The Social Obligations of the Cued Self in the Age of Advertising

The information age presents us with a gambit: present information transparency to level the asymmetries of information, “democratizing” the opportunities for people to act according to more informed, autonomous decisions; or to control and manipulate our inherent human vulnerabilities to further skew power towards increasing asymmetrical positive feedback loops benefitting the few. This paper examines contrasting notions of the self vis-à-vis (un)consciously curated environments as humans increasingly live in advertising-saturated environments.1