I don't welcome our new overlords
Jun. 29th, 2018 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jbananaIn the old world, TV adverts tried to sell you generic things like washing powder. Who doesn't like clean clothes? I didn't grasp the new world of targeted internet adverts until I was talking to a teenager about Spotify - isn't it annoying to hear the same ad for Jaguar again and again? He looked at me blankly, and said he only got sexual consent ads, and resented the implication that he might be a rapist.
I only recently got a smart phone, and I was dismayed at the amount of my life that I'm giving up to Google. I opted out of a load of their data gathering, and they said "Are you sure you want to do this, because we won't be able to show you relevant advertising!" I said "Why would I want that?"
I've been on various social media things over the years. There's a pattern. They start out being fun, inclusive and interactive. But things go wrong. There's a participation problem even at the beginning. Then the novelty wears off, shiny things appear elsewhere, and participation wanes. The people running it forget the social part, think about money, and the users become the product to be sold to advertisers and political campaigns.
So I like things that don't belong to anyone: email, SMS, telephone calls.
And I'm aware of the delight of using unpopular things like Dreamwidth. I can shout into the emptiness. No one's really listening.
I only recently got a smart phone, and I was dismayed at the amount of my life that I'm giving up to Google. I opted out of a load of their data gathering, and they said "Are you sure you want to do this, because we won't be able to show you relevant advertising!" I said "Why would I want that?"
I've been on various social media things over the years. There's a pattern. They start out being fun, inclusive and interactive. But things go wrong. There's a participation problem even at the beginning. Then the novelty wears off, shiny things appear elsewhere, and participation wanes. The people running it forget the social part, think about money, and the users become the product to be sold to advertisers and political campaigns.
So I like things that don't belong to anyone: email, SMS, telephone calls.
And I'm aware of the delight of using unpopular things like Dreamwidth. I can shout into the emptiness. No one's really listening.
