Abstract
A new era of online advertising has emerged, and this era has introduced Online Behavioural Advertising (OBA). OBA briefly, is advertising based on an internet user’s search history. OBA has the ability to provide internet users with products and services in which they are interested. This study was motivated by my personal experience of OBA before I even knew what it was. It is of importance to study this type of advertising as it greatly shapes the internet users’ experiences. For this study I was interested in finding out the views and responses that ten University of Johannesburg female students had towards OBA. The participants of my study were from the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Education, as they were the students I had better access to. The participants were accessed through WhatsApp messages. I conducted the interviews via WhatsApp voice and video call, Zoom, while one interview was conducted with a phone call. The study was conducted through qualitative interviews that were semi-structured. The research findings showed that most participants were worried about OBA while others were not entirely happy with it. The findings showed that OBA is addictive. One participant shared how severely her friend was addicted to shopping, ostensibly as result of receiving adverts for the type of products to which she was addicted. I also found that OBA makes the internet experience of internet users easier; some stated that it was because they could easily find the products they were interested in. Another finding was that the participants would be implementing a way of using the internet carefully because they know they are being watched. The panopticon, a concept in the theory of disciplinary power (surveillance) by Foucault, and surplus value, a theoretical framework that brings to the fore the workings of the capitalist system as posited by Marx, were of importance in this study, as they helped analyse the findings in a sociological framework. In the panopticon the prisoners were being watched all hours of the day, as articulated by Bentham. The panopticon is a useful analogy to understand the participants’ expressed willingness to be more careful of how they used the internet. They do not want some of their online personal business to be known by unknown parties. Surplus value shows us the importance of making the internet experience of internet users easier as this could drive up profits for the advertising business. These two theories brought forward the sociological significance of this study. The study showed OBA to be a problematic yet very convenient way of online advertising.
M.A. (Sociology)