This year, and I mean This Year, a lot of social media companies, unhappy with merely not capsizing and deflating and disappearing, are going through the unprecendented step of making themselves nuisances. From disenfranchising userbases to creating nonsense features that do nothing, to removing the publically-visible metrics that made their platforms interesting (before algorithms built digital cages so impenetrable that you need an anonymous browser to get anything useful out of them), to making themselves User Only Content, and more—the lions of yesteryear are shittier than ever, and less likely than ever to be replaced with better platforms. Let's face it: all your faved social media channels are going to hell.
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
12/10/16
Why My Attitude to Emoji Did a 180
💩
I mean, the above is basically the essence of my turnaround. For many years I was of a much different opinion about emoji – I thought they were pointless, stupid, and I would have never used one even in a T9 text. On the internet I used the voraciously, though, but they were known as 'smilies' and seemed a totally different thing – plus most of them depicted smilies electrocuting each other or shooting guns or humping or spilling beer instead of : ) or ; ) like weirdos and dummies in chats might use. I suppose it's a pointless digression, but to me smilies and emoji are conceptually different things that share a similar purpose.
I didn't think about smilies/emoji much from 2005 (when the last forum I enjoyed browsing shut down) to 2013. In that time I still considered them childish things undeserving of a serious mind, fripperies that only made the appearance of communicating anything, creating a muted shorthand for the illiterate to toy with.
Then I picked up a relatively more modern phone and starting using apps and stuff (I am a very late and reluctant adopter of social media) and I found myself using them more and more. The famous emoji 'Face with Tears of Joy' rose like a monolith, and the rest is history. Now I catch myself wanting to use emoji in Facebook, texting emoji to friends who never abandoned a distaste of them (mostly to annoy them and amuse myself), and doing wicked Snaps with emoji making half the point.
I gave in. I joined the merciless social media march. I sold my credibility and the security of being a Skeptical Person, and dove begrudgingly in. Being simultaneously out of touch and trying to decide what 'in touch enough' was for me made for some strange years, which are ongoing. There is a surreal quality to using five different apps and platforms regularly to communicate with friends. It's bizarre to me. To the old me it would have been unthinkable, a grave and simultaneously frivolous mistake, to waste my time in such a way or even to care.
But it did change. And now, instead of wondering whether to write anything at all or which word to delete, I spend actual time to throw an emoji into a text. It's both weird and funny to me. I guess it's more fun to use them, even if only in a sneering way, but they are useful to provide connotations - they can even make sarcasm fly in text form, which is actually quite an elegant solution to a real problem.
😎
I mean, the above is basically the essence of my turnaround. For many years I was of a much different opinion about emoji – I thought they were pointless, stupid, and I would have never used one even in a T9 text. On the internet I used the voraciously, though, but they were known as 'smilies' and seemed a totally different thing – plus most of them depicted smilies electrocuting each other or shooting guns or humping or spilling beer instead of : ) or ; ) like weirdos and dummies in chats might use. I suppose it's a pointless digression, but to me smilies and emoji are conceptually different things that share a similar purpose.
I didn't think about smilies/emoji much from 2005 (when the last forum I enjoyed browsing shut down) to 2013. In that time I still considered them childish things undeserving of a serious mind, fripperies that only made the appearance of communicating anything, creating a muted shorthand for the illiterate to toy with.
Then I picked up a relatively more modern phone and starting using apps and stuff (I am a very late and reluctant adopter of social media) and I found myself using them more and more. The famous emoji 'Face with Tears of Joy' rose like a monolith, and the rest is history. Now I catch myself wanting to use emoji in Facebook, texting emoji to friends who never abandoned a distaste of them (mostly to annoy them and amuse myself), and doing wicked Snaps with emoji making half the point.
I gave in. I joined the merciless social media march. I sold my credibility and the security of being a Skeptical Person, and dove begrudgingly in. Being simultaneously out of touch and trying to decide what 'in touch enough' was for me made for some strange years, which are ongoing. There is a surreal quality to using five different apps and platforms regularly to communicate with friends. It's bizarre to me. To the old me it would have been unthinkable, a grave and simultaneously frivolous mistake, to waste my time in such a way or even to care.
But it did change. And now, instead of wondering whether to write anything at all or which word to delete, I spend actual time to throw an emoji into a text. It's both weird and funny to me. I guess it's more fun to use them, even if only in a sneering way, but they are useful to provide connotations - they can even make sarcasm fly in text form, which is actually quite an elegant solution to a real problem.
😎
9/23/14
Cyber Menace
In shitty apartments all over the world, one thing is law: you get the internet and you let your friends use it( unless you are very suspicious of them; in which case, why are you hanging out with them?). You don't even need a public terminal (say, for instance, a hilarious, very poignant, and svelte circa 1998 laptop you bought from an IT guy for a bag of weed) because almost everyone carries with them an internet capable phone now. So there's no question at all that there's some kind of cyber menace... and, check this out: it has already claimed lives!
It just makes sense that in a society so ill that it sometimes creates psychiatric disorders at almost the same rate as it creates landmark celebrities, there would be a cyber element. The internet is everywhere and still spreading. Some people can't look away from it or live without it. Being without it is missing out, but being part of it is not always what you want. Some, the wild or wise, might even call the contemporary situation one involving significant levels of Cyber Menace.
It just makes sense that in a society so ill that it sometimes creates psychiatric disorders at almost the same rate as it creates landmark celebrities, there would be a cyber element. The internet is everywhere and still spreading. Some people can't look away from it or live without it. Being without it is missing out, but being part of it is not always what you want. Some, the wild or wise, might even call the contemporary situation one involving significant levels of Cyber Menace.
"This ain't your granddad's Neuromancer, kid."
Sure, it's easy to pish posh the point away by citing the unreal possibilities of the incipient cyber-era, which is so different from even what Nostradamus saw it was (due to relativistic drift and/or other variables) that contempory people are still trying to say what the hell is going on with no recognizable degree of accuracy. It's all... you know... dust in the wind kind of shit. Typos of the blogosphere business.
The internet business: the potential is awesome but the reality is also very convincing in another direction than what is classically termed hopeful. I don't really need to cite anything, I feel. Pretty much everybody has or has heard a fantastically gut-wrenching and uncomfortable internet story by this point. Facebook is turning some people into wrecks and offering hilarious insights into human nature to others. It's a fact of life, even: you play with the internet and you get burned. You get played. Or you get an okay laugh or chuckle while you shake your head. #SMGDH with a side of #LOL, please, and don't overdo it.
People's day-to-day living and actual worlds are all affected by the digital world. Well, not mine, but then again I'm a blogger and nobody cares, so I can actually sit down and look and see people get affected by the internet media they consume. It's a weird era, and unfortunately it's not always fun YouTube videos weird. I find it all very strange and I can feel its draw as much as the next human. Still, everybody should have to admit: a reality check is in order.
Beyond the hype, the laughter, the outrage, the trolling, the well animated distractions, and the jargon lie actual problems. Let's see what the impossible potential of the Cyber Menace can do about that, before we consider it a friendly necessity.
5/7/14
Death by Misclick
Have things gotten to the point where this is possible? It seems funny to me, like a bit Charlie Chaplin would have done in a silent film send-up of the Internet. It's probably not possible yet, I have to say... yet when that PR lady tweeted about AIDS her job ended and she faced the scorn of both the twittersphere and the blogoverse, not to mention the brutal comment board nebulae. Could the death of her relations with the cyber-public been caused by a simple misclick? Is it safe to laugh at her now that the dust has settled? What was her favorite album of 2011?
Here's my wild idea: she was typing out the post as some sort of perverse joke, and instead of properly screenshotting it for transmission to a few friends, she brushed the screen with her manicured pinky, inadvertently tweeting it. I know, it's so outrageous to think that someone wouldn't tweet ridiculous or hateful things that this particular example has no real value at all. Maybe it was part of a rebellious act after years of PR repression had tangled the psyche, and something offensive and sharp was needed to express frustration. A cry for help.
Well in any case it is easily possible a misclick can cost someone their job, since there are actual employers who are hysterical enough about indiscretion and deviance to fire or discipline you for shit they dig up about you on facebook, let alone the things you actually mean to showcase. This is why in real life there is the unspoken code of workplace civility, or workplace confidentiality (common in livelier, uninhibited workplaces): why people usually only express ignorant or fucked up ideas in speech, a safe distance away from recording devices, the offendable, and awkward or unexpected silences. You lose your job, next thing you know your credit is dead because you were too depressed about burning your own digital effigy to find a new job (plus the internet ruined your social credit and made you borderline unemployable, and you didn't capitalize on your pariah status), then your social life is dead because you have no money and are either couch surfing or on the street, or maybe at your parents' house. Next thing you know you're dead.
Death by misclick, but then you awaken from death as an online-only ghost, or get reincarnated as a future Social Media Expert. Really, I bet misclicks have cost a lot of people something over the years, and I'm not just talking about rounds of near-professional-level Starcraft. Of course nobody should use a misclick as an excuse, because it's a poor one, but outside of crazy hypothetical situations I am certain there is plenty of danger in them Worse on some level than a social misstep or faux pas or gauche seizure. And it's kind of crazy to think that something as small as the twitch of a finger could ruin your life, without even killing you or getting you pregnant. Or I guess that's crazy and says something about the internet era. I don't even know. I don't misclick. Not even when I post this article, or when I go most of a month without posting one. I've got to keep the reader hungry for new Publicato 'shzzt' and never admit that I am drying out, failing the exercise of writing and maybe worst of all... my faith in blogging shaken to the core.
Here's my wild idea: she was typing out the post as some sort of perverse joke, and instead of properly screenshotting it for transmission to a few friends, she brushed the screen with her manicured pinky, inadvertently tweeting it. I know, it's so outrageous to think that someone wouldn't tweet ridiculous or hateful things that this particular example has no real value at all. Maybe it was part of a rebellious act after years of PR repression had tangled the psyche, and something offensive and sharp was needed to express frustration. A cry for help.
Well in any case it is easily possible a misclick can cost someone their job, since there are actual employers who are hysterical enough about indiscretion and deviance to fire or discipline you for shit they dig up about you on facebook, let alone the things you actually mean to showcase. This is why in real life there is the unspoken code of workplace civility, or workplace confidentiality (common in livelier, uninhibited workplaces): why people usually only express ignorant or fucked up ideas in speech, a safe distance away from recording devices, the offendable, and awkward or unexpected silences. You lose your job, next thing you know your credit is dead because you were too depressed about burning your own digital effigy to find a new job (plus the internet ruined your social credit and made you borderline unemployable, and you didn't capitalize on your pariah status), then your social life is dead because you have no money and are either couch surfing or on the street, or maybe at your parents' house. Next thing you know you're dead.
Death by misclick, but then you awaken from death as an online-only ghost, or get reincarnated as a future Social Media Expert. Really, I bet misclicks have cost a lot of people something over the years, and I'm not just talking about rounds of near-professional-level Starcraft. Of course nobody should use a misclick as an excuse, because it's a poor one, but outside of crazy hypothetical situations I am certain there is plenty of danger in them Worse on some level than a social misstep or faux pas or gauche seizure. And it's kind of crazy to think that something as small as the twitch of a finger could ruin your life, without even killing you or getting you pregnant. Or I guess that's crazy and says something about the internet era. I don't even know. I don't misclick. Not even when I post this article, or when I go most of a month without posting one. I've got to keep the reader hungry for new Publicato 'shzzt' and never admit that I am drying out, failing the exercise of writing and maybe worst of all... my faith in blogging shaken to the core.
8/14/13
How Long Till Facebook Is Irrelevant: The Answer May Surprise You
Facebook's story is pretty fun to tell. Before 2006 (or somewhere around there) you couldn't sign up for Facebook without a university email address. That ended. Then the media caught on, a while later the floodgates opened, and anyone was let in at a cost to exclusivity which might have kept the social media service relevant into 2010. However, things happened as they did, because the Kings of Facebook or whatever needed a way to turn a relatively hyped, useless, hackneyed service into a dividend-paying money-printing machine. That's why your little brother, your dad, and your aunt are all Facebook Friends with you.
Anyways, people used to freely put up pictures of themselves doing drugs, copulating, as well as excreting on and variously vandalizing private property, because nobody on the service was square enough to be A) an uncool employer or B) a rat fink. Nudity was the only thing out of bounds, but nobody needed the internet for that. It was the wild west, populated by stupid university students. That phase didn't last long, but it was truly a hopeful one. It's hard to understand at this point in time because nobody does it anymore. Even Facebook's dumbest, least-University-educated users manage to post mostly PG-Employment level material. It was generally the exhibitionists and show-offs who couldn't keep their borderline activities in private memory, which is fine, because they're the same people for whom nothing is ever good enough.
Then, with the advent of a growing user base, employers took full advantage of lax privacy settings to investigate their employees and, if the optics were wrong, fire them. Facebook made some noises about privacy settings (which advertisers, PRISM et al. overrule anyway) and most people realized that, with privacy settings set properly, and a non-compromising profile picture, they wouldn't be able to get bagged. Even more people realized that, as always, nobody cares and nobody needs to know anything, and why they were on Facebook is anyone's guess. Many are still there. With employers and other nosy squares using Facebook to essentially spy on people the end had begun, and the important phase had ended.
With children, parents, nosy bosses, moralists, the uneducated, and all manner of riff-raff inhabiting Facebook, the popularity exploded and it became the thing everyone knew about (including worthless 'social media experts' on TV). It was like Twitter, briefly, but maybe even hotter. By now, nearly every Western person between the ages of 20 and 35 has a majority of friends and contacts on Facebook, with 'friends' numbering far in excess of 150. Of course, the great upsurge in popularity also meant increased scrutiny. Many people thought it was incredibly low of employers to spy on and then fire or punish employees because they were pictured drinking a beer. I agree completely. If you want to spy on an employee, check their Linked In account, because Linked In is designed for squares with no concept of the separation of life and work.
Most of the best criticism of Facebook revolved around its user base and effect on users. If you have an account, you already know. People broadcast their dimwitted political stances, their gullibility, pictures of food, and way too much information. Users also tend to only upload content that reflects positively on them and their lifestyle, making Facebook an echo chamber and also a bizarre cycle of envy and envy-prompting. Certain people, putting too much stock in their internet friendship machine, can see the smiling photographs, the tans, the significant others and the happiness of others and become incredibly lonely, sad, isolated, and even more deluded. So it can be said that the service caters first and foremost not to narcissists, but to the self-centered and potentially to the sociopath as well. In essence it can be claimed that Facebook is unhealthy, perhaps moreso than the internet.
Hell, I have not even made mention of the inherent privacy problems which provided privacy options do not solve. In essence, by ever existing on Facebook you are already compromised and every detail you edit or add thereafter goes into the vortex. The police can see everything you've ever said without your knowledge. So can any government, entity, or corporation with the stature or power to make Facebook cooperate. Not to mention anyone with a certain level of know-how can probably have that stuff you willingly shared about yourself. The craziest part is how the service has tapped into the (unconscious) human desire to share and self-promote... the disburdening is done willingly so it's not even entrapment. It's just exploitation. The old crusty man in my mind wants to say it's the fault of the user for being appallingly stupid, but the angry young man wants to blame Facebook, Inc. for just about every misery and betrayal they have wrought.
'Facebook isn't an echo chamber, and echo chamber is a nebulous term used by out-of-date critics to describe viral and meme-based behaviour', you say. I disagree, and urge you to shut up and stop being an apologist: Facebook often functions as an echo chamber devoid of consciousness or critical thought. For every stupid food picture, statement of outrage, birthday wish, and TMI infodump, there are a dozen re-shared memes, propaganda, or internet links. It's an echo chamber that shows you just what your acquaintances are wasting their time with, and invites you to also read top tens, read unsourced and biased articles, look for cute pics, and post shallow, heart-on-sleeve political and social rhetoric. Yeah, that shit's pretty awful, and in this writer's humble opinion, far worse than the self-promotion and the mindless sharing of private moments with no real purpose.
Facebook is already irrelevant: savvy people know this, hip people know this, even tweens know this. I suspect that its last year of relevance was 2010. At this point users see it as either 'Facebook!' or 'depressing friend directory', and increasingly, not even the gullible youth are excited about Facebook anymore. Some even use Twitter to engage in such discussions as #noneofmyfriendsonfacebook and to broadcast that they're getting out of the Facebook game. With the userbase growing older, lamer, and reposting more and more shitty content from the internet, and generally doing nothing important, it is no surprise that hardly anyone considers an account a meaningful or exciting thing, except for people who are promoting themselves, their business, or their art. In the end Facebook will only be useful for them, but its complete irrelevance means that there will be no further scandal because the user base is complacent and the service fulfills its duty quite well.
With a stable share of users and corporate status, it is unlikely that Facebook will disappear in less than five years. Ff a better service steals its users it may dwindle, but in Web 2.0 and beyond, computer/internet-literate users are too insignificant a group. The odds of a better service emerging are also low, since Facebook is part of the establishment and can likely take infringing parties to court and bankrupt them even with frivolous litigation. Facebook itself isn't novel enough anymore to create 'addicts' in the 2006-era sense: remaining power users are generally students, stay-at-home-parents, or retirees. With every baby picture, family portrait, and unnecessary political diatribe, the service makes itself less remarkable and more profitable... with every deleted user account, Facebook continues to hold private data in digital escrow, as if preparing for a blackmail war... with every day, as it fades into irrelevance far away from the beating heart of the internet, Facebook becomes more of a fact of the internet, here to stay and inflict social suffering on untold thousands.
Anyways, people used to freely put up pictures of themselves doing drugs, copulating, as well as excreting on and variously vandalizing private property, because nobody on the service was square enough to be A) an uncool employer or B) a rat fink. Nudity was the only thing out of bounds, but nobody needed the internet for that. It was the wild west, populated by stupid university students. That phase didn't last long, but it was truly a hopeful one. It's hard to understand at this point in time because nobody does it anymore. Even Facebook's dumbest, least-University-educated users manage to post mostly PG-Employment level material. It was generally the exhibitionists and show-offs who couldn't keep their borderline activities in private memory, which is fine, because they're the same people for whom nothing is ever good enough.
Then, with the advent of a growing user base, employers took full advantage of lax privacy settings to investigate their employees and, if the optics were wrong, fire them. Facebook made some noises about privacy settings (which advertisers, PRISM et al. overrule anyway) and most people realized that, with privacy settings set properly, and a non-compromising profile picture, they wouldn't be able to get bagged. Even more people realized that, as always, nobody cares and nobody needs to know anything, and why they were on Facebook is anyone's guess. Many are still there. With employers and other nosy squares using Facebook to essentially spy on people the end had begun, and the important phase had ended.
With children, parents, nosy bosses, moralists, the uneducated, and all manner of riff-raff inhabiting Facebook, the popularity exploded and it became the thing everyone knew about (including worthless 'social media experts' on TV). It was like Twitter, briefly, but maybe even hotter. By now, nearly every Western person between the ages of 20 and 35 has a majority of friends and contacts on Facebook, with 'friends' numbering far in excess of 150. Of course, the great upsurge in popularity also meant increased scrutiny. Many people thought it was incredibly low of employers to spy on and then fire or punish employees because they were pictured drinking a beer. I agree completely. If you want to spy on an employee, check their Linked In account, because Linked In is designed for squares with no concept of the separation of life and work.
Most of the best criticism of Facebook revolved around its user base and effect on users. If you have an account, you already know. People broadcast their dimwitted political stances, their gullibility, pictures of food, and way too much information. Users also tend to only upload content that reflects positively on them and their lifestyle, making Facebook an echo chamber and also a bizarre cycle of envy and envy-prompting. Certain people, putting too much stock in their internet friendship machine, can see the smiling photographs, the tans, the significant others and the happiness of others and become incredibly lonely, sad, isolated, and even more deluded. So it can be said that the service caters first and foremost not to narcissists, but to the self-centered and potentially to the sociopath as well. In essence it can be claimed that Facebook is unhealthy, perhaps moreso than the internet.
Hell, I have not even made mention of the inherent privacy problems which provided privacy options do not solve. In essence, by ever existing on Facebook you are already compromised and every detail you edit or add thereafter goes into the vortex. The police can see everything you've ever said without your knowledge. So can any government, entity, or corporation with the stature or power to make Facebook cooperate. Not to mention anyone with a certain level of know-how can probably have that stuff you willingly shared about yourself. The craziest part is how the service has tapped into the (unconscious) human desire to share and self-promote... the disburdening is done willingly so it's not even entrapment. It's just exploitation. The old crusty man in my mind wants to say it's the fault of the user for being appallingly stupid, but the angry young man wants to blame Facebook, Inc. for just about every misery and betrayal they have wrought.
'Facebook isn't an echo chamber, and echo chamber is a nebulous term used by out-of-date critics to describe viral and meme-based behaviour', you say. I disagree, and urge you to shut up and stop being an apologist: Facebook often functions as an echo chamber devoid of consciousness or critical thought. For every stupid food picture, statement of outrage, birthday wish, and TMI infodump, there are a dozen re-shared memes, propaganda, or internet links. It's an echo chamber that shows you just what your acquaintances are wasting their time with, and invites you to also read top tens, read unsourced and biased articles, look for cute pics, and post shallow, heart-on-sleeve political and social rhetoric. Yeah, that shit's pretty awful, and in this writer's humble opinion, far worse than the self-promotion and the mindless sharing of private moments with no real purpose.
Facebook is already irrelevant: savvy people know this, hip people know this, even tweens know this. I suspect that its last year of relevance was 2010. At this point users see it as either 'Facebook!' or 'depressing friend directory', and increasingly, not even the gullible youth are excited about Facebook anymore. Some even use Twitter to engage in such discussions as #noneofmyfriendsonfacebook and to broadcast that they're getting out of the Facebook game. With the userbase growing older, lamer, and reposting more and more shitty content from the internet, and generally doing nothing important, it is no surprise that hardly anyone considers an account a meaningful or exciting thing, except for people who are promoting themselves, their business, or their art. In the end Facebook will only be useful for them, but its complete irrelevance means that there will be no further scandal because the user base is complacent and the service fulfills its duty quite well.
With a stable share of users and corporate status, it is unlikely that Facebook will disappear in less than five years. Ff a better service steals its users it may dwindle, but in Web 2.0 and beyond, computer/internet-literate users are too insignificant a group. The odds of a better service emerging are also low, since Facebook is part of the establishment and can likely take infringing parties to court and bankrupt them even with frivolous litigation. Facebook itself isn't novel enough anymore to create 'addicts' in the 2006-era sense: remaining power users are generally students, stay-at-home-parents, or retirees. With every baby picture, family portrait, and unnecessary political diatribe, the service makes itself less remarkable and more profitable... with every deleted user account, Facebook continues to hold private data in digital escrow, as if preparing for a blackmail war... with every day, as it fades into irrelevance far away from the beating heart of the internet, Facebook becomes more of a fact of the internet, here to stay and inflict social suffering on untold thousands.
5/9/13
Has the Golden Era of Adblockers Passed?
Recently I tried to watch some online video on a television channel's website. The video applet failed to load completely and it didn't take long for me to develop the correct suspicion. I disabled my adblocker and reloaded the page. No fucking video. So I open the page in a vanilla browser and it loads, a wild contrast from what I had, up till that point, been used to. On the vanilla browser there is a banner and large square add. Then the video starts and I am subjected to extra-loud advertising, TV style, with a vengeance. In addition to the other adds. Another advertisement plays, and a third, before my content is loaded.
Adblockers, with the advent of hijacked banner ads and unscrupulous marketing, to say nothing of the paranoid or political users of the internet, are not simply a tool entitled users employ to rid themselves of annoyances. Ad-blockers are legitimately a way of keeping your computer clean, of preventing your oft-used technological distractions from compromise. The fact you don't have to watch commercials (which are basically always: manipulative, insulting, indoctrinating or some shameful combination of all three) is an added bonus to not having your internet-accessing-device fucked with.
I am not a poweruser but I've been adblocking for years - since I discovered it was possible. I understand that advertising revenue drives some smaller sites, and, yes, I'd agree they deserve their due - assuming they police their advertisements for some level of quality. Fine, whatever, have your .005 cents per impression. You deserve it, plucky little website. However, the worst offenders are often large media sites – sometimes even those which already use paywalls. Let me present a brief overview of the galloping trend of online advertising.
In the early 90's during the second wave of the internet, when things became graphical enough that advertisement in the classic sense became possible, it was largely internet entities that advertised for themselves, and certain forward looking companies often related to the tech-sector. It was a simpler time. By late 1999 basically everyone who wasn't under a rock or a dinosaur was getting into online advertisement. 'Hey, check out our website at http://www.geocities.SonnysPizza/index.htm for some coupons' and other types of hilarity abounded. Whatever, wherever you got advertised to, it took a slice of your pitiful bandwidth and generally wasted time and resources, but you had to face it. Eventually MSN Messenger (R.I.P) becomes huge, and eventually it begins to advertise to you.
Side banner; top banner; .gif flames - all of these things were familiar. Between then and now the internet has grown up and come of age to the point where a huge section of people use it. All the troglodytes, termites, attractive well-adjusted people, and infants came out of the woodwork and the internet is full of everyone now. Whatever, other people will tell you about it, and some gigantic nerd could probably make a convincingly venomous deal about it... all I'll say is it drove a wave of advertising intensity that eventually rivaled the notorious realm of television adverts.
Fucking pop-ups were one thing, but there came layers of advertising that would jump into existence around key-words. Video sidebars that glitched out your browser and had to fling their audio payloads into your ears. 'Interactive' commercials made by committees of dullards and shills. YouTube videos became clogged with side, top, and skippable pre-video advertisements for every user account considered important enough to waste your time for their profit. What was once dumb, became even dumber, amen. So it goes, right? Absolutely. Yet there were additions to your browsers that would kill all advertising.
True to form, adblockers were free. They worked, and nobody who adopted them ever looked back. Surfing without them was like going back in time. It sucked, you were exposed to all the reprehensible shit that barely existed in your ideal internet experience. Going back to ads is like hitting yourself in the face with a shoe. Beautiful adblocking programs, released by benevolent and right-minded developers, worked on classic print ads, video ads, and even ads played in video content. It is like a magic balm that drives mosquitoes far, far away. For those who use adblockers, the internet just is that much less shitty. It's less claustrophobic and it can seem like the terminal cash-in state of the world has been opposed.
So of course, it comes to an end, by hosted content ('hosting ain't free, yo') which a profitable broadcaster puts online. Until very recently I had never been blocked for anything but geographical reasons (though nationalization of the internet is another ugly recent phenomenon) but a week or two ago I was denied a show I had been following online. I imagine in a year it will be impossible to skip video-advertisements everywhere, and only the smug power users will know what to do about it. Hopefully the same people who did the good work of blocking online advertising will keep up and their programs will not lapse into irrelevance due to some frightening and monstrous online advertising epidemic.
Because what the hell? You're running a profitable business already, and why not add some more revenue? Why not even more? Why not three advertisements every five-and-a-half minutes on video content? Why not have it be 30% louder than actual content, like on TV? Who cares is the commercial is ideologically loaded or bankrupt of all value? Who cares if it's annoying? 'I like money, gentlemen, and nobody gets a free lunch!'
A browser without an adblocker is a sign of a pitiable person trapped in the commercial arena, a hopeless square, a submissive lackadaisical fuck, a worthless shit hyperbole rapist. This is one fight the internet should not lose.
Adblockers, with the advent of hijacked banner ads and unscrupulous marketing, to say nothing of the paranoid or political users of the internet, are not simply a tool entitled users employ to rid themselves of annoyances. Ad-blockers are legitimately a way of keeping your computer clean, of preventing your oft-used technological distractions from compromise. The fact you don't have to watch commercials (which are basically always: manipulative, insulting, indoctrinating or some shameful combination of all three) is an added bonus to not having your internet-accessing-device fucked with.
I am not a poweruser but I've been adblocking for years - since I discovered it was possible. I understand that advertising revenue drives some smaller sites, and, yes, I'd agree they deserve their due - assuming they police their advertisements for some level of quality. Fine, whatever, have your .005 cents per impression. You deserve it, plucky little website. However, the worst offenders are often large media sites – sometimes even those which already use paywalls. Let me present a brief overview of the galloping trend of online advertising.
In the early 90's during the second wave of the internet, when things became graphical enough that advertisement in the classic sense became possible, it was largely internet entities that advertised for themselves, and certain forward looking companies often related to the tech-sector. It was a simpler time. By late 1999 basically everyone who wasn't under a rock or a dinosaur was getting into online advertisement. 'Hey, check out our website at http://www.geocities.SonnysPizza/index.htm for some coupons' and other types of hilarity abounded. Whatever, wherever you got advertised to, it took a slice of your pitiful bandwidth and generally wasted time and resources, but you had to face it. Eventually MSN Messenger (R.I.P) becomes huge, and eventually it begins to advertise to you.
Side banner; top banner; .gif flames - all of these things were familiar. Between then and now the internet has grown up and come of age to the point where a huge section of people use it. All the troglodytes, termites, attractive well-adjusted people, and infants came out of the woodwork and the internet is full of everyone now. Whatever, other people will tell you about it, and some gigantic nerd could probably make a convincingly venomous deal about it... all I'll say is it drove a wave of advertising intensity that eventually rivaled the notorious realm of television adverts.
Fucking pop-ups were one thing, but there came layers of advertising that would jump into existence around key-words. Video sidebars that glitched out your browser and had to fling their audio payloads into your ears. 'Interactive' commercials made by committees of dullards and shills. YouTube videos became clogged with side, top, and skippable pre-video advertisements for every user account considered important enough to waste your time for their profit. What was once dumb, became even dumber, amen. So it goes, right? Absolutely. Yet there were additions to your browsers that would kill all advertising.
True to form, adblockers were free. They worked, and nobody who adopted them ever looked back. Surfing without them was like going back in time. It sucked, you were exposed to all the reprehensible shit that barely existed in your ideal internet experience. Going back to ads is like hitting yourself in the face with a shoe. Beautiful adblocking programs, released by benevolent and right-minded developers, worked on classic print ads, video ads, and even ads played in video content. It is like a magic balm that drives mosquitoes far, far away. For those who use adblockers, the internet just is that much less shitty. It's less claustrophobic and it can seem like the terminal cash-in state of the world has been opposed.
So of course, it comes to an end, by hosted content ('hosting ain't free, yo') which a profitable broadcaster puts online. Until very recently I had never been blocked for anything but geographical reasons (though nationalization of the internet is another ugly recent phenomenon) but a week or two ago I was denied a show I had been following online. I imagine in a year it will be impossible to skip video-advertisements everywhere, and only the smug power users will know what to do about it. Hopefully the same people who did the good work of blocking online advertising will keep up and their programs will not lapse into irrelevance due to some frightening and monstrous online advertising epidemic.
Because what the hell? You're running a profitable business already, and why not add some more revenue? Why not even more? Why not three advertisements every five-and-a-half minutes on video content? Why not have it be 30% louder than actual content, like on TV? Who cares is the commercial is ideologically loaded or bankrupt of all value? Who cares if it's annoying? 'I like money, gentlemen, and nobody gets a free lunch!'
A browser without an adblocker is a sign of a pitiable person trapped in the commercial arena, a hopeless square, a submissive lackadaisical fuck, a worthless shit hyperbole rapist. This is one fight the internet should not lose.
4/12/13
User Comment Rodeo: Generation Text; Its Detractors and Malcontents
A recent CBC article claims a few things so startlingly obvious that the sound of a gong ought to be looped over it. The findings demonstrated, and you might want to sit down for this one, that people who texted more (don't sweat, the breakpoint is 200 + texts) often tended to be less thoughtful than those who didn't. Also among the findings was the gem that the 200+ text club was (30%) more likely to be fixated on "wealth and image than an ethical life". Now, as unsurprising as this study's conclusions are, they are of limited truth.
Firstly, only teenagers or immature adults can actually muster up the energy to text more than 100 times a day. Yet I can be surprised by texting culture. At 15 seconds per text, 100 texts would only require a time investment of 25 minutes. Scale that any way you want, and remember that serial texters are quick, and it's easy to conclude that a serial texter can text 400+ times a day and still have lots of time left over to socialize 'face to face' (oh shit, that term is going to get worn out in the next few years). This 'texting' business, which is correctly SMSing business, has for many years now been a cultural crisis in the making. We all stepped in it with full confidence, so now we get to suffer it. Suffer the outrageous extremes of an increasingly dim and unfunny era.
You can already see what kind of User Comment Rodeo it's going to be. The best kind. Because you know the ageists, the trolls, the dickweeds, the self-described experts, the geniuses – in short the whole, illiterate, unwashed, entitled, self-satisfied mass of the public – is going to unable to prevent themselves from puking their word nonsense onto this story like tainted cocktail shrimp at a bad house party. Listen up, I know that serial texters are often total wankers. I understood years ago that they lacked the self-reflection expected of a great ape, dolphin, or crow. Don't forget that this study is biased: note that it focused on first year students. Don't buy into the hype without thinking critically about it first. First year students are so rarely aware of themselves that the study is unfair and biased. It stooped for low-hanging fruit when there are plenty of studies that can judge the adult narcissist sociopaths in business, finance, and politics.
But enough of my ado about nothing; let's have others' ado about nothing:
The cream of the crop, my friends. These posts were not only so good that some people voted for them, but upwards of 200 votes were cast per comment. Can you spot the deafening irony? Should I even bother? Instead, bring your attention to the post by the user named 'bootselectric'. Oh, how the point is missed. The biggest cop-out, btw, is getting fired by text message. That shit actually happens. Oh and nobody 'embraces their lives' around anything. Anyways, all of these posts (worthless activities on a worthless medium - yes I understand the height of irony that is my acknowledging this) were voted for more than 200 times. Irony.
Firstly, only teenagers or immature adults can actually muster up the energy to text more than 100 times a day. Yet I can be surprised by texting culture. At 15 seconds per text, 100 texts would only require a time investment of 25 minutes. Scale that any way you want, and remember that serial texters are quick, and it's easy to conclude that a serial texter can text 400+ times a day and still have lots of time left over to socialize 'face to face' (oh shit, that term is going to get worn out in the next few years). This 'texting' business, which is correctly SMSing business, has for many years now been a cultural crisis in the making. We all stepped in it with full confidence, so now we get to suffer it. Suffer the outrageous extremes of an increasingly dim and unfunny era.
You can already see what kind of User Comment Rodeo it's going to be. The best kind. Because you know the ageists, the trolls, the dickweeds, the self-described experts, the geniuses – in short the whole, illiterate, unwashed, entitled, self-satisfied mass of the public – is going to unable to prevent themselves from puking their word nonsense onto this story like tainted cocktail shrimp at a bad house party. Listen up, I know that serial texters are often total wankers. I understood years ago that they lacked the self-reflection expected of a great ape, dolphin, or crow. Don't forget that this study is biased: note that it focused on first year students. Don't buy into the hype without thinking critically about it first. First year students are so rarely aware of themselves that the study is unfair and biased. It stooped for low-hanging fruit when there are plenty of studies that can judge the adult narcissist sociopaths in business, finance, and politics.
But enough of my ado about nothing; let's have others' ado about nothing:
The cream of the crop, my friends. These posts were not only so good that some people voted for them, but upwards of 200 votes were cast per comment. Can you spot the deafening irony? Should I even bother? Instead, bring your attention to the post by the user named 'bootselectric'. Oh, how the point is missed. The biggest cop-out, btw, is getting fired by text message. That shit actually happens. Oh and nobody 'embraces their lives' around anything. Anyways, all of these posts (worthless activities on a worthless medium - yes I understand the height of irony that is my acknowledging this) were voted for more than 200 times. Irony.
8/15/12
Modern Hopelessness - User Comment Rodeo
I read an article awhile ago while I was looking around for interesting anti-consumerist agitprop. Mostly I was just trying to feel better, but of course there are a million problems and only a few dozens of mostly ideological solutions so I wound up feeling completely fucked. But you gotta believe in something! That or you begin to volunteer and first try to solve your stubborn local problems, remembering the enemy for later. While, you know, scraping a living together and trying not to end up on the streets, without a roof over your head or a pot to piss in. Odds are if you're young, you're over-educated and underemployed, and everyone is shitting on you because you want a good life, not even The Good Life as sold to you by the multinational greed-ignorance system. Or you're an entitled youth with an iPhone and you used to really like Dubstep but now it's more EDM and mostly it's weed, beers, and bros.
I sort of like Adbusters. All of their articles are alarmist, which gets a bit old, and which excuses severe lapses in discipline and research. Best part is, the alarmist tone is often warranted. Anybody not actively living in deluded ignorance can see that there are a lot of things wrong with the world and that, as a species, we might be fucking ourselves over. In fact, we probably are, and the problems stack up while the disbelievers go around like business as usual. Racism, sexism, ageism, exceptionalism, cronyism, patriarchy, oligarchy, police states, xenophobia, terrorism, war mongering, corporatism, you name it – there are issues for everyone. Pick your side and hold a fractious conflict against your opponents while the world withers. Throw stones, hurl insults, utter blanket statements about shit you don't really know much about. That's the game right now and we're doing a great job wasting the years playing it. There's this huge amount of angst everywhere, seemingly residing in less than 5% of the population. So it goes without saying that Adbusters is not popular and possibly stigmatized by whatever evil ghosts rule the world.
There was one online article that was kind of interesting. It was written in the same mildly alarmist hyperbolic style and touched on reality in a way that complements the dread of modern society that some people feel. Ironically, to be on point, the article has to focus on the hollow spectacle of western culture – which means it discusses a lot of supercilious bullshit amongst the mentions of economic woes, class warfare, and impending monolithic doom. Pretty much worth the fifteen minutes it takes to read and dismissive of 'feel good' movements in the west. The comment section drew me further into the puzzle... I didn't have time to read it all, but it didn't take long to find some real beauties lurking among the rank weeds.
I sort of like Adbusters. All of their articles are alarmist, which gets a bit old, and which excuses severe lapses in discipline and research. Best part is, the alarmist tone is often warranted. Anybody not actively living in deluded ignorance can see that there are a lot of things wrong with the world and that, as a species, we might be fucking ourselves over. In fact, we probably are, and the problems stack up while the disbelievers go around like business as usual. Racism, sexism, ageism, exceptionalism, cronyism, patriarchy, oligarchy, police states, xenophobia, terrorism, war mongering, corporatism, you name it – there are issues for everyone. Pick your side and hold a fractious conflict against your opponents while the world withers. Throw stones, hurl insults, utter blanket statements about shit you don't really know much about. That's the game right now and we're doing a great job wasting the years playing it. There's this huge amount of angst everywhere, seemingly residing in less than 5% of the population. So it goes without saying that Adbusters is not popular and possibly stigmatized by whatever evil ghosts rule the world.
There was one online article that was kind of interesting. It was written in the same mildly alarmist hyperbolic style and touched on reality in a way that complements the dread of modern society that some people feel. Ironically, to be on point, the article has to focus on the hollow spectacle of western culture – which means it discusses a lot of supercilious bullshit amongst the mentions of economic woes, class warfare, and impending monolithic doom. Pretty much worth the fifteen minutes it takes to read and dismissive of 'feel good' movements in the west. The comment section drew me further into the puzzle... I didn't have time to read it all, but it didn't take long to find some real beauties lurking among the rank weeds.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)