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Opinion
Ad It Up
12/6/2006
We all know that many edible berries and fruits advertise to animals with the attractiveness of their fruit, so that the animals can propagate their seeds. As a child I was fascinated with how the Viceroy butterfly mimics the appearance of the Monarch butterfly so that birds – at least those which have previously tasted the apparently disgusting Monarchs (never had the courage to eat one myself) would leave the Viceroys alone.
So, what’s wrong with commercials? Maybe nothing is, in principle anyway. We do need to locate the things we need and even the things we just want. What would a world in which there were no “attractive” things look and feel like? The problem comes when advertising is done to excess – but who gets to decide what excess is?
We’ve seen wave after wave of advertising methods sweep across the Internet, culminating in multiple pop-up ads, mini-movies that live in the corner of your computer screen and fly out at you if your cursor moves nearby, and so much spam that e-mail is, for some, dysfunctional.
At the moment, I am hiring a managing editor for SCUP’s journal, Planning for Higher Education. I am also on two search committees for executive director positions, one with the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) and the other with the Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA). Having carefully read more than one hundred of them in the past month, it hasn’t escaped my notice that resumes are also a form of advertising.
Some think that when advertising g'es wrong is when it obscures rather than reveals, when it is used to create desires that are not otherwise inherent, or when it used to cause harm. What’s harm to one creature or person, however, is not necessarily so for another. Think of the Anglerfish, or of those lumpy, colorful fishes that lack the visible aqua-dynamics of what we think are “normal” fish slicing through the water, so that it can snuggle up against coral reefs and remain unnoticed while schools of its feeder fish swim by. The feeder fish might think it’s unfair and wrong to pretend to be harmless when you are not, but at least one of the parties involved gets a full stomach out of it.
And the spammers are getting full stomachs, too. How is it that they can stay in business? Well, the up-front costs are low per-millions-of-messages. Who are the people who fall for those schemes? Interestingly, new users, especially those who are adult and just getting online in 2006, may be responsible. The result is a very human situation where a few perpetrators flood this new environment with the cheap effluent of spam e-mails, knowing they’ll attract enough suckers to fill their stomachs.
To me, the worst thing that advertising on the Internet d'es is flood the environment with “noise” that obscures the information I really want. My e-mail is, in fact, quite dysfunctional right now because the spammers are sending me 3,000 messages a day, burying the 200-300 that I really want to read.
That’s especially annoying here aboard the Sovereign of the Seas, where they’re about to charge me 50 cents a minute to go online and download the 3,000+ messages that I have had sent to me in the day since we left port.
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