Saturday 12 July 2008 — This is more than 16 years old. Be careful.
The latest step in our march toward all advertising all the time is Gas Station TV, which consists of screens on top of gas pumps, blaring news, weather, and ads. These remind me of the screens in elevators, pestering us for the few minutes it takes to ride to our floor.
I understand the economic forces driving these micro-channels of ad-laced info-bits. What I don’t understand is why they have to be limited to news headlines and weather forecasts. If the information is only there to engage our interest, why not branch out? What about classic paintings? What about cartoons from the New Yorker? How about poetry? Opening paragraphs from random Wikipedia articles? With so much content flowing all over the net, why are we forced to see the same news, stocks, sports, and weather all the time?
Comments
Joking aside, you have a good point. Why not use such displays to educate, or to provide public service messages (perhaps sponsored by Acme Corp.)?
Ned has a good point. I suspect most people would find random content drawn from interesting sources around the web to be much more compelling. For example...
The Flickr "interestingness" feed
The Smoking Gun's latest "featured document"
Any article from "The Onion"
Random Digg features
Oh, or here's a novel idea: Just rotate through the top stories from OTHER countries instead of recycling the same crap Rupert Murdoch keeps pouring down our throats.
... oh, wait, that last one is a bit classist, isn't it?
This is a tide that needs to be turned back. We must all rise up! How many people can really be happy to see these things?
If I ever run into the guy from Shell who so cutely "knocks on the screen" to get my attention, I can't promise I won't punch him in the face, cog of a machine though he may be. I don't care if it's just your job, you volunteered to be the face of this phenomenon, and you get everything that comes with it!
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