Advertising, Value, and Meaning
Mandy Brown on advertising and reading on the web:
Any economy which charges ever less for ever more intrusive ads will eventually be successful not in creating wealth but in driving the readers away, until the only ones left to heed the ads are all the other ads […]
It’s ironic, isn’t it? We don’t want to pay for stuff, so we promise to submit to advertising — but we find the advertisements annoying, so we tune them out like parents tune out screaming children, or else we find ways to block the advertisements altogether.
This issue fits into larger societal questions I have. What do we value? What do we consider valuable? What are we willing to trade or compromise for the things we value?
There’s what we can call the Walmart Way, in which value means less expensive, affordable, cheap, or low quality. The driving force determining what we’re willing to trade real money for is a rarely possible combination of best quality and lowest price. This is shameful.
Concerning what content we devour on the web, we’ve proved to ourselves that there’s not much we value enough to actually pay for at all. We expect everything to be freely given us, sometimes at the pain of others.
I am not opposed to advertising, but much of it doesn’t seem sustainable. Nor does it seem healthy. If we want a product or a service, we ought be willing to pay for it with something other than a distracted attention. After all, isn’t that how it works in real life?
Being Dressed In Value I think quite a bit about what value means. In my own work, it’s more of an intent than a state of being. The goal I have set for myself, which is not always procured, is for the fruit of my labor to be imbued / permeated / infused / dressed with a very real and non-monetary worth / goodness / usefulness / value — which is a difficult thing to convey in our fleeting and consumeristic society, and something an advertisement usually cannot support.
Back to Mandy’s article (which you should read), she asks rhetorically, “Wasn’t the web supposed to be better than this? Wasn’t there a promise that we could generate money and meaning, not merely the former?”
I’d like to say yes, but unless we change our mind about what we value, and howwe value, I don’t think any such promise can ever be made.
