Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Sunday July 19 2015, @09:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the averse-to-adverts dept.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation carries a piece of analysis/commentary on the societal ethics of advertising. I found it fascinating by the depth of arguments (true, there is a bias, but it's likely that most of us soylents share it); do take your time to read it in full, my attempts to summarize it below is bound to fail:

Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted.

Two problems result from this. The solution to both requires legal recognition of the property rights of human beings over our attention.

First, advertising imposes costs on individuals without permission or compensation. It extracts our precious attention and emits toxic by-products, such as the sale of our personal information to dodgy third parties.

Second, you may have noticed that the world's fisheries are not in great shape. They are a standard example for explaining the theoretical concept of a tragedy of the commons, where rational maximising behaviour by individual harvesters leads to the unsustainable overexploitation of a resource.

A classic market failure

The advertising industry consists of the buying and selling of your attention between third parties without your consent. That means that the cost of producing the good — access to your attention — doesn't reflect its full social cost.

...Since advertisers pay less to access your attention than your attention is worth to you, an excessive (inefficient) amount of advertising is produced.

...It's a classic case of market failure. The problem has the same basic structure as the overfishing of the seas or global warming. In economics language, people's attention is a common good.

Why now?

First, as we have become more wealthy our consumption decisions have become more valuable...

Second, a shift in social norms has made it more acceptable to sell other people's attention.... Anyone in a position to access our attention, like the managers of pubs or hockey arenas, will be approached by multiple companies offering to pay a fee to install their advertising screens, banners, or cookies...

Thirdly, technology has made advertising even more intrusive. Not only is it now possible to print advertisements on grocery store eggs and to put digital displays above pub urinals.... Every moment we spend on the internet or with our smart phones is being captured, repackaged and sold to advertisers multiple times...

Counter-counter arguments: How economists defend advertising and why it isn't enough

  1. The direct value of advertising First is that advertising gives consumers valuable information about the sellers and prices of products they want to buy. The favoured example here is the classified ads section in newspapers.... Perhaps it was the case in 1961 that consumers struggled to find such information for themselves. But it is hard to see how this can still be the case in the internet age...

    Advertising can be used to reduce competition: high spending by rich established players drowns out information from smaller newer competitors and thus creates an entry barrier, converting markets to oligopolies...

    Second is the counter-intuitive claim that brands communicate their trustworthiness by their conspicuous expenditure on advertising not by what it actually says....[but]Companies wanting to demonstrate their confidence in their products don't have to waste so much of our time to do so. There are all sorts of more constructive ways of spending money conspicuously.

    Third, is the social status that advertising can confer on a product and its consumption. What's the point of buying a Rolex or Mercedes unless the people around you know that it is expensive and are able to appreciate how rich and successful you must be? The business logic here is sound, but not the moral logic.

  2. Financing public goodsAdvertising is the financial model for many pure public goods like terrestrial television and radio, as well as club goods like newspapers, Google's search/email and Facebook... Advertising provides an alternative revenue source that makes it possible to profitably provide such services universally at the marginal cost of production — that is, zero.

    There are alternatives. If these things are so valuable to society there is a case for supporting them from with taxes — grants, license fees (many national broadcasters) or payments for ratings. This is a well-established system for funding public and club goods...

    Alternative models, like that of Wikipedia, are sometimes possible and are more socially — that is, economically — efficient. Wikipedia's value to consumers is in the hundreds of billions of dollars while its annual operating costs are only $25 million...
      Obviously Wikipedia's operating costs are so low, like Mozilla's, because of its volunteer labour force. But that fact just makes one wonder why we couldn't have a "democratic" Facebook too, and whether that would not be superior from a social welfare perspective to the current "farming model" of extracting maximum value from its members-cum-livestock.

The right to preserve our attention

Advertising is a valuable commercial opportunity for businesses with access to consumers' attention, or their personal information. For the companies that buy and sell our attention it is — as all voluntary transactions must be — a win-win. But advertising lacks the free market efficiency that is claimed for it. Advertising is made artificially cheap, like the output of a coal burning power station, because the price at which it is sold doesn't reflect its negative effects on third parties — us.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Funny) by VortexCortex on Monday July 20 2015, @01:18AM

    by VortexCortex (4067) on Monday July 20 2015, @01:18AM (#211237)

    Oh dear, it seems I'm obliged to don the storytime tinfoil and tell you a tale of yesteryear.

    Once upon a time, in the mid 1970's, a spinoff from the allegedly defunct MKULTRA project discovered the Microwave Auditory Effect. [wikipedia.org] This is a method for remotely producing sound inside someone's head, whether they want to hear voices or not. Other methods were discovered of manipulating minds with directed energy weapons. [wired.com] These were utilized against the public in order to try driving people crazy via inducing irrational emotions, causing confusion, anxiety, and invoking paranoia as part of COINTELPRO. [wikipedia.org] During this time a disinformation campaign was created to conflate activists and conspiracy theorists who protected themselves from attack as insane. As successful as the media meme was, being called a "Tinfoil Hat Conspiracy Theorist" did not reduce the effectiveness of said headgear. As the energy weaponry became more common knowledge the Army was cleared to use some forms as crowd control via "pain rays" that heat people with microwaves. [youtube.com] As the federal agencies began using the tech to harass people more often the police took an interest and have been equipping themselves and their jails with energy weapons. [youtube.com] Other energy weapons for mind control could also be mounted on such platforms with minimal modification and some contractors began prototyping this psychological weaponry. [wired.com] However, the projects went dark and the Army removed the V2K (voice to skull) page it once had publicly available. [wired.com]

    Interestingly enough, one of the original applications of the voice-to-skull microwave technology would be to have a "hypnotist" whisper subliminal thoughts into a target's head. This was echoed again in the article about screaming microwave crowd deterrents when it was suggested that instead of a hypnotist they could employ an advertisement agency and rather than enemy soldiers they could target ordinary consumers by whispering subliminal purchasing suggestions into their minds instead of invoking horrific psychological terrors (how one tells the difference is beyond me).

    Dr. Sadovnik also makes the intriguing suggestion that, instead of being used at high power to create an intolerable noise, it might be used at low power to produce a whisper that was too quiet to perceive consciously but might be able to subconsciously influence someone. The directional beam could be used for targeted messages, such as in-store promotions. Sadovnik even suggests subliminal advertising, beaming information that is not consciously heard ...

    Now, just as I was once considered insane for suggesting that the government was spying on all communications under the Carnivore [wikipedia.org] and ECHELON programs decades before Snowden's PRISM leaks, I am still considered quite crazy for suggesting that Mind Control rays are very real -- "Mad as a Tinfoil Hatter", you might say. I've catalogued much evidence first hand of the use of even more advanced energy weaponry secretly deployed against citizens, but you'll have to wait for someone else to go public to hear about it (or until the state foolishly disappears me and one of my deadman's switches leaks the keys to my insurance files).

    And that, gznork26, is how Tinfoil Hats were born.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +4  
       Interesting=1, Informative=1, Funny=2, Total=4
    Extra 'Funny' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 1) by gznork26 on Monday July 20 2015, @01:28AM

    by gznork26 (1159) on Monday July 20 2015, @01:28AM (#211242) Homepage Journal

    Thanks for taking that next step for me. I'd read about a lot of that stuff already. Getting people to take the first timid step out of 'accepted reality' can be the hardest, and trickiest part of waking them up to what's really going on. Tell them too much all at once and a lot of people throw up their 'shields' and turn you off entirely.

  • (Score: 2) by captain normal on Monday July 20 2015, @03:20AM

    by captain normal (2205) on Monday July 20 2015, @03:20AM (#211264)

    Didn't you ever hear of tin foil hats? like a Faraday cage, it can block all kinds of radiation.

    --
    When life isn't going right, go left.
  • (Score: 2) by penguinoid on Monday July 20 2015, @04:55AM

    by penguinoid (5331) on Monday July 20 2015, @04:55AM (#211287)

    You're the first real live tin foil hat conspiracy theorist that I've had contact with.

    To be honest, the non-tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists sound crazier -- it seems that the government really can influence your emotions and get a voice in your head using EM waves. Although if I was worried about that I think I'd go with an EM field strength detector/recorder, as the hats aren't in style anymore.

    --
    RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by wantkitteh on Monday July 20 2015, @11:39AM

    by wantkitteh (3362) on Monday July 20 2015, @11:39AM (#211374) Homepage Journal

    Damnit, how can I mod this informative AND funny at the same time?

  • (Score: 1) by dr_barnowl on Monday July 20 2015, @12:57PM

    by dr_barnowl (1568) on Monday July 20 2015, @12:57PM (#211386)

    I do wonder if the Hum [wikipedia.org] is actually a psych-ops programme sometimes - for those affected it certainly is debilitating to one degree or another.