There are lots of cultural opposition movements online, like against work exploitation, consumerism, car culture, surveillance, intellectual property, etc. I can find communities on lemmy for all those topics. But regarding a more general opposition to advertisements and marketing, other than the occasional person telling others to use adblockers online (what about ads in every day life?), I fail to see organized attempts to challenge advertisements. There is a lot that can be scrutinized. Ethical concerns such as manipulation, lack of consent and just the simple fact your attention is for sale. The effects range from damage to environment, to our mental health, to harming industries themselves, lowering product quality and maintaining monopolies.
Yeah but it needs good marketing
Adblocking is my movement
Advertisements are a thing where you can turn them off and basically suffer none of the negative externalities (escaping the tracking is a LOT harder). There’s no real reason to form a movement over a basically solved issue.
On your phone, browser, yes… Highway bilboards, gas pumps, mcdonalds screens, supermarket screens, eyedoctor appointments, clinic waiting rooms, public spaces, and … baiscally anywhere outside of home… littered with ads everywhere you turn.
Just stare at your phone instead like a normal person.
Tell me you’re terminally online without telling me you’re terminally online
So I am a perception researcher. There is research on a lot of tactics for advertising.
There are laws now, shaped by that research, that prevent advertisers from using specific symbols used to mark materials and locations for safety. For instance.
The symbol for radiation is not allowed on advertising.
Do you know why?
Maybe you have a pretty good idea.
The symbol will lose not only its meaning when applied to non radiation areas. But it loses salience.
Salience is how attention-grabbing something is. There are specific features of things in the world that our perpetual system was designed to notice more. Because these are important to us in some functional way. They help us navigate our environment.
Bright colors. High contrast. Unusual Geometrics. And movement.
Another important thing about the perception system is it’s adaptiveness. Highly adaptive. Even at older ages.
But very very adaptive at young ages.
An example. Kittens raised in spaces with only vertical black and white lines and never allowed to see any other orientation or color. (Blindfolded when fed and most of the time). When these cats were put in a room with horizontal lines. They could not “see” them. And ran into the walls. They never regained their ability to see horizontal lines nor any other orientation since this loss happened since birth.
This is because specific neurons in your primary cortex respond to specific orientations. If they never fire from lack of stimuli. They die.
Now that’s an extreme version. But what I trying to get at is this:
The sensory system is highly adaptive to the environment. It provides what the person needs.
When we are bombarded with adds that all use salient stimuli (bold colors, moving, high contrast), we start tunning these out. They become “low salient”.
Why is this a problem. ?
Because the brain processing at early sensory attention cannot “tell the difference” between a billboard advertising video playing in your periphery trying to grab your attention. And a small child running in the periphery that will end up in front of your car.
We are “learning” to not see movement. Or at least not direct our attention to it to identify what it is.
We are learning to not see bold colors and high contrast.
Things that we actually do need to see most of time. People are still missing safety and warning signs all the time because advertisements try to grab our attention and we learned to ignore anything bold.
This is not speculation. Lots of research on this. Being constantly surrounded by advertisement changes salience of important visual and audio cues.
It also has cognitive effects like exhaustion.
But I’m not as versed on those as the perception parts. That’s my area of expertise.
I say, we as scientist must prove ads are harming us. Get legislation passed to protect people and kids.
But there already is evidence. And nothing is done.
No one cares. No one can fight lobbyists.
And it’s hard to quantify the damage. Like specifically risk increases and the like.
Very difficult to do.
No control subjects.
So the research is often dismissed as speculation on real world applied harm.
There are some laws in some places. But not enough.
Thank you, this was fascinating.
I’m very interested in what a perception researcher does day to day. But yeah, research showed cigarettes were harmful way before anything was done. Research is showing climate change is real, and recycling isn’t effective, and vaccines are safe. I fear we’re headed to a second dark age.
Mostly writing for me right now. I finished up my doctorate research experiments in June and now I’m writing my dissertation.
After I’m done I plan to teach and continue doing research.
I exclusively do in-person research.
Nothing online. This is a bit more challenging as I have to set up a room and schedule people. And they often don’t show. So it’s exhausting sometimes.
My doctorate research is on depth perception based on motor feedback from the lens in your eye that focuses light.
I might continue to do a little more research in this area but my next interest is in motion sickness from visual and vestibular cues in moving vehicles.
As a general rule, I research multisensory systems. I have little interest in studying an isolated system. Boring.
So motion sickness. It’s like getting car sick. Especially if reading.
I have some theories on how to combat this and want to test my hypothesis.
I get motion sick easy so this is also personal for me to find solutions.
Graduate work is not too different from what I will be doing after I graduate.
Teaching. doing experiments. And lots and lots of writing.
I already did teaching and teaching assistant as a grad student. I quite liked it and received a graduate teaching assistant award. So I think I’m well suited to it. Teaching isn’t for everyone tho.
But I don’t want to fully give up research to devote all my time to teaching, so I’m going to try to do both.
Most professors do both.
That’s pretty cool, thanks for sharing. I always found psych experiments super interesting but didn’t think I could make a career out of it.
Billboards and other physical ads and such suck but are thankfully already mostly illegal where I live.
Problem with other kinds of advertising is that it can’t be made illegal, not truly. People would still do it, it would just not be marked as such. I’m not sure how to fix this.
People mentioned Ad Busters and others, but No Logo was pretty formative for me. It’s not exactly what you asked about (it’s a book, not a movement), but I think it continues to point that people have been acting against advertising for decades.
Just, you know, they don’t have a ton of money…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outdoor_advertising#Regulations billboards are banned in several cities and, surprisingly, in four entire states of the US.
I’ve been pushing it for a while now.
But, we need to start harassing marketers.
We need to tell them “No, I won’t and haven’t ever subscribed to your shit. I’ve never bought your shit. You spend millions to shove your shitty product and service in my face, everywhere I go and everything I use. I will continue to use adblockers to spite you. I will shit all over your product and service in anyway I can. I will send back the shit you’ve sent me. And if anything, I will get personal with you because you’ve been harassing me and getting away with it for however long, just because you’ve spent millions to do so. I am making it even.”
The marketers don’t make the decision. They’re underpaid wage slaves just reading script.
We know they aren’t. But the point is to make their jobs so discouraging, they wouldn’t ever want to do shit for these companies again. That’s only the beginning.
Besides, a lot of them chose to do that job anyways. Don’t try garnering sympathy for these kinds of people.
Adbusters magazine
I have become an advocate not only against ads but for mental integrity as a whole. No more deceitful manipulation of the mind allowed. No more disinformation or dark patterns accepted at all. I know it’s naive to think that possible, but why even try if we’re not aiming for the perfect utopia?
It depends what you mean by movement, and where you mean.
There are already some direct action movements on the ground, like Subvertisers International, Adbusters and historically B.U.G.A.U.P to name some famous Western ones.
I think the abundance of tools available to block ads online hints at a movement in itself. We don’t need a leader or a central committee.
The wrinkle I see here is that a generalized ‘everybody’ hates ads but ‘everybody’ is also aware of the fact that they finance a large swath of stuff that we would have to pay for otherwise.
I think “most people” would tolerate advertising if it wasn’t so predatory and invasive (especially for apps/sites that a person values). So the solution to the “wrinkle” has been hiding in plain sight for years.
Honestly, advertising is very dystopian. Online tracking being the obvious first example.
But that’s not all. How should I block physical ads in the city? Not only does it ruin the view, but roadside billboards surely caused at least one death by distracting a driver, and ads can get quite distasteful.
Also, it’s not just roadside - they’re plastered everywhere! Buildings, bus stops, right in the middle of the sidewalk. Some are classic paper, some are of the TV screen type. Some are quite small and inconspicuous, but a lot are huge enough to be seen from at least half a mile away.
Physical ads don’t finance anything. They’re just obnoxious. I don’t know how succeptible to ads other people are, but for me it takes an actually good offer to entice me - and usually that’s heard on radio or seen on TV (as far as ads go).
Chose your own dystopia. Where no ads exist and everything is pay per view/read/report/etc. Or the one we’re in.
The bigger problem with traffic deaths is that we developed a system of transportation that relies heavily on cars that are mostly driven by humans. Removing billboards is not going to improve on that that much. But underwear model billboard pileups are a thing. But so are those caused by drivers on their phones and my guess there are way more of those.
Tracking and selling of information has gotten out of hand, no doubt. It is political decisions or a lack thereof that got us here.
Btw everybody thinks they’re immune to advertising. And we’re not.
The unofficial wisdom of marketing is that half of any advertising budget is wasted. They just don’t know which half. So they continue. This whole thing boils down to the fiduciary responsibilities to provide as much value to shareholders again, the bane of capitalism. They cannot afford to check which half is wasted.
And just for some context here: personally I don’t mind billboard ads to be honest.
Chose your own dystopia. Where no ads exist and everything is pay per view/read/report/etc. Or the one we’re in.
Ads being a replacement for paying applies to internet services (social media, news sites, etc. that you can use for free). When you have billboards on the side of the road, you still have to pay the road toll. When you see ads in public transport, you still have to pay the ticket. When ads are shown on a TV channel, you still have to pay the subscription.
Online ads, as insufferable as they are, are still more clearly justifiable from the end user’s point of view than traditional ones.
You could argue my take is too accepting of the current situation and I would agree with that. At the same time, I would argue yours is simplifying things quite a bit. Subscription TV channels came after free-to-air channels with commercials. This may depend on where you live in the world but most places have at least one local station or a selection of them broadcast through the air, not cable or satellite, and not subscription based. Financed through commercials or in some countries also through a license model (like in the UK). Cable/satellite/subscription channels are iterations on the model brought to you by capitalism. Ads in public transport can lower ticket prices. Billboards can help lower rental rates in buildings and their revenue adds to the tax intake of the community they’re in. If you think it already takes too long to get potholes fixed, it would take even longer without them. Not all roads are toll roads. I get it: you don’t like billboards. You’re going to get all these unintended side effects if they were banned tomorrow.
Online ads are insufferable. I’m running 3-4 plugins to avoid them. I’m also normally watching broadcast TV on DVR so I can skip through the commercial breaks. I bail on any subscription service that adds ads.
The problem online is the cause of the problem. It’s the simplicity with which data can be collected and the lack of regulation. It’s also generally still paying off a debt incurred when in the early days of www users got accustomed to getting everything ‘for free.’ Traditional media has lowered the price dramatically of its own offerings to get new eyeballs online while older streams of income still paid for most expenses, like the income from TV commercial revenue or sales of printed paper. And as these traditional sources of great rivers of money decreased over decades, the ones that replaced it were digital trickles in danger of drying out. That brought about a “militarization” of online ads, ever more targeted and annoying. This problem needs a multi-pronged approach including regulation of data collection and new financing models for media in general.
I dont think the main stream will ever meaningfully turn against advertising. We’ve collectively demonstrated that we’re willing to accept advertising and trade our privacy in exchange for free content and services.
That said, the worse the main stream web gets the better the “side web” gets. The good parts of the web will always exist, even if they’re not as popular as they once were.
Do you have any recommendations of cool ‘side web’ sites that are worth visiting?
Not really, although you might try the 512kb club.
Im talking more about technologies and platforms. IRC, XMPP, RSS…
Depends. Fediverse challenges advertisement. Adblockers challenge advertisement. People switching to piracy after amazon and netflix pushing for more adds challenges advertisements.
Is there a united movement? No. But that’s partly because those that do care have an adblocker and rarely see ads.
I remember a time when webpages had banner ads that didn’t flicker and make it impossible to read the page, and that also weren’t based on corporations spying on you. If it had stopped there, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. Even a few second pre-roll ad before a video starts based on the video content and not the user’s history would be annoying, but something a lot of people would tolerate. But no, number must go up!
