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This is my feedback to Yahell's new beta homepage, as they do say that my comments and suggestions are "useful" to them in developing new products and services....
If I thought that a fixed-top-position advertising module were useful to my life, I would have added it there myself. I can understand you wanting to ensure commercial revenue, but if you do not make that ad module AT LEAST movable to ensure the visibility of users' personally-chosen content, this is hardly a supportable update. Change it. Let it be undeletable, but you'd damn well better make it movable.
The next new development in our current consumer-citizen dystopia, meanwhile....will be criminalizing the evasion of commercial content. Fast-forwarding TiVo or (damn, am I old) VCRs....getting up to take a leak during TV breaks, muting the volume....calculating how much time before the movie starts is actually "captive audience" time for un-related ad filler...hell, even looking at the landscape instead of at the billboards as the car goes by. I'm a freak: I'm really really good at filtering out and forgetting things that aren't useful to me -- which makes me a real fly in the ointment to marketing surveys (it's been proven, folks, in both print and video format). Eventually, you know, they're just going to beam commercials directly into our cellphones and iPods and what have you, or at least a subliminal enabler-wave to make it easier for the ads to sink in. At this point of thought I'm quite glad not to have any of those devices....though of course, this could also be a possible high-tech goal of auctioning off the public broadcast airwaves, so that everyone's brains can be primed for optimal absorption of marketing tactics.
Oops, better not give 'em any ideas.....they're trying frantically now to circumvent the circumvention of their methods, struggling to ensure that we are never, never free from the infiltration of their precious marketing messages, no matter how insipid, offensive, or flat-out unnecessary to our lives. Anyone know just how broad the applications of "propaganda" really are? Anyone here ever been schooled in critical thinking?
Some people will doubtless say, well, them's the breaks of living in a world with technology -- if you're taking the chocolate you haven't a right to complain. Well, bollocks to that. You know what, people?--there is NO SUCH THING as a valid user agreement. Those warning messages that you get when you run an adware/spyware check and delete cookies?--they're meaningless. All that exists in this marketplace is corporations trying to exploit people for all they're worth -- emphasis on "worth" -- so the least I think we can do is return the favour. There are no valid rules, because there are no longer ethics in this world. They are gone, unless we force them back into service for US.
First and pragmatically foremost of the many under-recognized rights of the mind is the right to ignore that which is not useful to us and our survival. Children still need to develop it, which is why they're such easy demographic marks -- and so do most adults. This is essential to basic functioning and concentration, and no TOS in the world, much less the everyday venue of media and supermarket, gives corporations the right to override it. The mind must be able to keep its own counsel and its own priorities. Otherwise we are no longer human beings but merely buying-mechanisms, value generators, cogs in the machine.
Of course, it may already be too late to stop it. There is a vast and stupid herd out there -- overstimulated, overmedicated, overdistracted and such good, goood compliant little consumers.........
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[Note: As I have returned my homepage to its previous state, I realize that there is a fixed-top-position ad module there already....it just happens to be of a modest enough size, in a narrow third column (rather than a full third of the page), as to not block any of my critical content and impinge quite so loudly upon my ethical sensibilities. As a matter of fact, you know...why, I must have been ignoring it! :O ]
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If I thought that a fixed-top-position advertising module were useful to my life, I would have added it there myself. I can understand you wanting to ensure commercial revenue, but if you do not make that ad module AT LEAST movable to ensure the visibility of users' personally-chosen content, this is hardly a supportable update. Change it. Let it be undeletable, but you'd damn well better make it movable.
The next new development in our current consumer-citizen dystopia, meanwhile....will be criminalizing the evasion of commercial content. Fast-forwarding TiVo or (damn, am I old) VCRs....getting up to take a leak during TV breaks, muting the volume....calculating how much time before the movie starts is actually "captive audience" time for un-related ad filler...hell, even looking at the landscape instead of at the billboards as the car goes by. I'm a freak: I'm really really good at filtering out and forgetting things that aren't useful to me -- which makes me a real fly in the ointment to marketing surveys (it's been proven, folks, in both print and video format). Eventually, you know, they're just going to beam commercials directly into our cellphones and iPods and what have you, or at least a subliminal enabler-wave to make it easier for the ads to sink in. At this point of thought I'm quite glad not to have any of those devices....though of course, this could also be a possible high-tech goal of auctioning off the public broadcast airwaves, so that everyone's brains can be primed for optimal absorption of marketing tactics.
Oops, better not give 'em any ideas.....they're trying frantically now to circumvent the circumvention of their methods, struggling to ensure that we are never, never free from the infiltration of their precious marketing messages, no matter how insipid, offensive, or flat-out unnecessary to our lives. Anyone know just how broad the applications of "propaganda" really are? Anyone here ever been schooled in critical thinking?
Some people will doubtless say, well, them's the breaks of living in a world with technology -- if you're taking the chocolate you haven't a right to complain. Well, bollocks to that. You know what, people?--there is NO SUCH THING as a valid user agreement. Those warning messages that you get when you run an adware/spyware check and delete cookies?--they're meaningless. All that exists in this marketplace is corporations trying to exploit people for all they're worth -- emphasis on "worth" -- so the least I think we can do is return the favour. There are no valid rules, because there are no longer ethics in this world. They are gone, unless we force them back into service for US.
First and pragmatically foremost of the many under-recognized rights of the mind is the right to ignore that which is not useful to us and our survival. Children still need to develop it, which is why they're such easy demographic marks -- and so do most adults. This is essential to basic functioning and concentration, and no TOS in the world, much less the everyday venue of media and supermarket, gives corporations the right to override it. The mind must be able to keep its own counsel and its own priorities. Otherwise we are no longer human beings but merely buying-mechanisms, value generators, cogs in the machine.
Of course, it may already be too late to stop it. There is a vast and stupid herd out there -- overstimulated, overmedicated, overdistracted and such good, goood compliant little consumers.........
_
[Note: As I have returned my homepage to its previous state, I realize that there is a fixed-top-position ad module there already....it just happens to be of a modest enough size, in a narrow third column (rather than a full third of the page), as to not block any of my critical content and impinge quite so loudly upon my ethical sensibilities. As a matter of fact, you know...why, I must have been ignoring it! :O ]
_
