(no subject)
Feb. 8th, 2011 10:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretCan't wait for shiny new laptop to show up. I'm thinking of naming it Thersites. My naming schema, for the unaware, is to name all computerish devices after characters from the Iliad. I came to this schema after exhausting the previous schema and vowing to find a naming schema I couldn't possibly exhaust.
Shiny new laptop will have shiny new CD/DVD burner, and I sprung foolishly for the extra money to have it be a Lightscribe drive. So I figure that after I work out how to use it, I'll be able to send out fancy personalized mix-CDs. It will also have a webcam, which I should probably figure out how to use. I'm so bad at staying in touch with people.
Two fun nights in New York in a row. Watched the Super Bowl with Mark at a bar near Madison Square Park. The forces of good defeated the forces of evil. Honestly, not much more to say than that.
Then the last night I was at the public coming out for Immodest Proposals, the salonfreeradical42 has taken to hosting to argue some interesting topic while drinking alcohol in the company of friendly people. He's been poking me to come for months- finally schedules aligned.
We talked about 'subvertising', apparently a new coinage for the old idea of fighting back against the advertising that surrounds us. Whether it be by altering print ads through vandalism, blocking web ads with AdBlock, skipping tv commercials with TiVo, there are a number of tools in the toolbox for waging a certain limited combat against advertising.
Of course, this provoked a discussion of whether such acts are ethical. We pondered, too briefly I felt, the question of when causing economic harm to an advertiser becomes a form of theft. My feeling, and it was an opinion clearly not shared by all in the room, is that subvertising is not an inherently unethical act, but that its existence in the margins of the law makes it conducive to unethical acts- acting to undermine an advertising campaign by vandalizing it carefully fits glove in hand with more banal acts of malicious vandalism. I was entertained by the litmus test proposed that vandalizing advertisements is acceptable "Only if it's really funny," but I think it sidesteps the more important issue that often such acts carry political significance and offer communicative power to the disenfranchised.
There was also an interesting detour into discussion about what kinds of advertisements make us want to fight back. The group was interestingly mixed between the skeptically devout and the devoutly skeptical, leading to a lively back and forth on the question of whether advertisements with religious content or advertisements with sexual content are more problematic, upsetting, or deserving of pushback. Here I advanced my growing understanding that religious advertisement is rarely directed at the unbeliever, that instead contemporary proselytization efforts have two purposes: 1)Literally, to fulfill the commandment to proselytize, regardless of impact and 2)To create an inclusion by creating an exclusion. The clearer missionaries can establish an us vs. them dynamic, the sharper the contrast they can create between believers and unbelievers, the better they can instill in their flock a sense of purpose and meaning. The more they can paint Jews and atheists and wrong Christians as people who have been handed the revelation and rejected it, the easier it is to make believers feel that they were the ones who had the special insight (reflex wants this word to be seychel) that made them accept revelation.
In any case, I had a lot of fun and the beer was good and I will be trying to make a more consistent effort in the future to attend, and if you're in the New York area you probably should give it a try, too. (Or also not in the New York area... I hear rumor of events in other places, too.)
Shiny new laptop will have shiny new CD/DVD burner, and I sprung foolishly for the extra money to have it be a Lightscribe drive. So I figure that after I work out how to use it, I'll be able to send out fancy personalized mix-CDs. It will also have a webcam, which I should probably figure out how to use. I'm so bad at staying in touch with people.
Two fun nights in New York in a row. Watched the Super Bowl with Mark at a bar near Madison Square Park. The forces of good defeated the forces of evil. Honestly, not much more to say than that.
Then the last night I was at the public coming out for Immodest Proposals, the salon
freeradical42 has taken to hosting to argue some interesting topic while drinking alcohol in the company of friendly people. He's been poking me to come for months- finally schedules aligned.We talked about 'subvertising', apparently a new coinage for the old idea of fighting back against the advertising that surrounds us. Whether it be by altering print ads through vandalism, blocking web ads with AdBlock, skipping tv commercials with TiVo, there are a number of tools in the toolbox for waging a certain limited combat against advertising.
Of course, this provoked a discussion of whether such acts are ethical. We pondered, too briefly I felt, the question of when causing economic harm to an advertiser becomes a form of theft. My feeling, and it was an opinion clearly not shared by all in the room, is that subvertising is not an inherently unethical act, but that its existence in the margins of the law makes it conducive to unethical acts- acting to undermine an advertising campaign by vandalizing it carefully fits glove in hand with more banal acts of malicious vandalism. I was entertained by the litmus test proposed that vandalizing advertisements is acceptable "Only if it's really funny," but I think it sidesteps the more important issue that often such acts carry political significance and offer communicative power to the disenfranchised.
There was also an interesting detour into discussion about what kinds of advertisements make us want to fight back. The group was interestingly mixed between the skeptically devout and the devoutly skeptical, leading to a lively back and forth on the question of whether advertisements with religious content or advertisements with sexual content are more problematic, upsetting, or deserving of pushback. Here I advanced my growing understanding that religious advertisement is rarely directed at the unbeliever, that instead contemporary proselytization efforts have two purposes: 1)Literally, to fulfill the commandment to proselytize, regardless of impact and 2)To create an inclusion by creating an exclusion. The clearer missionaries can establish an us vs. them dynamic, the sharper the contrast they can create between believers and unbelievers, the better they can instill in their flock a sense of purpose and meaning. The more they can paint Jews and atheists and wrong Christians as people who have been handed the revelation and rejected it, the easier it is to make believers feel that they were the ones who had the special insight (reflex wants this word to be seychel) that made them accept revelation.
In any case, I had a lot of fun and the beer was good and I will be trying to make a more consistent effort in the future to attend, and if you're in the New York area you probably should give it a try, too. (Or also not in the New York area... I hear rumor of events in other places, too.)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-09 05:57 pm (UTC)Word. For a while, I could attribute the lack-of-connect in the advertising to not really understanding their target audience. But the failure to improve, at all, over the past decades...? Ain't no explanation for that other than they were reaching their target audience just fine.
To me it looks like 1) following the letter of the law (imo, that doesn't reflect well on their gods, but what do I know about what their gods think of things?) and 2) the requisite pre-work for a nicely satisfying "I told you so" later. Your thesis about inclusion/exclusion is likely a more accurate interpretation of the latter dynamic -- more respectful, certainly, in that posits something other than petty small-mindedness. (My irritation with proselytizing, it shows.)