Ha, watching the Today Show and I just now for the first time saw the Dawn commercial where they’re washing oil off the little duckies. I do have an overpowering urge to buy Dawn soap now. Or maybe get a pet duckling.
Am I really the oldest one here? John Cameron Swayze is the man. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
To the OP, I guess I just don’t see it that same way you do. I see a lot of stuff that’s meant to inform. And a lot of promotional stuff that is questionable. To me, your term “bend your will” sounds like an attack, and I don’t feel like I’m being attacked when I see opinion pieces or ads. But there is a lot of sensationalism that you have to weed through to find the information you need.
Which makes it all the more fun to deny it to them.
I buy Dawn because it’s the only thing that washes poison oak oil out of clothing. Granted, I do have poison oak…and clothes.
I wonder if it has something to do with the difference between city people and suburban/rural people. City people, I feel, are better at dealing with overstimulation. You walk down a busy city street and you’re faced with hundreds of people and thousands of pieces of visual and audio information, much of which is trying to sell you something. You can’t interact with all of it , you can’t even absorb all of it, so you just filter out the distractions and center on what you need. The internet is the same way - your have to walk fast, and if someone wants your money, you don’t make eye contact and just keep walking.
They probably do. They designed it, they know exactly how to make it work without problems, they almost certainly find it totally comfortable to use.
That said, I don’t have any issues with them at Walmart, at least; they got their software figured out, and it works well. However, I still don’t generally use them because it’s still making me do the cashier’s work without paying me for it.
If it was actually automated - I put my groceries on the conveyor, go pick them up bagged at the other end and a machine did it all, I’d be perfectly happy, ecstatic even, to use it. But it’s not ‘automation’ when it just shifts the work from one human to another. There’s nothing new about these whole self-checkout systems that wasn’t possible 30 years ago.
As for advertising…it’s definitely a frustrating thing. I’m of the mind that if you advertise to me a product that is good which I need or otherwise find useful, this is a good thing, because now I am aware of a product that fits my needs. That’s the good kind of advertising, that is symbiotic in that it helps both consumer and advertiser.
But they want us to buy so much stuff that they cannot just advertise to us good things that we need and would be beneficial to us. They have to advertise just about everything, really really hard at us. It’s really this ‘growth’ concept. I hear about how companies and investors and stockholders and such go nuts if there’s not more growth each quarter than the last quarter, and that’s…ridiculous. As long as you’re not losing money, that should be enough!
Right, this is why you need a test and QA department that is completely separate from design and development. Because real users will find ways to break things that the designers never dreamed of… 
I don’t know if this was the inspiration for that ad, but back in the mid-aughts there was an email going around (remember the days when we used to spread misinformation by forwarding emails?) that was a list of supposedly bad things about Dawn dish soap. One item on the list was the fact that Dawn is used to clean up oil spills, insinuating that if Dawn can clean up crude oil it must contain some horrible poisonous industrial chemicals.
Then they came out with the ad with the ducks. It basically says “Yeah, Dawn really is powerful enough to clean up crude oil, but that doesn’t mean it’s poisonous. See, it’s safe enough to use on these cute little ducks.” Like I said, I have no idea if the ad was actually intended to refute that earlier piece of misinformation, but if it was it was a brilliant way of doing it.
Beyond a certain point this ceases to be politeness and seems to turn into a dominance game.
The only way to gracefully escape is to have an inarguable trump card. Such as, “Sorry, my doctor has forbidden me to drink cocktails, I’m afraid”.
Or if that doesn’t work, the one trump that nobody is allowed to argue with: “I’m sorry, it’s against my religion”.
As Douglas Adams said, you can’t criticise religion. You Just Can’t, it’s Not Allowed.
That’s because you haven’t put the glasses on yet. You haven’t seen. Put 'em on!
What clinched my decision to leave Facebook was a personal experiment. I tracked how many positive posts I read relative to posts that gave me some kind of bad feeling. The number of “bad feeling” posts was strikingly high. Most were neutral and the minority were actually positive, but when I realized I was just bombarding myself with negative emotions, I had to stop.
And yesterday I deleted my Reddit account for similar reasons.
Since I’ve never been on Twitter, Insta or Tiktok, the Dope is all that remains.
They wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work.
I’ve always been particularly vulnerable to advertising, myself. I know this about myself and try to be aware. The problem is, I’ve made a lot of impulse purchases where I later said, “Damn, I’m glad I bought that.”
Like my lemon juicer. My only regret is I didn’t get one sooner.
So every time I go to buy something, there’s this little voice that says: this could be the next lemon juicer.
Yep. The good stuff sort of washes over you pleasantly. The bad stuff erodes you. You can stand an indefinite amount of washing, but a strictly finite amount of erosion.
I vaguely remember a satirical scene in a future setting where technology enabled advertising to be added to people’s dreams. An episode of Futurama, I think?
Now that Elon’s Musk’s brain implant technology is set to begin human trials, is the satire soon to become reality?
Sure, you might think “I’d never go for that”. But, I remember saying that about cellphones at one time in the distant past.
I avoid mostly. Can’t tolerate TV with commercials or web browsing with ads. Use adblockers.
Yep, it made Fry want to buy Lightspeed Briefs. Which if I am remembering correctly was the episode that gave us the expression “Shut up and take my money!”
I think part of this is the insidious nature of advertising. You can block a pop-up ad, but in truth, almost anything you read online is trying to sell you something.
It’s all based around algorithms intended to maximize engagement. So the very articles you read have content that was predetermined to maximize engagement. People don’t just blog or write or video what’s on their mind anymore. Journalists don’t just cover what sounds interesting to them. They tailor their content based on user statistics. Writers do the same. Which newsletter got the most clicks? Okay, write more content like that.
This approach to creating content ensures a relative homogeneity of ideas and that people in select demographics won’t have to read anything they don’t like. But you see, often personal growth comes from reading things we don’t like. Diversity of thought comes from reading things we don’t like. Boredom often breeds creation, but the commodification of ideas has eliminated all potential for boredom.
You can’t really get away from it if you’re on the Internet.
One thing I’ve been doing with my news feed is look at the headline of each article and figure out what it’s trying to do to me. Even if the article itself seems benign, it’s usually trying to prime me for some kind of purchase.
I guess I don’t use the internet like most people. I read this site, a few comics, and some gaming sites. Ads are blocked. I don’t use newsfeeds or blogs or Youtube or TikTok or whatever–they’ve never had any value for me. Most of my news is from NPR or the Economist. My entertainment time is mostly spent on some coding projects, or watching tennis or Disney+, or playing a computer game.
I guess I’m wondering why people still engage with stuff that has no value to them. Life is too short to waste your time.
If it had no value to them, they wouldn’t engage with it. The issue is that it does have some value. That’s the underlying issue with most bad habits.
I doubt she wanted the manager to pull extra staff out of her butt, but just to get out of her chair and pitch in to help her staff through the rush.