Digital Media and Personalization

The rise of personalization technologies has disrupted domains ranging from political campaigns to fashion, with reverberating societal consequences. People who use digital media platforms leave behind a data trail that can be used to peer into their minds and make inferences about their psychological characteristics. These inferred psychological characteristics, in-turn, can be used to dynamically customize messages to individual users at a granular scale. Personalization technologies operate with the goal of maximizing persuasive appeal of messages by creating a psychological fit between mediated content and the characteristics of individual users. In this course, we will examine (1) the basic psychological mechanisms underlying personalization technologies, (2) the role played by big data and machine learning techniques in facilitating persuasion and (3) the ethical issues associated with the rise of modern-day personalization technologies. By combining a big data lens with socio-cognitive psychological research, we will understand how, why and when personalization technologies work. We will also spend time formulating the future of personalization technologies while considering the broader societal repercussions that might originate from their continued widespread adoption.