Dispatches from Marketer World: Part 5— Facebook

So Facebook is now totally a thing and marketers are all over it because it lets them invade the privacy of average consumers that much more and because it gives them an objective, but thoroughly meaningless, number that they can pretend represents their "popularity" or summat.

Facebook does a lot of things for marketers— it somehow manages to convince people to dump their private lives and private information into the clutches of a company that explicitly exists to abuse it, creating a vast wealth of information about who's interested in what, and allowing marketers to attempt a form of ad targeting that's less bullshit than the normal cookie-based educated guesses— to target ads based on the kinds of products people express interest in and therefore might be in the market to buy. You'll notice I said "attempt," not "succeed" in that sentence. That's because, while Facebook has been quite successful in getting people to disregard all notions of privacy with respect to their lives, they haven't solved the fundamental problem that computers simply can't derive someone's interests from their activities with any level of precision. Sure, you can try keyword matching and various tricks like that, but it's still just educated guesses— the same kind of "targeting" you get from a tracking cookie. They have all the data, but no way to interpret it.

Facebook tries to work around this problem by implementing the "like" button. They figure, "people are willing to make us privy to all of their private information, maybe we can make them do the work for us by explicitly telling us what their interests are in a manner we can readily interpret. So, we give each company that wants to market through us a big fancy "like" button, and allow the users that like them to register this approval!"

The first problem with this is that real humans do not genuinely like companies, so the entire concept makes no sense outside of the marketers' fantasy world where people emotionally connect with legal fictions and small pieces of intellectual property.

The second problem is that even if there are a few subhumans out there who define themselves by what brand of crisps they buy, Facebook has transformed the "like" into a supposed measure of popularity. Companies are desperate to be more popular than their competitors, and therefore desperate to get more "likes." This leads them to pursue more effective ways of gaining "likes," namely by paying money for them. Most companies will, at minimum, offer a discount in exchange for your willingness to click the "like" button, with some paying cashy money to buy bulk "likes" from dummy accounts, thus completely defeating the supposed purpose of the "like" button and turning it into a measurement of how much money you have invested in purchasing "likes."

But the "like" system resonates with marketers in no small part because it reinforces one of their prime delusions— namely, that people can genuinely like a company and thus hold loyalty to it and its products, and especially its brands. Accordingly, marketers become quite invested in the whole Facebook thing.

And so, a recent market research survey asked: "What percentage of your Facebook friends have you met in real life?"

That I wasn't on Facebook never even occurred to them.

Little Things That BUG Me #10

Complaining about Internet Exploder has already been done to death, and the only people who still use it are old people who don't know what Firefox is and need their grandsons to install it anyway. That said, I'm a Mac user, so I get to complain about Safari instead.

It's rubbish. There. Got that out of the way. Version 4 had a remarkable tendency to crash every time I visited certain websites which is not a very good feature in a browser by and large. Version 4 was the version I had because I hadn't bothered to install system updates— it's a Mac so (a) there's no malware that needs to be patched against and (b) if there were, there would be no patch released because Apple dropped support in 1987.

Well I finally got around to installing the system updates and Safari 5.0.6 came with them. This version no longer crashes, but it's extremely slow and tends to go unresponsive for a minute or two whenever I try to load most web pages, and unlike the earlier version, it is not capable of playing netflix videos without dropping frames. So yeah, not a very good browser. But then, it makes sense that Safari would be crap— it's made by Apple.

Besides, I expect Mac users, as a group, contain a much higher percentage of old people who would need their granddaughters to install Firefox for them, given that Apple products have this bizarre reputation of "user-friendliness" (which ten minutes of using an iPhone would trivially disprove). Personally, I use Apple products because I'm allergic to paying money for things and I keep finding Macs for free in various bins.

Web Design Commandments

Here are the commandments for web design. I may add to this list as I think of new stuff.

1. Thou shalt not have autoplay videos or sounds.

Seriously. It's annoying. Any web designer who violates this commandment shall be sentenced to have the video or audio play in their house simultaneous with each time it autoplays for a visitor to their website.

2. Thou shalt not use Javascript exit popups.

Here, I'm talking about "var exitsplashmessage." It causes a dialog box to pop up when the user tries to navigate away from the page. Don't do this. Ever. Doing so carries a sentence of being locked into every retail outlet you visit until you agree to hear a lengthy sales pitch.

3. Thou shalt not hijack system commands.

Here's a relatively innocent example. In Fruit OS, typing command-N opens a new window in Firefox. Unless, of course, I happen to have Hotmail open, in which case Hotmail hijacks that command and opens a new email within the browser tab. Don't. Just don't do this. The command key is reserved for local applications, and is not to be used by web content. Microsoft's web designers and anyone else who violates this commandment will be sentenced to have a smarmy-looking bloke follow them around who deliberately misinterprets everything they say as a solicitation for sex directed at him.

Metaphors And Realism: Breaking Bad Redux

Having made a very brief My Media Habits post for the show "Breaking Bad," in which I dismissed it as shite, I subsequently found, on a far more popular blog, a review of the show which praised it for a thorough deconstruction of male power tropes in culture; apparently, in the episodes I couldn't be bothered to watch, Walter White goes on at great length about how he's providing for his family while effectively screwing them over, which starkly parallels the way "family values" is used to justify male power at the expense of everybody, including men.

I don't much care.

One of the first things I learned about writing, when I was still cranking out terrible short stories in secondary school, is that all the metaphors in the world are wasted if the story doesn't make any sense on the surface. You can thoroughly deconstruct, parallel, satirise, or do whatever the hell you want to anything you want, but if, on an entirely concrete literal level, the story is absolute dross, you have failed and the only people who will pretend to like it are literature professors.

So I don't care what metaphors Breaking Bad manages to pack into the later episodes. The basic premise is too unrealistic and I don't buy it, therefore anything built on it is lost.

Free Fizzy Drinks

Ah, another upside to taking market research surveys for money. Today I was just shipped a crate of free fizzy drinks. I will be getting paid to drink them. And next week, I will be getting another crate and I will be paid to drink those too.

"Relevant Advert" Is A Contradiction

I'm in the middle of a market research survey that's asking me a whole bunch of questions about how much invasion of my privacy I'm willing to tolerate in order to receive more "relevant" adverts. The questions are all multiple choice, as usual, so let me spell it out for them here:

An advert is irrelevant BY DEFINITION. That's why you have to pay money to show it to me.

Are we clear now? Yes? Good.

Dispatches from Marketer World: Part 4— Tablets

Tablet PCs. Those things that are like laptops but don't have a keyboard or a proper operating system or any proper applications— just limited cut-down stuff they have to call "apps" for legal reasons. Or maybe they're mobiles you can't actually make calls on. They have some use, but you could invariably buy a laptop that does all of the same things as a tablet and more, but is also cheaper. Unless, of course, you get a knockoff tablet like the Shenzhen Haina Haipad, which barely works. I've mentioned tablets before (scroll down), and NO, I didn't sacrifice my principles at the same alter as when I bought the smartphone.

Apparently tablet PCs are all the rage among the easily swayed, to the point that they've effectively cannibalised the netbook market, although admittedly that's only because Apple doesn't make a netbook and people will rush out to buy anything Apple makes because they're mad.

Well apparently, as of the market research survey I took the other day, tablets are now something marketers simply assume that you own. In exchange for enough money to buy a tank of petrol for my three-inch-long model car, I provided my opinions on various brands (and it's always brands, innit) of electronic and whether I owned them and whether I'd consider buying them and similar drivel.

In this survey, it was simply assumed that I owned a tablet, and that I would buy another tablet when it broke or got stolen or couldn't run the latest update to "Where's the Rope's Angry Fruit" or a marketer told me it was obsolete or out of fashion or whatever.

They made a point of asking me whether I'd heard of Samsung and Motorola, in case I lived on the moon and wasn't at least familiar with the existence of major multinational corporations with advertising budgets bigger than the GDP of Namibia, but that I owned a tablet was simply assumed since even people who live on the moon own tablets because it's required by law.

Maybe it's because the names "Samsung" and "Motorola" are brands and marketers' obsession with brands makes them perpetually anxious that you won't have heard of theirs or won't emotionally connect with theirs, while the idea that you may not want their product because it's useless and expensive and the label has nothing to do with it never crosses their minds.

So yes. In marketer world, that you own an entirely redundant wad of electronics is simply assumed, but that you're at least dimly aware of the existence of Samsung and Motorola must be carefully ascertained because many people have never heard of massive multinational Japanese and Indian tech companies respectively. (That's what those are, right?)

At this point, clever people will have noticed that in the first paragraph I referred to a sacrificial location as an "alter" and, being clever, they got the joke in that I was sacrificing my principles and thus "altering" them. If you are observant but not clever, and thus noticed the "incorrect" term but didn't understand why it was used, then please refrain from commenting. It will only embarrass us both.