Charlie Stross ranting about attention and advertising. :)

Udhay

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2006/01/14/#attention-1

On the attention economy

Irritable? Easily distracted? Have difficulty focussing on written text
for long enough to read more than a sentence? Welcome to the club.

According to some researchers, we are exposed to up to 3500
advertisements per day by way of television, internet, radio, shop
windows, buses, and other pervasive display media. (And somehow I don't
think they're counting the 400-600 spam emails that end up in my Junk
folder every day, either.) This cognitive overload is the end product
of an arms race between advertisers (who want to buy a share of our
attention) and their target audience (those of us with attention to
spare). Advertisements are distracting nuisances most of the time,
unless you're specifically looking for something -- say, you want to
buy a camcorder so you buy a camcorder magazine and comb through the
reviews and ads. We therefore screen them out. Advertisers in turn
resort to more and more eye-catching methods in an attempt to get our
attention.

Personally, I don't like advertisements. I don't like it when someone
tries to sell me something I don't need by hinting that I am socially
inadequate if I don't own it. I don't like it when insurance companies
or lenders try to sell me insurance or loans by playing on fears of
financial insecurity. I really hate telesales: telesales calls are like
someone standing outside your front door and ringing the bell until you
go to the door to find out what's causing the racket, then exhorting
you through a megaphone. Spam is even worse, mostly because the content
is either incomprehensible, revolting, or fraudulent. And as the spam
and telesales problem gets worse I'm gradually finding that my
attitudes are hardening -- not just against spammers and telesales
firms, but against all advertisers, because they merely represent
different points on the same slippery slope.

They all nag for my attention -- attention which is not freely given
except when I deliberately go looking for a particular product or type
of product. And it occurs to me to wonder where it's all going to end.
Spam filtering tools block the most obviously mechanized mass-mailings,
so spammers resort to more complex tools that try to personalize their
pitch; ultimately the job of separating spam from real communication is
Turing-complete -- you'd need a human-equivalent AI to do it properly,
and by the time we get there the spammers will probably be using AIs of
their own to outwit our personal secretary bots.

You can try to get away from ads on TV by switching to watching only
DVDs or downloads, but this stops working when the media conglomerates
realize that the DVD purchasers are a captive audience for secondary
content on their disks. You can render yourself less vulnerable to
telesales by using the Telephone Preference Service statutory list, or
by using an answering machine, but the former only weeds out the
better-socialized telesales outfits (scammers don't bother with it)
while the latter reduces the usefulness of the communications device.
Usenet got overrun by spam so lots of us switched to weblogs; which was
fine until the blog spammers arrived. Instant messaging? SMS texting?
Hello IM spambots and spimmers. Try to escape by playing a computer
game and some asshole in marketing is going to realize that there's
prize real estate in their MMORPG and start selling advertising
billboards in Middle Earth. Even going for a walk in the country is no
guarantee of safety, from the posters gummed to the walls of rotting
trailers parked in fields, to the skywriting on the clouds overhead.

In the short term we may be able to build advertising censorware into
our glasses. But it's still only a partial solution to the blight.

About the only really advertising-proof entertainment media are the
19th century hold-overs: theatre, opera, novels. (And maybe live music
events at venues too small and primitive to have been nobbled by the
likes of ClearChannel.) Get rid of electricity and most of the tools
the advertisers rely on stop working. Maybe that's the way forward.

Meanwhile, we have a terminally fragmenting society, self-medicating
through alcohol and other drugs, that is losing the ability to
discriminate between trivia and important issues -- largely because of
the way news has becoming a marketing vehicle for advertising eyeballs,
the consumer society is driven by fear and insecurity rather than the
meeting of actual needs, and we're growing so used to receiving
information in ten second long compressed bursts that we can't read
books any more.

Ban the advertising industry. Ban it now, before it's too late.

(This rant brought to you on the back of nearly 500 spams and just two
meaningful messages in a 24 hour period, to a primary mail address I've
maintained for just 5 months short of a decade and which I may have to
abandon shortly because, unfortunately, it's no good being bloody
minded: the bastards have won.) 


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