And I’ll let someone else tell you how ; – )
This item describes it pretty well. While blog-surfing, I ran across This Public Address, who wrote:
Watching the Dave Chappell show last night, I saw an interesting bit on the Internet as a place—Chappell contended that if it were a place, none of us would dare to be seen there. He saw it as a seedy neighborhood, full of people hawking porn and penis-enlargement creams. I started thinking about how I’ve been dealing with it for the past few years.
First, I seldom travel to commercial sites. Period. Unless I’m ordering a book, or click through on some blogger’s link by mistake—I hate advertisements. I avoid them wherever I can, and I can usually find out what I want to know with only infrequent visits to newspapers and magazine sites that inundate you with pop-ups and banner ads. If I see “google ads” on a blog, I sometimes de-link it just because being sold at annoys me. Of course, it’s impossible to avoid the ads completely (especially when weeding them in my email) but I make a conscious effort to “tune-out” advertising.
It is increasingly difficult to do this, but still, I think of the blogs I read as a sort of oasis outside the commercial maelstrom. If I am shopping, ads don’t bother me. But I spend very little time, relatively, shopping. I spend more time reading. Growing up through fads of designer clothes and such, I often wondered why people would consciously wear advertising as a fashion/status statement. That’s what always bothered me about apple users—“look at me, I’m different”—because I use this product?
Even the name of the practice bothers me—branding. It seems to me that it would hurt. Why do people insist on it?
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