... the random blips of an invisible scribe. I've never even tried to find advertisers for this site, but I've heard that I'm supposed to be "monetizing" it or something.
But the relentless seepage of advertising into our lives is something to be aware, and cautious of. This recent article in the NYT reviews the book “The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture” (Counterpoint, $26). Perhaps the most compelling argument they proffer is how many of us not only consume the advertising, we live it -- speaking in tongues with the Starbucks barista, reworking advertising in personal homages, transforming it into a symbol (Mentos, Rick Astley):
YouTube, founded in 2005, follows in the tradition of exchanging something of value for audience attention. The authors say it is revolutionizing marketing by enabling “democratized ad messaging.” Rather than being the passive recipients of sales pitches from advertisers accompanied by entertainment or information, consumers can now create and disseminate their own entertainment and information in the form of videos.Yesterday, I was working on my computer at home, and at one point I had to delete over a dozen pop-up ads from Netflix, some debt collection agency, and some weight loss pitches from my desktop. Is there no relief from the advertising onslaught? I can only walk in the woods so much...
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2 comments:
One of the advantages of the web is to allow people to exercise their free speech and put up their own creations. I am not sure what the problem is with people posting their own entertainment and information on youtube.
That said, ad-driven sites can be annoying. I find that Firefox is pretty good at stopping popup ads and it has plugins that will remove non-popup ads and even turn off flash on pages.
I have no problem with people creating content off web material, and posting it online. What I do wonder about is the increasingly commercial nature of the content we all play with...
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