Musings from a Millennial: Irony Comes Home to Roost
By Meghan Peterson, PhD
Recently, I read an article in Sunday, September 23 edition of The Hartford Courant about multiple organizations, including the ACLU and women’s groups, joining a lawsuit against Facebook over its advertisement targeting practices. Central to the legal challenge is the claim that Facebook permits various businesses throughout the United States to target employment ads to men, for example. Thus, if I were a male, I may see a job ad pop up on my Facebook page that would not be visible to a female Facebook user.
Initially, I was immediately struck at how un-surprised I was at reading the article. After all, Facebook, along with its other social media colleagues, has made most of its money from doing precisely that: gathering personal data from users, then subsequently utilizing that data to market specific products to specific kinds of people. If you are a Facebook user, have you ever noticed that after searching for a winter jacket on L.L. Bean, an ad for that very jacket may mystically appear on your Facebook? For me, therefore, the article was less surprising than it was bemusing and ironic. Let me explain.
I was amused at the subtle oddity contained within the article’s premise: a lawsuit brought by organizations challenging Facebook’s advertising practices on the basis that they are discriminatory against, in this case, women. Discrimination, at least as far as the law is concerned, is wrong in any form against any group. In other words, discrimination perpetrated by the state against citizens is unconstitutional, for it violates due process and equal protection under the law.
That said, what Facebook is doing (or, more accurately, allowing to occur) is a direct function of a huge theme among millennials: identity politics. Millennials love identity politics as much as we love our Starbucks dairy-free lattes and gluten-free pasta. Although identity politics (the idea of organizing politically around race, gender, or sexual orientation) took off in the 1960s and 1970s, it has bowled everything over in its path when it comes to millennial living. When I was an undergrad in college, there were clubs for every stripe and polka dot: feminist and feminist allies, LGBTQIA+ and LGBTQIA+ allies, disabled and disabled allies. When I was doing graduate work, there were classes in black queer theory, masculinit(ies), or whiteness.
Now, as a new mama of a young son, I see blatant messaging in baby books about gender, race, ethnicity, (dis)ability, and the like. As millennials, we have perfected the art of dissecting humanity to the point that unity becomes difficult at best, impossible at worst. And we have a social media megalith enabling the targeting of job ads to a specific subgroup of humanity (i.e., men). Oh, no!
What have we as millennials done? To think that a company would capitalize on the very explicit identification of human beings, as we so carefully learned to do in college, in our careers, or as we raise our children…how far of a departure is that from what we had blithely subscribed to? Not very far, I reckon.
The irony of identity political chickens is coming home to roost. Only time will tell how the coop can tolerate the divisive, truly dividing culture of our own un-doing and un-making.
