While the Super Bowl may be over, the high-cost television advertising that accompanied it is back once more with the start of the Olympics. I’m not much of a TV guy, but it was hard to miss one particular ad that’s sent large ripples across social media: Coca-Cola’s newest commercial, “It’s Beautiful.” The ad went viral on Facebook and Twitter during and after the Super Bowl for its musical choice of “America the Beautiful” sung in a variety of languages, and I have to guess I’m not the only college student who found it repeatedly popping up on his news feed for days.
The typical series of events for nontraditional ads then followed the progression ad executives now surely predict: Social media broke out in waves of criticism from more traditional viewers. A backlash against these first waves from a far larger number of viewers then followed, and soon, the ad had its own articles in Time, Huffington Post and other publications. In fact, you now have to watch an ad in order to get to Coca-Cola’s ad on USA Today’s website — how’s that for successful advertising?
This vision of America is certainly striking, but I believe what followed it tells us far more about our society: namely, about the connection between our growing cultural fragmentation and our technology.
Let’s talk about one typical hour any college student (including myself) could spend on the internet. He opens his internet browser and brings up Facebook without much thought to check for notifications. While he’s there, he unfriends that guy who constantly posts about his hyper-conservative or hyper-liberal values (you choose) and then likes The Daily Show, seeing that 82 of his friends have already done the same. Moving along, he glances through Netflix’s user recommended movies for something to watch later while putting on Pandora for some background music, liking certain songs as he goes so it knows his tastes.
In all of these online spaces, the internet creates personalized e-comfort zones for each one of us. And on the surface, this makes sense: Who doesn’t want to be surrounded by like-minded people and enjoy finely honed content? But the algorithms that tailor our internet experience to what we routinely enjoy and who we routinely interact with have a social cost: they insulate us from viewpoints that challenge us and entrench the opinions we already have. It’s what’s commonly called the echo chamber effect.
If you feel offended by Fox News commentator Todd Starnes’ Feb. 2 tweet — “So was Coca-Cola saying America is beautiful because new immigrants don’t learn to speak English?” — your Facebook news feed can tell you you’re not alone. But neither is Todd Starnes, who enjoyed 141 retweets and 93 favorites and surely felt vindicated by this.
As each of us wades deeper into our personalized online communities, we move with growing confidence, but we may also be moving farther from the understanding and compromise that will push our human communities forward.
