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Who are you? |
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Who are you?
Direct marketing companies have many othe ways of appropriating data bodies. Allowing form regional and national variations, data are obtained from registration cards, telephone directories, social insurance data bass, religious groups, educational institutions, trade unions, registry offices, banks and of course from the date trace left behind in digital environments, e.g. by clicking on an advertising banner. Direct marketing companies collect als this data systemtically and enhance them, i.e. they associate a range of different indicators with a person's name. Techniques used range from simple inferences ("if you are German and your name is Claudia, you are 80 % likely to be between 25 and 33 years old") to complicated data mining programmes such as  Knowledge Seeker, Enterprise Miner, or Scenario. Indicators include
postal address
sex
size of household
age group
purchasing power
neighbourhood quality
size of town
region
professional and academic titles
phone and fax numbers
e-mail address
pronness for mail-order purchasing
number of children
age of children
marital status
purchasing patterns
investment behaviour
credit status
credit history
convictions
nature of products and services purchased
many other social and economic indicators
There can be a hundred or more indicators associated to an individual's name. Direct marketing companies such as Abacus direct and Schober maintain databases that include almost everybody with a social existence. In fact, dirct marketing in increasingly becoming the modern individual's constant companion, starting from birth: in many places, new-born babies receive gift boxes with baby food, toys and other baby products - in return for their personal data.
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Automation
Automation is concerned with the application of machines to tasks once performed by humans or, increasingly, to tasks that would otherwise be impossible. Although the term mechanization is often used to refer to the simple replacement of human labor by machines,  automation generally implies the integration of machines into a self-governing system. Automation has revolutionized those areas in which it has been introduced, and there is scarcely an aspect of modern life that has been unaffected by it. Nearly all industrial installations of automation, and in particular robotics, involve a replacement of human labor by an automated system. Therefore, one of the direct effects of automation in factory operations is the dislocation of human labor from the workplace. The long-term effects of automation on employment and unemployment rates are debatable. Most studies in this area have been controversial and inconclusive. As of the early 1990s, there were fewer than 100,000 robots installed in American factories, compared with a total work force of more than 100 million persons, about 20 million of whom work in factories.
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