I do sort of see the decrease of control over advertising as terrifying. After all, they are gathering data on us without our permission, shoving ads in our feeds for shit we don't want and ideas we shouldn't want. But, the thing is, this easy conveyance of information is a double-edged sword.
For, this conveyance of information can also be used against those in power. It can let anti-corporate campaigns get huge amounts of buzz for anticorporate campaigns in cases like the Occupy movement, or the movement to kill SOPA. And it also enhances the Streisand Effect, IE, if a corporation tries to take something down, inevitably far more people are going to watch it.
This happened most certainly with the film (Coming out this Friday at the Loft) known as Escape From Tomorrow, shot entirely at Disneyland and Disney World. The fact that it was flipping the bird at Disney and the fact that people all thought it was inevitably going to be taken down by corporate lawyers was likely what gave it so much buzz and hype, dending a lot of people to see it.
And even by looking on "Knwo Your Meme", you'll see a whole bunch of memes taking corporate ad campaigns to the domains of parody and mockery, articles on Cracked listing various corporate marketing transgressions, lies and cruelties, and posts with thousands upon thousands of notes dealing with the ways corporate America manipulates America's body image.
Yes the free exchange of information in this age has increased the ease with which corporations can manipulate and push their lies on the public. But it also increases the ease with which these lies can be killed by mockery and skewering in the public discourse. In a way, it resembles the idea of "culture jamming" that was once thought to be merely a countercultural pipe-dream
Now if we could just get the terrifyingly horrible Trans Pacific Partnership to go viral like we did with SOPA...
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