advisory website in the UK, so it's pretty good food advice for 1932. Sutton claims this is the first specific explanation in the comic of why Popeye eats spinach.
Sutton also provides several other examples of Popeye editorialising about the goodness of spinach, for example this from July 1931:
"Special letter to me children frens – Dear kids – the reasin why I yam so tough an’ strong is on account of I has et spinach when I was young – An if you youngstirs wants to be helty like me ya got to eat yer weeds like yer maw sez – yers trulie, Popeye."
Laura Lovett argues that there was something of a crisis of child malnutrition in the early 20th century, and that Popeye's food advice was made with this crisis very clearly in mind. A report in 1907 had found that about a quarter of children were underfed; a separate report found that over half of African-American children in Mississippi in the 1920s were malnourished. This was a big deal in the American press at the time - Lovett claims there were over 50 articles about this in 1922 alone. The 1920s was also an era where there were increasing efforts at educating people about things like vitamins and what proper nutrition consisted of; it was in this era, according to Lovett, when the catchphrase "eat your vegetables, there are children starving in [insert country here]" began to be used as a public health message. So it was unsurprising, in this context, that E.C. Segar would have gotten Popeye to eat spinach - someone who reads the papers likely would have been aware that kids needed more encouragement to eat 'good' food.
As to why it was spinach and not beets, Sutton doesn't say. Personally, I reckon that the choice of spinach was largely a literary device to pick a single vegetable and stick with it - "Popeye eats spinach" is clearly more memorable than "Popeye eats his veggies" would have been.
It might be that the animated cartoon series about Popeye, which started from 1933, spread myths about the iron levels of spinach later on. It could have been something in the animated series that made the writer of the 1935 science newsletter mentioned above feel the need to correct the record. But in the original cartoon strip by Segar, Popeye's reasoning seems to have been quite sensible advice about spinach having good levels of vitamins.
Sources: I think I tracked down the academic paper that I suspect most of the journalistic pieces /u/ivymikey linked to are based off, a 2010 paper by Mike Sutton in the Internet Journal of Criminology. There's also a paper by Ole Bjorn Rekdal in Social Studies Of Science which largely contextualises the Sutton paper, but does so quite well, and an article by Laura Lovett from 2005 that contextualises Popeye's food advice in terms of issues with child malnutrition in the 1920s.
This article is more focused on the bad science and less on the spike, as it was later determined that spinach isn't as high in iron as first thought: (https://www.neatorama.com/2015/10/01/Popeye-and-the-Great-Spinach-Myth/)
This article discusses the 33% spike in sales of spinach after the Popeye cartoons came out: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/spinach-typo-popeye-2014-1?r=US&IR=T
Another article also says this: In the comics, Popeye originally derived his great strength from rubbing the head of the Whiffle Hen. This gimmick, of course, was soon changed to spinach (by 1932). Spinach not only gave Popeye superhuman strength, but also endowed the sailor with abilities like virtuoso dancing or playing piano. The Popeye cartoons were so popular during the Depression, sales of spinach in America increased by 33%, and it briefly slotted in as the third most popular kids food after ice cream and turkey. “Popeye” spinach is still the second largest-selling brand of spinach in America. (http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/12/popeye-facts/)
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Reddit Comment:
I remember reading about this some 20 years ago in The Bathroom Reader. According to that, spinach was chosen because of an error. A German chemist, Erich von Wolf, discovered how much iron was in spinach - 3.5 mg per 100g. However, when he wrote his findings, he placed the decimal one spot over and people thought that spinach contained 35 mg per 100g. When Popeye was created, the writers used spinach as his "superfood" because of its supposed high iron content. In reality, Popeye's superfood could have been beets or cabbage or any other green, leafy vegetable as spinach isn't really any better than other green leafy veggies.
But then I figured, "Hey, I read that 20 years ago, I should double check and find some sources, just in case."
According to this article (http://www.wired.com/2012/09/opinion-errors-knowledge-crowdfixing )from Wired magazine a few years ago, a scientist wrote a paper in 1980 that restated the story. In the article, he mentions that in 2009, another paper (https://web.archive.org/web/20141228033844/http://www.bestthinking.com:80/articles/science/chemistry/biochemistry/the-spinach-popeye-iron-decimal-error-myth-is-finally-busted )was written that traced the origin of the story. The author of the 1980 paper was unsure of the source of the story, being so long ago. The 2009 author found another professor had talked about the misplaced decimal in 1973 and thanked another professor (whom couldn't be found) for this information in a 1977 letter.
Long story short, the real value of iron in spinach was known by 1892 and the US government was publishing information about it by 1907 so writers of Popeye would have known about it before they started.
This article (https://www.neatorama.com/2015/10/01/Popeye-and-the-Great-Spinach-Myth/ ) claims that the US government got Popeye to eat spinach in the 1930s as a way to encourage Americans in the Great Depression to eat spinach as both an iron-rich replacement for more expensive meat and as a canned food. It mentions that spinach became a very popular food around then. The article also pushes the same debunked story of the misplaced decimal point, so how accurate is it? This website (http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/12/popeye-facts/) mentions that Popeye didn't get strength from spinach at first, but from rubbing a Whiffle Hen. It wasn't until 1932 that Popeye began eating spinach.
I've found a couple articles that mention that spinach is becoming more popular these days, surpassing the popularity that it enjoyed in the 40's (https://wayback.archive-it.org/5923/20110903060247/http://ers.usda.gov/News/spinachcoverage.htm )and 50's (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9175-2005Mar29.html?noredirect=on ).
So what does all this mean? We can safely assume that the creator of Popeye did not choose spinach because of the German-Iron myth, at least not without knowing that it was false. The Guardian claims that he did, (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/dec/08/ec-segar-popeye-google-doodle ) but without a source, we cannot be sure that the Guardian is any more accurate than any other source. There is some evidence that Popeye didn't begin to eat spinach until 1932 and that it could have been pushed by the US government. Spinach reached it's zenith of popularity in the 40's and 50's, possibly attributed to Popeye, so it would make sense that the USDA or FDA pushed for it. Whatever the case may be, if you want to be strong to the finish, you should probably eat some sort of leafy green vegetables.
-----
From the same Reddit thread, there is a good quote about editorialising and Popeye speaking directly to kids telling them to eat their spinach cos it will make them strong is good:
From about the 1970s, there was a factoid going around - which has been repeated in a deleted comment or two here - about how there were errors in the calculation of the amount of iron in spinach, and how that error was never corrected. This, allegedly, meant that the makers of Popeye thought that spinach was an especially good source of iron and that this was the reason why Popeye eats the stuff. This factoid was very popular: it was spread by some heavy hitting medical journals, including the British Medical Journal and The Lancet. The factoid is also untrue. It appears to be based on a serious of misinterpretations and Chinese whispers, and it's been spread because skeptics enjoying having a good story to tell about why it's good to be really careful with data.
The people pushing the factoid are absolutely correct that spinach is not an especially good source of iron, but scientists did know this in the 1920s and 1930s. While there had been an error in calculations of the amount of iron in spinach in the 1870s, it had long been rectified; American government health advice of the period had more correct iron levels, and did not appear to see spinach as a meat substitute but rather as a vegetable worth eating for its vegetable-ness. Mike Sutton's paper on the myth, for example, cites a 1935 science newsletter with the title Spinach Overrated As A Source Of Iron, for example, which explicitly mentions Popeye in passing.
And it looks as if the spinach has lots of iron thing was never strongly pushed by the Popeye character in E.C. Segar's cartoon. Segar was the cartoonist who originally created Popeye as an incidental character in his long-running cartoon strip in 1929. He did not seem especially fussed about iron in the Popeye cartoons of the era according to Sutton, who claims to have read every strip of the comic from the 20s to the 30s.
Instead, Segar's motivations for having Popeye eat spinach was more of a generalised 'eat your greens, kids!' thing. Sutton, for example, reprints a 1932 Popeye cartoon where a woman sees Popeye eating raw spinach and exclaims "Good heavens! Are you a horse?!" (the implication in the cartoon being equivalent to the way that meat lovers today might call salads 'rabbit food').
Segar has Popeye reply, "Spinach is full of Vitamin A's and tha's what makes hoomans strong an' helty". Popeye's advice about the vitamin content of spinach is basically still pushed by the NHS's advisory website in the UK, so it's pretty good food advice for 1932. Sutton claims this is the first specific explanation in the comic of why Popeye eats spinach.
Sutton also provides several other examples of Popeye editorialising about the goodness of spinach, for example this from July 1931:
"Special letter to me children frens – Dear kids – the reasin why I yam so tough an’ strong is on account of I has et spinach when I was young – An if you youngstirs wants to be helty like me ya got to eat yer weeds like yer maw sez – yers trulie, Popeye."
Laura Lovett argues that there was something of a crisis of child malnutrition in the early 20th century, and that Popeye's food advice was made with this crisis very clearly in mind. A report in 1907 had found that about a quarter of children were underfed; a separate report found that over half of African-American children in Mississippi in the 1920s were malnourished. This was a big deal in the American press at the time - Lovett claims there were over 50 articles about this in 1922 alone. The 1920s was also an era where there were increasing efforts at educating people about things like vitamins and what proper nutrition consisted of; it was in this era, according to Lovett, when the catchphrase "eat your vegetables, there are children starving in [insert country here]" began to be used as a public health message. So it was unsurprising, in this context, that E.C. Segar would have gotten Popeye to eat spinach - someone who reads the papers likely would have been aware that kids needed more encouragement to eat 'good' food.
As to why it was spinach and not beets, Sutton doesn't say. Personally, I reckon that the choice of spinach was largely a literary device to pick a single vegetable and stick with it - "Popeye eats spinach" is clearly more memorable than "Popeye eats his veggies" would have been.
It might be that the animated cartoon series about Popeye, which started from 1933, spread myths about the iron levels of spinach later on. It could have been something in the animated series that made the writer of the 1935 science newsletter mentioned above feel the need to correct the record. But in the original cartoon strip by Segar, Popeye's reasoning seems to have been quite sensible advice about spinach having good levels of vitamins.
Sources: I think I tracked down the academic paper that I suspect most of the journalistic pieces /u/ivymikey linked to are based off, a 2010 paper by Mike Sutton in the Internet Journal of Criminology. There's also a paper by Ole Bjorn Rekdal in Social Studies Of Science which largely contextualises the Sutton paper, but does so quite well, and an article by Laura Lovett from 2005 that contextualises Popeye's food advice in terms of issues with child malnutrition in the 1920s.
Ethical & Legal Issues - Habits and Target's Pregnancy Predictors
Relevant Criteria/Key Knowledge
- the way media is used by globalised media institutions, governments and the individual
- ethical and legal issues in the production, distribution, consumption and reception of media products
- media language.
Data Harvesting & Data Mining
Ethics surrounding data mining and harvesting is a gray area. Ethical implications for businesses using data mining different from legal implications. Performing a theft is illegal but thinking of trying to perform a theft could be claimed to be unethical.The concerns amongst the public, therefore, is that when companies even attempt to use their shopping information or other data to target them back with more products, they consider it unethical.
The process and technology can’t be considered to just be good or bad, since it has many useful advantages for the public good too.
Habits
So what’s the thinking behind this? Essentially, a Duke University study in the US estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day.
Ann Graybiel, an MIT neuroscientist, began exploring habit behavior by putting rats with electrodes on their heads into a T-shaped maze with chocolate at one end. Rats initially appeared to wander aimlessly, able to smell the chocolate, but unable to find it. There was no pattern in the rat’s movements and no indication it was working hard to find the treat.
The probes on the rats’ heads, however, showed that whilst they were walking through the maze, their brains were working furiously. Every time they scratched at, or sniffed, a wall, the neurosensors inside the animals’ heads exploded with activity.
The rats moved through the maze quicker and quicker, able to quickly find their way to the chocolate, the more times they completed it. However, at the same time, their brain activity decreased. As their path to the chocolate became more and more automatic, as it became a habit, the rats started thinking less and less.
The process in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine is called “chunking”. There are dozens of behavioral chunks we rely on every day and left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any repeated behavior into a habit, because habits allow our brains to conserve effort.
But conserving mental energy is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment we might fail to notice something important. So we’ve devised a clever system to determine when to let a habit take over. It’s something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or ends – and it helps to explain why habits are so difficult to change once they’re formed, despite our best intentions.
What Graybiel at MIT found was that as the ability to navigate the maze became habitual, there were two spikes in the rats’ brain activity: once at the beginning of the maze, and once at the end. Those spikes showed when the rats’ brains were fully engaged and the dip in neural activity between the spikes showed when the habit took over.
The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First there is a cue, a trigger that tells the brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical, mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps the brain to figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop (trigger, routine, reward) becomes more and more automatic. Neurological studies have revealed that some triggers can span just a fraction of a second.
So how does this apply to shopping? It is very difficult to break a habit. People will shop at the same shops and buy the same brands because that’s what they’ve always done and that’s that. Target, in the example below, realized that if they waited for people to have a baby and then tried to market baby items, such as nappies, etc. to new mums, it would be ineffective, because most of these items would be bought in preparation for the baby, not after it had arrived and they would be bought from the same places using the same brands. Target set about trying to combat this.
Target and Pregnant Women
Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy.
Target, essentially, has figured out how to data mine its way into your womb to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying nappies.
Andrew Pole had just started working for Target as a statistician in 2002 when two colleagues from the marketing department asked him, “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?”
The answer was yes.
Initially, Andrew Pole’s job was more simple: find out which families have children and then send them catalogues that feature toys before Christmas. Look for shoppers who buy new swimsuits in Spring and then send coupons for sunscreen at the start of Summer and then diet books at the start of Winter.
But the biggest job Pole had was to identify moments in shoppers’ spending habits that were flexible and figure out from there what coupons and catalogues would get them spending in new ways…to break old habits essentially.
A UCLA professor, Alan Andreasen, and his researchers in the 1980s discovered that most people habitually buy many items, such as toothpaste, coffee, etc. making it hard for marketers to get new products noticed. What the researchers did notice however, was that people’s shopping habits became flexible when they were going through a major life event such as buying a new house, getting married, getting divorced, or having a baby.
New parents’ shopping habits, they discovered, are more flexible at that time than at almost any other time in their adult lives. If companies could identify when their shoppers were pregnant, rather than waiting until after the baby had arrived, they could potentially earn millions.
So Pole analysed data, looking at items that were bought, and determined what they called “pregnancy prediction” scores. Narrowing down his study to around 25 particular products when bought in conjunction with each other, he was able to not only determine if a shopper was pregnant, but also estimate their due date so that Target could send them coupons timed to specific stages of the pregnancy.
The analysis behind it was this: if a shopper bought, in March, cocoa-butter lotion, zinc and magnesium tablets, a bright blue rug and a handbag large enough to double as a nappie back, they could estimate with around 87% certainty, that the shopper was pregnant and expecting in late August. Due to Target having this shopper’s Guest ID number along with important data about her shopping habits stored in their database, they also knew how to trigger the shopper’s habits: they knew if they sent her an email coupon, she would most likely make a purchase online. They knew if they sent her an advertisement in the mail on Friday, she often went to the store on Saturday mornings, so she would be likely to use that coupon and buy more items.
So Pole applied his program to all of their female shoppers stored in the Target database, and soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. If they could entice those women or their husbands to visit Target for baby-related products, they could then use their understanding of trigger,routine, reward habits to push them to also buy groceries, bathing suits, clothes, toys, etc. whilst they were there, thus targeting the shoppers when their habits were most flexible and potentially creating new habits that would keep them coming back to Target.
Pole said, “If we send someone a catalogue that says, “Congratulations on your first child!”, and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable. We are very conservative about compliance with privacy laws, but even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”
A year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into Target near Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was angry because coupons had been sent to his teenage daughter who was still in high school, offering discounts on baby clothes and cribs. The father was outraged because he felt Target was encouraging his daughter to get pregnant.
The manager called the man to apologise a few days later only to have the father apologise to him instead. He had since discovered that his teenage daughter was in fact pregnant and was due in a few months’ time. Pole’s pregnancy-prediction model had discovered the teenage girl’s pregnancy before her father had even found out.
When this story got out, people were upset. So Target got sneakier. The company created personalized booklets for customers. Instead of sending someone with a high pregnancy score a booklet of just baby items, they mixed the booklets up with items they knew the expectant mother would never buy: they would put an ad for a lawnmower next to an ad for nappies. An ad for wineglasses next to an ad for baby clothes. This was designed to give the impression that all the products were chosen by chance. Target had discovered that as long as a pregnant woman doesn’t think she’s being spied on, she’ll use the coupons, as she’ll just assume that everybody in her street got the same book of coupons. A Target employee stated that, “as long as we don’t spook them, it works.”
Practice Question
Describe an ethical and/or legal issue arising from media institutions harvesting and selling an individual’s personal information. (5 marks)
Sample Answer
Whilst it could be argued that the shopping chain, Target, aren’t necessarily a media institution, their use of marketing and market research, their online shopping platforms and the mass distribution of their marketing coupons and catalogues, means that they are essentially distributing media product to a wide and varied audience. According to laboratory research conducted by Ann Griebel at MIT on rats, it was established that once habits are formed, brain activity tends to drop considerably, meaning that habits are not only hard to break, but also good for marketers to establish themselves as part of. In addition to this, according to a UCLA study conducted in the 1980s, people’s shopping habits are far more flexible during times of great change, such as getting married or having a baby.
With the knowledge of these two studies, Target employed a statistician in 2002 to analyse shopping data of their own customers to determine to an 87% certainty which of their customers were pregnant. They were then able to send coupons and catalogues promoting baby-related products to customers at a time when their shopping habits were most in flux.
An ethical consideration arose from this, when a teenage high school student had been searching online for baby products and was sent catalogues and vouchers for cribs, baby clothes, etc. Her father angrily complained, accusing Target of encouraging teen pregnancy, only to later discover that his daughter was already pregnant and Target’s analytical “pregnancy predictor” had found out about his daughter’s pregnancy before he had.
This situation, once public, caused outrage and created a significant backlash for Target, even though they were not on-selling the data to other companies. Companies like Google, however, who are far more aggressive with their data mining and harvesting, openly admit to selling mined data about users of their browsers, phones, apps, etc. so that advertisers can directly target them. The question has arisen, if Target, through the creation of a statistical pregnancy predictor was able to gather so much data about its users, it raises the question, how much actual information by larger conglomerates such as Google who now essentially have recording devices in people’s homes via Google Home, Alexa, etc. is being mined and sold.
Resources
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aleksandr-kogan-the-link-between-cambridge-analytica-and-facebook-60-minutes/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#2609a8676668
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
http://blog.sollers.edu/data-science/ethical-implications-of-data-mining
Ethics surrounding data mining and harvesting is a gray area. Ethical implications for businesses using data mining different from legal implications. Performing a theft is illegal but thinking of trying to perform a theft could be claimed to be unethical.The concerns amongst the public, therefore, is that when companies even attempt to use their shopping information or other data to target them back with more products, they consider it unethical.
The process and technology can’t be considered to just be good or bad, since it has many useful advantages for the public good too.
Habits
So what’s the thinking behind this? Essentially, a Duke University study in the US estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day.
Ann Graybiel, an MIT neuroscientist, began exploring habit behavior by putting rats with electrodes on their heads into a T-shaped maze with chocolate at one end. Rats initially appeared to wander aimlessly, able to smell the chocolate, but unable to find it. There was no pattern in the rat’s movements and no indication it was working hard to find the treat.
The probes on the rats’ heads, however, showed that whilst they were walking through the maze, their brains were working furiously. Every time they scratched at, or sniffed, a wall, the neurosensors inside the animals’ heads exploded with activity.
The rats moved through the maze quicker and quicker, able to quickly find their way to the chocolate, the more times they completed it. However, at the same time, their brain activity decreased. As their path to the chocolate became more and more automatic, as it became a habit, the rats started thinking less and less.
The process in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine is called “chunking”. There are dozens of behavioral chunks we rely on every day and left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any repeated behavior into a habit, because habits allow our brains to conserve effort.
But conserving mental energy is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment we might fail to notice something important. So we’ve devised a clever system to determine when to let a habit take over. It’s something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or ends – and it helps to explain why habits are so difficult to change once they’re formed, despite our best intentions.
What Graybiel at MIT found was that as the ability to navigate the maze became habitual, there were two spikes in the rats’ brain activity: once at the beginning of the maze, and once at the end. Those spikes showed when the rats’ brains were fully engaged and the dip in neural activity between the spikes showed when the habit took over.
The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First there is a cue, a trigger that tells the brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical, mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps the brain to figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop (trigger, routine, reward) becomes more and more automatic. Neurological studies have revealed that some triggers can span just a fraction of a second.
So how does this apply to shopping? It is very difficult to break a habit. People will shop at the same shops and buy the same brands because that’s what they’ve always done and that’s that. Target, in the example below, realized that if they waited for people to have a baby and then tried to market baby items, such as nappies, etc. to new mums, it would be ineffective, because most of these items would be bought in preparation for the baby, not after it had arrived and they would be bought from the same places using the same brands. Target set about trying to combat this.
Target and Pregnant Women
Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy.
Target, essentially, has figured out how to data mine its way into your womb to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying nappies.
Andrew Pole had just started working for Target as a statistician in 2002 when two colleagues from the marketing department asked him, “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?”
The answer was yes.
Initially, Andrew Pole’s job was more simple: find out which families have children and then send them catalogues that feature toys before Christmas. Look for shoppers who buy new swimsuits in Spring and then send coupons for sunscreen at the start of Summer and then diet books at the start of Winter.
But the biggest job Pole had was to identify moments in shoppers’ spending habits that were flexible and figure out from there what coupons and catalogues would get them spending in new ways…to break old habits essentially.
A UCLA professor, Alan Andreasen, and his researchers in the 1980s discovered that most people habitually buy many items, such as toothpaste, coffee, etc. making it hard for marketers to get new products noticed. What the researchers did notice however, was that people’s shopping habits became flexible when they were going through a major life event such as buying a new house, getting married, getting divorced, or having a baby.
New parents’ shopping habits, they discovered, are more flexible at that time than at almost any other time in their adult lives. If companies could identify when their shoppers were pregnant, rather than waiting until after the baby had arrived, they could potentially earn millions.
So Pole analysed data, looking at items that were bought, and determined what they called “pregnancy prediction” scores. Narrowing down his study to around 25 particular products when bought in conjunction with each other, he was able to not only determine if a shopper was pregnant, but also estimate their due date so that Target could send them coupons timed to specific stages of the pregnancy.
The analysis behind it was this: if a shopper bought, in March, cocoa-butter lotion, zinc and magnesium tablets, a bright blue rug and a handbag large enough to double as a nappie back, they could estimate with around 87% certainty, that the shopper was pregnant and expecting in late August. Due to Target having this shopper’s Guest ID number along with important data about her shopping habits stored in their database, they also knew how to trigger the shopper’s habits: they knew if they sent her an email coupon, she would most likely make a purchase online. They knew if they sent her an advertisement in the mail on Friday, she often went to the store on Saturday mornings, so she would be likely to use that coupon and buy more items.
So Pole applied his program to all of their female shoppers stored in the Target database, and soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. If they could entice those women or their husbands to visit Target for baby-related products, they could then use their understanding of trigger,routine, reward habits to push them to also buy groceries, bathing suits, clothes, toys, etc. whilst they were there, thus targeting the shoppers when their habits were most flexible and potentially creating new habits that would keep them coming back to Target.
Pole said, “If we send someone a catalogue that says, “Congratulations on your first child!”, and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable. We are very conservative about compliance with privacy laws, but even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”
A year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into Target near Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was angry because coupons had been sent to his teenage daughter who was still in high school, offering discounts on baby clothes and cribs. The father was outraged because he felt Target was encouraging his daughter to get pregnant.
The manager called the man to apologise a few days later only to have the father apologise to him instead. He had since discovered that his teenage daughter was in fact pregnant and was due in a few months’ time. Pole’s pregnancy-prediction model had discovered the teenage girl’s pregnancy before her father had even found out.
When this story got out, people were upset. So Target got sneakier. The company created personalized booklets for customers. Instead of sending someone with a high pregnancy score a booklet of just baby items, they mixed the booklets up with items they knew the expectant mother would never buy: they would put an ad for a lawnmower next to an ad for nappies. An ad for wineglasses next to an ad for baby clothes. This was designed to give the impression that all the products were chosen by chance. Target had discovered that as long as a pregnant woman doesn’t think she’s being spied on, she’ll use the coupons, as she’ll just assume that everybody in her street got the same book of coupons. A Target employee stated that, “as long as we don’t spook them, it works.”
Practice Question
Describe an ethical and/or legal issue arising from media institutions harvesting and selling an individual’s personal information. (5 marks)
Sample Answer
Whilst it could be argued that the shopping chain, Target, aren’t necessarily a media institution, their use of marketing and market research, their online shopping platforms and the mass distribution of their marketing coupons and catalogues, means that they are essentially distributing media product to a wide and varied audience. According to laboratory research conducted by Ann Griebel at MIT on rats, it was established that once habits are formed, brain activity tends to drop considerably, meaning that habits are not only hard to break, but also good for marketers to establish themselves as part of. In addition to this, according to a UCLA study conducted in the 1980s, people’s shopping habits are far more flexible during times of great change, such as getting married or having a baby.
With the knowledge of these two studies, Target employed a statistician in 2002 to analyse shopping data of their own customers to determine to an 87% certainty which of their customers were pregnant. They were then able to send coupons and catalogues promoting baby-related products to customers at a time when their shopping habits were most in flux.
An ethical consideration arose from this, when a teenage high school student had been searching online for baby products and was sent catalogues and vouchers for cribs, baby clothes, etc. Her father angrily complained, accusing Target of encouraging teen pregnancy, only to later discover that his daughter was already pregnant and Target’s analytical “pregnancy predictor” had found out about his daughter’s pregnancy before he had.
This situation, once public, caused outrage and created a significant backlash for Target, even though they were not on-selling the data to other companies. Companies like Google, however, who are far more aggressive with their data mining and harvesting, openly admit to selling mined data about users of their browsers, phones, apps, etc. so that advertisers can directly target them. The question has arisen, if Target, through the creation of a statistical pregnancy predictor was able to gather so much data about its users, it raises the question, how much actual information by larger conglomerates such as Google who now essentially have recording devices in people’s homes via Google Home, Alexa, etc. is being mined and sold.
Resources
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aleksandr-kogan-the-link-between-cambridge-analytica-and-facebook-60-minutes/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#2609a8676668
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
http://blog.sollers.edu/data-science/ethical-implications-of-data-mining
Media Production Process
Practice Question:
Explain how feedback processes used during post-production helped you refine your media product. (6 marks)
Sample Answer:
As part of the post-production process for my narrative fictional film, audience feedback was sought from both my target demographic and indeed a broader range of audience members. The feedback processes used included: rough cut screenings, surveys, one-on-one discussions/interviews and email feedback from uploaded links. The intention from seeking this feedback was to ascertain both the strengths and weaknesses of my product at those moments in time and, thus, ensure that my finished product was as polished, sophisticated and professional as possible.
As a result of consultation with my target audience, multiple people suggested that the diegetic sound, especially dialogue, was distracting from the success of the product, due to noise, distortion and uneven sound levels captured during the recording process.
In response to this, I was able to export all sound files from my film product and import them into the sound application Audacity. Using Audacity, I was able to use the Noise Removal filters. This aided in successfully removing all of the noise and distortion that existed in my film product.
I was also able to use the Adobe Premiere Pro Adaptive Noise Reduction filters and the Multi-Band Compressors to normalize the audio of the entire product, meaning that fluctuating noise levels were removed and the entire sound tracks of my film product consistently hovered between the broadcast quality levels of -6db and -12db.
Following this, further feedback was sought from audience members and it was advised multiple times that the now lack of atmospheric diegetic sounds added an artificial quality to my film and affected the audience engagement and immersion in my product. In response, I used an H5 Zoom Audio Recorder, to then record diegetic foley sound effects and atmospheric diegetic sounds, to then apply to the final sound mix of my product. This assisted in creating clean audio tracks without noise and distortion whilst the foley sounds and atmospheric sounds in the sound mix created a realistic and immersive environment and added a professional sophistication to my final product.
Explain how feedback processes used during post-production helped you refine your media product. (6 marks)
Sample Answer:
As part of the post-production process for my narrative fictional film, audience feedback was sought from both my target demographic and indeed a broader range of audience members. The feedback processes used included: rough cut screenings, surveys, one-on-one discussions/interviews and email feedback from uploaded links. The intention from seeking this feedback was to ascertain both the strengths and weaknesses of my product at those moments in time and, thus, ensure that my finished product was as polished, sophisticated and professional as possible.
As a result of consultation with my target audience, multiple people suggested that the diegetic sound, especially dialogue, was distracting from the success of the product, due to noise, distortion and uneven sound levels captured during the recording process.
In response to this, I was able to export all sound files from my film product and import them into the sound application Audacity. Using Audacity, I was able to use the Noise Removal filters. This aided in successfully removing all of the noise and distortion that existed in my film product.
I was also able to use the Adobe Premiere Pro Adaptive Noise Reduction filters and the Multi-Band Compressors to normalize the audio of the entire product, meaning that fluctuating noise levels were removed and the entire sound tracks of my film product consistently hovered between the broadcast quality levels of -6db and -12db.
Following this, further feedback was sought from audience members and it was advised multiple times that the now lack of atmospheric diegetic sounds added an artificial quality to my film and affected the audience engagement and immersion in my product. In response, I used an H5 Zoom Audio Recorder, to then record diegetic foley sound effects and atmospheric diegetic sounds, to then apply to the final sound mix of my product. This assisted in creating clean audio tracks without noise and distortion whilst the foley sounds and atmospheric sounds in the sound mix created a realistic and immersive environment and added a professional sophistication to my final product.