Notifications and Pattern Recognition.

I’m obsessed with narrative, so it’s unlikely anyone else thinks this way - but as location based social tools, and mobile status updates become more and more common, my sense of pattern recognition comes into play more and more often.

A simple example: a few weeks ago, a co-worker left the office for lunch. My phone vibrated twice while he was gone, with push notifications from Foursquare letting me know he checked in at a local indian restaurant, and then a high end local sandwich place. I wondered if the lineup had been too long at the first restaurant, or if he’d decided to pick up a sandwich because he was still hungry, etc.

It turned out that the sandwich shop sells excellent hot chocolate, something I was not aware of.

This is a silly little example, but thing about the tendency that will comes into play here - the human need to turn incomplete information into some kind of clear picture, something that supports our worldview, despite the lack of certainty inherent in these assumptions. When we aren’t around, we exist in the digital ephemera, tweets and posts and status updates and notifications. This collected information is always an incomplete picture, and yet it offers enough that assumptions are made. The next meaningful step in marketing might not be analysis and interpretation of this information, but instead hijacking the tendency to interpret, and using it to lead people toward assumptions that drive desired behaviour.

Imagine ‘renting’ the presence of a person online. Not sponsored tweets or posts, but acutally paying someone to ‘drive’ their established profiles, checking in at locations, mentioning behaviours (but not specific brands) and generally establishing the lifestyle and brand associations of potential customers, waiting for them to make the final connection to the product themselves. Would this work around government rules regarding disclosure? Would it be feasible for government regulators to prove otherwise?

This sound sinister, but it’s not much more than using game mechanics to drive behaviour (and a slight hint of the hyperreal). And because it’s based on incomplete intepretation, the argument can be made than anyone influenced is doing it to themselves. So do we worry about trusting each other, or about trusting ourselves to only identify valid patterns?