Your TV isn’t watching you

I read David Burke’s article “Your TV is watching you” with pleasure, even though he attacks my view that digital interactive television (iTV) could help promote civic participation in the UK if only we could get over the British obsession with denying individuals and groups freedom of speech on television.

Burke’s key concern over interactive TV is the legal collection of personal data and – as he sees it – the sinister profiling of individuals that this might facilitate. He thinks that democracy requires “a fierce protection of our privacy that can never make peace with something like iTV”.

Negative approval

I feel that being attacked by the British editor of Whitedot, the international campaign against television, is the sort of negative approval that reinforces the point. It’s rather like being condemned by the Countryside Alliance for not understanding their rural ways, when in fact they are really talking about opposition to the case for hunting.

Burke is particularly worried about those who might use the data, particularly right-wing public relations (PR) consultants, whose poisonous profession has the dark power to twist our minds to vote for people that David doesn’t like.

Left-wing PR consultants are probably a bad thing as well, but in the article, Burke reserves his indignation for a US Christian coalition candidate who “by combining market research with individualised messages” (i.e. personalised marketing) sent leaflets to voters that hit on precisely the issues of most concern to them. The candidate won and dislodged a liberal in a district that had “voted Democrat for the last 100 years”.

This effort was “crude”, claims Burke, who says, “think how powerful this technique would be if you could use iTV. Interactive? Yes, very! But is this democracy?”

Democracy is colour-blind

Let’s look at that argument in more detail. The Christian coalition candidate in question was engaged in:

• directly consulting people’s opinion – market research
• listening – analysing that research
• campaigning – leafleting with a targeted message
• ending a century of one-party rule

This to me sounds like an absolute triumph for democracy in that election and evidence of grave failure in previous years. For David Burke, every colour of ice cream is probably red; but democracy is colour-blind and there is nothing quite as irrational in a plural society as the complaint that ‘if only others were not such sheep (or victims of the media) they would see the world as I do’.

Democracy is a dialogue of understanding between people and their representatives. It’s hard to ascertain whether Burke’s objections rest on the fact that a candidate bothered to ask the voters what they thought, or the fact that the candidate understood what they answered and could communicate effectively to them individually how he would address their concerns.

In any case, it’s not quite as personal as it sounds. Research response rates in Burke’s leaflet example would have meant that the candidate could only have been sure of the personal opinions of a tiny fraction of the voting public. The rest would have been best estimates.

The futility of snooping

There are five reasons why David Burke’s estimate of the likely impact of iTV is misconceived.

First, European Union data protection laws make it illegal for pollsters to use political opinion data that might be inferred from people’s browsing habits online without their consent. But even if a particularly criminal media baron were to corrupt these laws to influence an election result, iTV or even TV alone would not be powerful enough to swing the vote. Moreover, no media baron (even Silvio Berlusconi) has a monopoly on every media outlet. If he tried, that baron would be caught, exposed and his political allies discredited.

Second, where TV is concerned the opinions being monitored in any such initiative would (for the vast majority of homes) belong to a family and not just an individual. The evil spin-doctor analysing the stream returns from iTV would conclude that the public are a confused mass of people with contradictory opinions, who invariably cannot be made to reconcile with a single message. Interactive ads (i-Ads), like leaflets, will be seen by groups and not just individuals.

Third, what people saw on television last night is (although clearly not for Whitedot) the stuff of social currency. We talk about programmes and adverts we like with the people we like. This is less true of political advertisements, but any personalised adverts too would carry the risk of similarly failing to attract that daily social commentary.

Moreover, genuine one-to-one marketing or inconsistencies in personalisation would always create the possibility of damaging mixed messages. It is more likely that a campaign manager would select several broadly appealing message strands and use research data to target groups rather than attempt anything really personal. Thus, personalised i-Ads would be much like opt-in direct mail – and western civilisation has survived this form of media long enough without its victims being led trance-like to subscribe to the Reader’s Digest . Burke’s fear of politicians looking into the dark recesses of our soul to manipulate us is unfounded – such action would be both illegal and impractical.

Fourth, people tend to ignore TV advertising these days. Much recent work into its declining effect shows that the majority of viewers have adopted behaviours to ignore both the media and the messages they do not care for.

Advertising, of course, still works – because advertisers are sophisticated enough to appeal to a large enough portion of the viewing audience so that the few who may be inclined to buy into a new brand of soap are tempted to do so.

The primary point here is that quite a large number of people want to buy soap. For those who have no interest in soap, no amount of sophisticated targeting, appeal to our demographics, psychographics or any other graphics is going to work. We have free wills and interactive TV is in no danger whatever of undermining that, anymore than the ‘blipverts’ of the sinister 1980s cyberpunk movie Max Headroom.

Fifth, no politician is entirely a creature of the media. Even a focus-group obsessive like Tony Blair can show his true convictions when the time is right. Quite simply, politicians are of two kinds today: those who are competent by the standards of democracy in the media age, and those who are not.

In the 20th century, a politician’s powers of oration and debate were paramount (William Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign is a classic example). Now, the soapbox is a microphone and a camera, and the audience is bigger, more critical and smarter. Under these circumstances, politicians learn new tricks, and whatever the state of technology over the last thirty years, they have usually learnt those tricks from the marketing profession whose raison d’être is persuading you that you want to listen to what they have to say. Marketing professionals are just finding their feet with iTV; politicians will follow.

Don’t ban, communicate

David Burke could usefully read John Stuart Mill’s essay on the “Law of libel and liberty of the press”. Mill argued that free speech entailed that no one could decide what opinions should be permitted and what prohibited. He wrote: “To decide what opinions shall be permitted, and what prohibited, is to choose opinions for the people: since they cannot adopt opinions that are not suffered to be presented to their minds.”

To ban any form of media is precisely a prohibition on the communication of new ideas, some of which cannot be communicated effectively to busy people by worthy tomes of balanced prose by impartial authors. Nor can any form of media replicate exactly the same diversity of publications as its predecessor technology from day one.

To ban an interactive form of media is even more destructive. The whole point of interactivity from the perspective of communications professionals is to better understand what opinions have been presented to people’s minds already, so as to better communicate the messages that will change those opinions to the ones that the communicator believes in. Its purpose is not crudely to agree with as many people as possible and hope they’ll love you for it. That kind of communication – and that sort of politics – has a deservedly short life.

Interactive TV is here to stay. In the EU, there is legislative privacy protection and most people are fairly relaxed about how companies and governments use data within that framework. Of course, the opportunities presented by new forms of mass communication are always problematic until they become the norm. This form will be no different.

David Burke is wrong. Your TV isn’t watching you, and if anything, the trend is for a shift in the balance of power towards the viewer rather than the TV service-provider and its dubious spin-doctor allies.