A word from our sponsors
Random thoughts about communications:
The telephone was invented in 1876 and it's usually Alexander Graham Bell who gets credited with the invention. I'm sure he thought that the ability for people to communicate over long distances must have been like magic. Last year, four calls out of every five that we had at home (especially in the evening) were telemarketers trying to sell us junk we didn't want. Thank goodness for Do Not Call registers.
Fax: great idea. I'm sure the inventor thought so too. Half the fax messages we get in my office are advertisements from people we've never heard of.
Email: I started using email in the late eighties. At that time the Internet was in its infancy and it was pretty much unheard of for private individuals to have connections at home. As such, email was exclusively used for real mail. The Internet boom and the invention of the Web changed all that. These days many people get more spam than genuine email.
You see where I'm going. Every form of communication ever invented soon gets used as yet another channel for marketing and advertising, often to the point where the commercial traffic hinders the flow of real information. Some TV channels seem to use at least half the air time for advertising - five minutes of the show we're trying to watch (paying to watch, since we have cable) then five minutes of ads; rinse and repeat. Radio is the same - I sometimes have to scan through five or six music stations before I can find one that's actually playing music. Magazines often have more pages of ads than actual copy.
As soon as a new communication technology is developed, it seems to be just a matter of days before somebody figures out how to flood it with advertising. Microsoft's Windows Messenger (not MSN/.NET Messenger - that's similar but not quite the same thing) was developed to allow network administrators to broadcast important messages to the network users; it is also used to pop up adverts. The ICQ client downloads advertising graphics. A few days ago, when I was casting around to find an RSS reader, one of those I tried included a frame that was filled with advert graphics (need I say that I uninstalled it immediately).
The marketing people that jump on any new communication channel seem to think it's their right to do so. When the national do-not-call legislation came in, people like the Direct Marketing Association were sobbing about how "they wuz robbed" and how many telemarketers would be out of a job (my response: Tough!).
They say that advertising keeps the economy moving. They say that without advertising we'd be stuck with state-controlled TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, you name it.
Maybe that's true. But they way I see it, when every communication channel we have gets flooded with adverts to the point that the real messages are lost in the noise, something needs to be fixed.
The telephone was invented in 1876 and it's usually Alexander Graham Bell who gets credited with the invention. I'm sure he thought that the ability for people to communicate over long distances must have been like magic. Last year, four calls out of every five that we had at home (especially in the evening) were telemarketers trying to sell us junk we didn't want. Thank goodness for Do Not Call registers.
Fax: great idea. I'm sure the inventor thought so too. Half the fax messages we get in my office are advertisements from people we've never heard of.
Email: I started using email in the late eighties. At that time the Internet was in its infancy and it was pretty much unheard of for private individuals to have connections at home. As such, email was exclusively used for real mail. The Internet boom and the invention of the Web changed all that. These days many people get more spam than genuine email.
You see where I'm going. Every form of communication ever invented soon gets used as yet another channel for marketing and advertising, often to the point where the commercial traffic hinders the flow of real information. Some TV channels seem to use at least half the air time for advertising - five minutes of the show we're trying to watch (paying to watch, since we have cable) then five minutes of ads; rinse and repeat. Radio is the same - I sometimes have to scan through five or six music stations before I can find one that's actually playing music. Magazines often have more pages of ads than actual copy.
As soon as a new communication technology is developed, it seems to be just a matter of days before somebody figures out how to flood it with advertising. Microsoft's Windows Messenger (not MSN/.NET Messenger - that's similar but not quite the same thing) was developed to allow network administrators to broadcast important messages to the network users; it is also used to pop up adverts. The ICQ client downloads advertising graphics. A few days ago, when I was casting around to find an RSS reader, one of those I tried included a frame that was filled with advert graphics (need I say that I uninstalled it immediately).
The marketing people that jump on any new communication channel seem to think it's their right to do so. When the national do-not-call legislation came in, people like the Direct Marketing Association were sobbing about how "they wuz robbed" and how many telemarketers would be out of a job (my response: Tough!).
They say that advertising keeps the economy moving. They say that without advertising we'd be stuck with state-controlled TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, you name it.
Maybe that's true. But they way I see it, when every communication channel we have gets flooded with adverts to the point that the real messages are lost in the noise, something needs to be fixed.
Labels: Rants
posted by Pete Ford at
1:04 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home