There’s advertising on the Internet?

The only thing more depressing than the content and obnoxiousness of most advertising today is having the knowledge that somewhere, probably in a big city, people are actually responsible for creating that particular piece of propaganda, probably while congratulating each other on how clever they all are. Instead of providing useful information about a given product, modern advertisements are, in large part, lies that seek to coerce, through psychologically manipulative means, people to buy low-quality products (with planned obsolescence, of course) that they don’t need. Perhaps the worst part is that it is pretty much unavoidable.

It didn’t take too long before advertisers realized they could spread their poisonous messages all over the Internet, just like they had earlier corrupted radio, public television, cable television, satellite radio, newspapers, video games, movies, sports telecasts, sporting events, and magazines, to name a few. Web advertising has morphed from blinking text to banners to pop-ups to Flash movies. For obvious reasons, I will not link to any examples of the abominations of which I have just written.

Much to the dismay of scheming advertisers, people can filter out internet advertising if they find the right tools and read instructions on how to use them. Firefox is a browser that allows for people to write “extensions” that provide extra functionality not available in Firefox. Some of these extensions even block advertisements, and people have written filter lists that contain rules for certain ad-blocking extensions to use in order to block as many ads as possible in a way that is transparent to the user. Another approach to ad-blocking works by mapping certain web addresses to a person’s local computer in a particular file so that when a web site requests a connection to that web site, the computer will try to connect to that site on the person’s computer rather than the actual web site, thus preventing the advertisement from even being downloaded.

Although I could write a really long rant on advertising and may do so at some point, I don’t object to the idea of advertising but only if advertising means simply to provide information about a product to potential customers. Without advertising at all, I’d imagine it would be difficult for many businesses to succeed at all because no one would ever hear about the products, and this means that people would not be able to find products that they really do need. I cannot stand the in-your-face, constant barrage of transparently condescending advertising that feeds on the emotions rather than that gives useful information about a product or service, and thankfully I can avoid most of it while I’m browsing the Internet.