Modern civilization is bombarded daily and even hourly by advertising. It's on our radios and televisions, our buses and buildings; it's in our magazines, newspapers and books; we listen to them while on hold or watch them zip by while standing on the subway. It's so pervasive on the internet that it almost chokes our visual spectrum. Ads have so permeated our online gaming experiences as to demand categorization: advergaming.
Studies have shown that the average American sees anywhere between 247 to 3000 advertisements per day and the industry spends $620 billion to get those advertisements to us.
What does this mean to our society? The full implications of daily and hourly advertising hasn't yet been determined.
But, for me it's become my obsession to avoid them as much as possible. Driving to work today I purposefully ignored the blue Vote Conservative! signs that our local representative had his interns place every fifty feet on Sir John A. Macdonald Blvd. I spend minutes of my time surfing the internet using Firefox's AdBlock Add-on so that I can read my blogs or look at my porn or post on my forums ad-free. Recently, my parents started using a service on the Whig-Standard website that would randomly insert and advertisement for their business everytime the main page loads. Thing is, I never see them. I have all ads and iFrames blocked on that site so I can read my local news without being visually distracted. Unfortunately, in blocking all these ads, I'm not supporting the services I use...
And my answer to that? Too-freaking-bad.
Studies have shown that the average American sees anywhere between 247 to 3000 advertisements per day and the industry spends $620 billion to get those advertisements to us.
What does this mean to our society? The full implications of daily and hourly advertising hasn't yet been determined.
But, for me it's become my obsession to avoid them as much as possible. Driving to work today I purposefully ignored the blue Vote Conservative! signs that our local representative had his interns place every fifty feet on Sir John A. Macdonald Blvd. I spend minutes of my time surfing the internet using Firefox's AdBlock Add-on so that I can read my blogs or look at my porn or post on my forums ad-free. Recently, my parents started using a service on the Whig-Standard website that would randomly insert and advertisement for their business everytime the main page loads. Thing is, I never see them. I have all ads and iFrames blocked on that site so I can read my local news without being visually distracted. Unfortunately, in blocking all these ads, I'm not supporting the services I use...
And my answer to that? Too-freaking-bad.
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