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.
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.
Well the thing about careers in research is that pretty much all require at least a masters and most require a PhD.
For example. I could teach at colleges with a master’s. But I’m not qualified to run experiments unless I have a PhD.
Usually only community colleges and small religious colleges hire professors with only a master’s.
Most other colleges or universities prefer or require a PhD.
When I first started college, at age 24, I just wanted to get some education to get a better job.
Psych was not even on my radar.
I took a class because why not. Did well. Took a few more psych classes. Before I knew it, I had enough for it to qualify as my major.
I talked to the chair professor and told him. I didn’t want to major in psych because 1. Everyone I knew who was a psych major never even finished their degree. 2. I didn’t want to go to school for another 10 years to be able to work in the field.
I said I didn’t want to be 40 before I finished.He said. Dani. You are going to be 40 regardless. You want to have a degree and a career that suits you or not by the time you are 40?.
So here I am. Turned 40 in May. 😅
I may need to explain why it took me so long.
I did my associates and bachelor’s half time because I worked full time during those degrees. So they took me 8 years. Then half a year gap. Then 1 year masters. Then 1 gap year. Then started PhD. 6 year program. I have 2 masters now. In the same exact field.
I was not competitive enough to get into a PhD program without research experience. That’s why I had to get a master’s first.
Younger people with more free time often work as research assistants. I didn’t have that option as I had a full time job plus school.
I’d join. Ads do nothing but damage to society. How much? Well they manipulate people to make suboptimal choices and waste at least as much as the advertisers budget (on average), or they would stop doing it. So it’s at least 775 billion dollars per year. Rising annually. Enough to end world hunger and homelessness.
My eyes opened when a videogame in a company I worked for (I worked on another title) was made under hard conditions, polished, pushed under almost burnout conditions to be finished “in time”, and the budget for commercials was 4x the dev budget…
Im here to remind you that someone is wasting untold millions marketing GTA6.
Rockstar could literally say nothing, preview nothing, zero demos, zero screenshots and drop GTA6 randomly one weekend and make a billion dollars.
Yet the money is wasted.
Just make a new 2D isometric Iceland Dale and it will sustain a small dev team no problemo IMO. Then don’t push the tech but write new stories and expand the world. But no, it doesn’t have microtransactions and you can’t get funding without selling your soul I guess.
I’d love working on a project like that, I miss the old game dev days 😊😌.
You know, if I gained that knowledge as an employee I would go apeshit and probably quit. Now I’m going to find out how much my employer uses on advertising and find a way to throw it in their face…
It was a thing back in the late 1990s as part of the antiglobalization movement. Look up old issues of the Adbusters magazine or Naomi Klein’s book ‘No Logo’
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…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outdoor_advertising#Regulations billboards are banned in several cities and, surprisingly, in four entire states of the US.
Yeah but it needs good marketing
No it will not. In order for an anti-advertising movement to grow it will need to advertise…
I think if such a movement ever does arise (independent of a generally sympathetic unrelated movement such as a communist one) it will only be after things get a whole lot worse. Like they’re going to have to be projecting ads on the moon, filling every inch of public space with ads, replacing all music at stores with nonstop ads, etc before people will start saying “hey, this is seriously too much” and then that may eventually lead to the public perception emerging that almost any advertising is too much.
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!
Here people regularly smash those stupid add posters everywhere or replace them with militant ones.
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.
I did bump into this page, but it seems what they do is they buy air time intended for ads and place a kind of subverted piece in what is apparently called “culture jamming”. I was hoping more for an organic kind of movement on social media that gets people to talk about the issues more clearly and rethink what is acceptable.
Ads are just the tools of propaganda turned inward for the benefit of the market, right? I think we’d need more consciousness on just how much propaganda there is, and how much of society / our world is shaped by it, before there’s a strong anti-ad backlash in general.
Adblocking is my movement
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.
