CYBERPUNK: So Into You

By Joab Jackson, Baltimore City Paper. Posted June 29, 2000.

It's not the most scenic stretch of cyberspace, but I fixate on it nonetheless. I follow with rapt interest the little red dots marching across the black screen, representing inclines, declines, and straightaways. I've long since gotten used to this route I take almost daily.

This is why I was quite surprised one day when, halfway through my journey, the landscape suddenly vanished and was replaced by gigantic floating creatures tumbling across the screen. It took a moment for me to recognize that these weren't diode-grown monsters, but rather letters spelling out a Web address. The stair-climbing machine I was plugging away on was inviting me to visit its manufacturer's home page, presumably to discover great bargains on home fitness equipment.

It was the oddest place I've ever seen an advertisement. And in some small but significant way, I felt violated by its presence.

It's not as if I'm not already bombarded by ads. The televisions mounted in the health club's gym were blaring CNN and MTV, the club's own radio program was endlessly repeating pitches for nutritional elixirs, and mountains of ad-stuffed magazines were strewn about. But it was this Web-page address on this piece of equipment's screen that surprised me.

Once upon a time, advertisers had pretty direct access to the masses. We all watched the same three TV networks, there weren't all that many national magazines, and just about everybody in a particular area read the same newspaper or two. But lately, the advertising industry is finding its audience fragmenting -- wandering off to Web pages, niche magazines, specialized cable channels -- or, worse still, simply tuning out. We fast-forward past coming attractions on the video rental tape, flip by even the most hard-core Calvin Klein ads without so much as a blush. As a result, advertisers are looking to grab our attention by any means possible, crossing all sorts of boundaries and getting way more invasive.

A few months back, I got a letter from a university where I once took some classes. The envelope itself was printed in official school letterhead, but inside was a credit-card application. Visa had purchased a list of students' names and addresses from the school and hid its junk mail behind university letterhead. More recently, I flew cross-country on Continental. The big screen in coach was used not just for the in-flight movie, but to show commercials to the strapped-down audience at the beginning of the flight. According to a piece in the San Jose, Calif., alternative weekly Metro, "7-Eleven stores in selected markets have begun running 15-second commercials on their ATM machines while customers are waiting for their cash" ("The Big Mindsuck: Why Spam Must Die. Die. Die.").

And then there's the Real Jukebox program from RealAudio. Mind you, this software is a fine thing, allowing me to tune in to such wonderful Net stations as the drum 'n' bass-dominated Neurofunk, Radio Free New Orleans, and Underground Radio 3WK, among others. But when you sign on to the broadcasts of many stations, RealAudio inserts video advertisements into the stream. "Your selection to follow this brief message from our sponsor," the screen reads.

Our sponsor? Certainly you'd expect the Net stations to have ads; that's how they pay their bills. But the software itself? Let me offer up a real-life comparison: If I'd purchased an actual radio for $29.99 (what I paid for the RealAudio software), I certainly wouldn't want the radio itself to play advertisements before I could tune in to my favorite station. The radio manufacturer got my money; its business with me is done.

Other forms of consumer coercion on the Net are even more subtle, craftily blending content with commerce. Case-in-point: Ask Jeeves. Billed as a "personal guide" to the Internet, this search engine allows you to type in a question; you get back a range of pre-written questions that most closely fit yours, all with links to Web pages that can presumably supply the answers. Ask Jeeves' barely veiled intent seems to be to direct visitors to Web sites where they can buy things. When I asked, "What are CDs are made of?" the first question that came back was, "Where can I buy music CDs online?" -- with a link to an online store. Nowhere in my question was the word "buy," or "purchase."

Equally disingenuous is You Rule School, an entertainment site for children produced by General Mills. Hey, kids! Spot the carefully hidden product placements in such fun-time activities as the Fruit Roll-Ups obstacle course -- Fruit Roll-Ups, of course, being one of General Mills' many fine products.

I was first tipped off to this trend of pervasive advertising by Steve Talbott's thought-provoking Netfuture, a newsletter focusing on the ways technology affects us. Talbott, who also authored the 1995 book The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in our Midst, addressed the topic in his essay, Cluttering Our Lives for Profit in the March 11, 1999 issue. He writes, "Commercial marketing threatens to swallow up all of culture. I see no hope of bringing proportion and health to this arena until there is a widespread willingness to look at the human transactions involved, and to take responsibility for them."

How to do this? "A good starting point would be to grant that requesting someone's attention is a personal, not a merely mechanical, act, and is therefore also a morally tinged act. You are asking something of another human being -- something extremely valuable. Attention is a limited resource whose responsible allocation is crucial to the welfare of both individual and society. It is central to personal identity," Talbott writes. "At the very least, the claimant seeking someone else's attention should be able to say, `I honestly believe that this interruption, this redirection of your attention, is worth the disturbance it will cause.'"

In this new advertising age, the traditional lines of demarcation are no longer clear. In newspapers and television, "content" is physically separated from the advertising; we know how to read each. In new media, from stair-steppers to personalized Internet navigators, the boundaries aren't so distinct. And there are too many companies willing to cross them before the lines are drawn.

Joab Jackson can be reached at joabj@charm.net.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »