The Emphasis of “You” is a marketing technique employed by many major marketing programs. It is a focus placed upon the individual and how the individual interacts with technology and is empowered by it.

Websites such as a Google and Amazon focus their marketing and public image around personalization and catering to individual users. However, this apparent emphasis on “you” is a smokescreen to how these technologies pry into our privacy, collect data, and piggyback on our own contributions to the internet. This Emphasis of “You” exploits the human urge to create, connect, and build identities, and companies like Google use this quietly and subversively to harvest data and information from the individual.

The Emphasis of “You” distracts from the greater picture of what is happening because of Googlization, which is Google capitalizing on the sum total of our internet contributions. As a result, the “you” becomes a product of Google, all under the guise of self-determination.