interactive advertising?

[jake williams]

Is there a reason we don't see more interactive advertising - say, before videos and flash games? I remember an Energizer ad where you had to click and drag the batteries to the bunny and press an "on" button or something before the video would run. I feel like I remember this being the fantasy of advertisers as the internet was becoming popular, but it doesn't seem to have really materialized, is there a reason?

Maybe more of a technical question or a cultural question than an explicitly political question, but it's interesting nonetheless. I think it would be really bad for the left to fall beyond innovations in the use of technology by the ruling class.

[Dean]

Is there a reason we don't see more interactive advertising - say, before videos and flash games? I remember an Energizer ad where you had to click and drag the batteries to the bunny and press an "on" button or something before the video would run. I feel like I remember this being the fantasy of advertisers as the internet was becoming popular, but it doesn't seem to have really materialized, is there a reason?

Maybe more of a technical question or a cultural question than an explicitly political question, but it's interesting nonetheless. I think it would be really bad for the left to fall beyond innovations in the use of technology by the ruling class.

I don't know what you mean by the left in this case - the left doesn't utilize an aggressive marketing campaign as it is.

But in terms of advertisements, they are primarily a capitalist assertion onto the consumer. Due to this nature, the consumer has not yet willingly embraced advertising (except for in certain contexts, like sports and Ninja Turtles) as it is something done to them.

To me, this speaks to the character of the human animal as a very independent, critical creature - whatever clearly seeks to assert itself on to us is always viewed with some degree of cautiousness.

What I see is the permeation of advertising, and other marketing methods, into the character of our activity as human beings (labor). This is far more insidious than interactive online media, and allows the entirety of human labor to become a tool in the furtherance of capital.

[jake williams]

I don't know what you mean by the left in this case - the left doesn't utilize an aggressive marketing campaign as it is.
What I mean is we have to have an understanding of what's going on in the economy and society.

[¿Que?]

Advertisement is bad enough without having to perform labor to get rid of it. I'd rather wait it out. What if it gets so bad you have to actually be good at it (like a video game) in order to get to the desired content? Furthermore, what if that labor is somehow appropriated to the accumulation of capital. It would be some sort of techno slavery or something.

Science fiction?

Actually, something to this effect is already happening with captchas. I'm not sure how it works exactly, but I think I heard that captchas were being used to transcribe books or something. I can't find a link, it was a while ago. Technology moves so fast...

I also heard that warez sites sometimes make use of captchas not that they create, but that are actually captchas from things like email accounts, using human labor to solve a technological obstacle that software can't solve. You're average warez downloader thinks it's just another captcha, whereas in reality he is creating a new spam email account for the warez site owners.

I'm really not sure if these ideas are any good or if technology has surpassed the need for this type of appropriation of human labor (labor as leisure etc). I know with Adobe reader, all I have to do after scanning a document is press a button, and the whole thing is text searchable. I really don't know why people ever thought (or still think) we can appropriate labor from leisure activities, but I'll let them cappies have their dream. Also, I'm not sure how relevant that was to your post, but it's the first thing I thought of.

[anticap]

What if it gets so bad you have to actually be good at it (like a video game) in order to get to the desired content?

What with PC-gaming being decimated, in terms of both quality and complexity, by the mad rush of developers to the dumbed-down console model (many PC games are now ported from the console versions, almost as an afterthought), I don't think you need to worry. :lol: (Point being that what it means to be "good" at video games is declining rapidly.)


Actually, something to this effect is already happening with captchas. I'm not sure how it works exactly, but I think I heard that captchas were being used to transcribe books or something. I can't find a link, it was a while ago. Technology moves so fast...

I believe you're referring to reCAPTCHA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA). Given the unfortunate necessity of that sort of thing, I though reCAPTCHA was a great idea: help digitize books while protecting against bots. Sadly, it was recently "captcha'd" by Google, I'm guessing because it threatened their own digitizing business model (http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/30/google_faces_antitrust_investigation_for_agreement ) somehow.