Read Angela's post on the Facebook terms-of-service controversy on her Shiny Door.

The recent brouhaha over Facebook's new terms of service (see Consumerist.com's "Facebook's New Terms Of Service: 'We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.'") simmered down when Facebook backed down.

But don't think that this topic of megamarketing in micromedia will go away.

Today's Wall Street Journal, in "Google to Sell Targeted Ads," tells us:

Yesterday's Washington Post riffed on the controversy over Facebook's creepy legalese that tried to own your info as if a Mormon were committing you to a celestial marriage (including the right to peddle your info to other peddlers) with Brian Solis's "Are Blogs Losing Their Authority to the Statusphere?" (Also take a look at Post columnist Rob Pegoraro's February 19 piece "Facebook Backs Into a 'Bill of Rights.'")

The implications are grave, unless you want your brain turned over to marketers, hucksters, and other profit-makers. In this faltering economy, such electronic carneys are likely to jump at the chance to make money off you whether or not you want them to.

Solis notes one report estimating that 346 million people are reading blogs globally. But hi-tech marches on, and micromedia like Facebook and Twitter are overtaking blogs, as is obvious to those millions of us who find ourselves micro-communing before we even have our morning coffee. Solis adds:

That's not necessarily news, but just wait until various peddlers intrude even more on our lives and make our buy-buy-buy approach to life even more mindless. Everything's competing so much for our attention that we could wind up paying no attention to our becoming more compliant suckers for hucksters. (Again, stating the obvious, but so what?)

Last week, Chris Crum pointed out our changing mores on Web Pro News in "Behavioral Targeting Gaining Public Acceptance."

Carneys, unscrupulous or otherwise, will be glad to hear this from Crum, who quotes a survey by Truste and adds:

Privacy advocates aren't so sanguine, as the above WSJ story on Google's targeted marketing says:

So, on the micromedia front, go ahead and take Facebook's lame "IQ Test" if you want — as long as you know that its real purpose is to extract info about you and how to contact you while charging you money for that privilege. (Read the test's fine print.)

Before Marshall McLuhan was famous, his funny, clever, and insightful October 1947 essay in Horizon, "American Advertising," and his graphic non-novel Mechanical Bride a few years later pointed out — without preachiness — the potential of the suckers' game that marketing was leading us into: limiting your choices and telling you what to buy while making you think you have more choices and are making your own decisions what to buy.

Good luck finding McLuhan's 1947 essay on the web. You can buy that issue of the British magazine Horizon online, of course (I did), or read the essay in a 1957 collection called Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America.

But I'm one of the few people marketing McLuhan's essay to you, and I won't make a penny by doing so. You may want to read it so that you can be armed — if you even want to be armed — against modern-day micro- and megamedia brainwashing aimed at your wallets.