There are lots of cultural opposition movements online, like against work exploitation, consumerism, car culture, surveillance, intellectual property, etc. I can find communities on lemmy for all those topics. But regarding a more general opposition to advertisements and marketing, other than the occasional person telling others to use adblockers online (what about ads in every day life?), I fail to see organized attempts to challenge advertisements. There is a lot that can be scrutinized. Ethical concerns such as manipulation, lack of consent and just the simple fact your attention is for sale. The effects range from damage to environment, to our mental health, to harming industries themselves, lowering product quality and maintaining monopolies.
So I am a perception researcher. There is research on a lot of tactics for advertising.
There are laws now, shaped by that research, that prevent advertisers from using specific symbols used to mark materials and locations for safety. For instance.
The symbol for radiation is not allowed on advertising.
Do you know why?
Maybe you have a pretty good idea.
The symbol will lose not only its meaning when applied to non radiation areas. But it loses salience.
Salience is how attention-grabbing something is. There are specific features of things in the world that our perpetual system was designed to notice more. Because these are important to us in some functional way. They help us navigate our environment.
Bright colors. High contrast. Unusual Geometrics. And movement.
Another important thing about the perception system is it’s adaptiveness. Highly adaptive. Even at older ages.
But very very adaptive at young ages.
An example. Kittens raised in spaces with only vertical black and white lines and never allowed to see any other orientation or color. (Blindfolded when fed and most of the time). When these cats were put in a room with horizontal lines. They could not “see” them. And ran into the walls. They never regained their ability to see horizontal lines nor any other orientation since this loss happened since birth.
This is because specific neurons in your primary cortex respond to specific orientations. If they never fire from lack of stimuli. They die.
Now that’s an extreme version. But what I trying to get at is this:
The sensory system is highly adaptive to the environment. It provides what the person needs.
When we are bombarded with adds that all use salient stimuli (bold colors, moving, high contrast), we start tunning these out. They become “low salient”.
Why is this a problem. ?
Because the brain processing at early sensory attention cannot “tell the difference” between a billboard advertising video playing in your periphery trying to grab your attention. And a small child running in the periphery that will end up in front of your car.
We are “learning” to not see movement. Or at least not direct our attention to it to identify what it is.
We are learning to not see bold colors and high contrast.
Things that we actually do need to see most of time. People are still missing safety and warning signs all the time because advertisements try to grab our attention and we learned to ignore anything bold.
This is not speculation. Lots of research on this. Being constantly surrounded by advertisement changes salience of important visual and audio cues.
It also has cognitive effects like exhaustion.
But I’m not as versed on those as the perception parts. That’s my area of expertise.
I say, we as scientist must prove ads are harming us. Get legislation passed to protect people and kids.
But there already is evidence. And nothing is done.
No one cares. No one can fight lobbyists.
And it’s hard to quantify the damage. Like specifically risk increases and the like.
Very difficult to do.
No control subjects.
So the research is often dismissed as speculation on real world applied harm.
There are some laws in some places. But not enough.
Thank you, this was fascinating.
I’m very interested in what a perception researcher does day to day. But yeah, research showed cigarettes were harmful way before anything was done. Research is showing climate change is real, and recycling isn’t effective, and vaccines are safe. I fear we’re headed to a second dark age.
Mostly writing for me right now. I finished up my doctorate research experiments in June and now I’m writing my dissertation.
After I’m done I plan to teach and continue doing research.
I exclusively do in-person research.
Nothing online. This is a bit more challenging as I have to set up a room and schedule people. And they often don’t show. So it’s exhausting sometimes.
My doctorate research is on depth perception based on motor feedback from the lens in your eye that focuses light.
I might continue to do a little more research in this area but my next interest is in motion sickness from visual and vestibular cues in moving vehicles.
As a general rule, I research multisensory systems. I have little interest in studying an isolated system. Boring.
So motion sickness. It’s like getting car sick. Especially if reading.
I have some theories on how to combat this and want to test my hypothesis.
I get motion sick easy so this is also personal for me to find solutions.
Graduate work is not too different from what I will be doing after I graduate.
Teaching. doing experiments. And lots and lots of writing.
I already did teaching and teaching assistant as a grad student. I quite liked it and received a graduate teaching assistant award. So I think I’m well suited to it. Teaching isn’t for everyone tho.
But I don’t want to fully give up research to devote all my time to teaching, so I’m going to try to do both.
Most professors do both.
That’s pretty cool, thanks for sharing. I always found psych experiments super interesting but didn’t think I could make a career out of it.
Well the thing about careers in research is that pretty much all require at least a masters and most require a PhD.
For example. I could teach at colleges with a master’s. But I’m not qualified to run experiments unless I have a PhD.
Usually only community colleges and small religious colleges hire professors with only a master’s.
Most other colleges or universities prefer or require a PhD.
When I first started college, at age 24, I just wanted to get some education to get a better job.
Psych was not even on my radar.
I took a class because why not. Did well. Took a few more psych classes. Before I knew it, I had enough for it to qualify as my major.
I talked to the chair professor and told him. I didn’t want to major in psych because 1. Everyone I knew who was a psych major never even finished their degree. 2. I didn’t want to go to school for another 10 years to be able to work in the field.
I said I didn’t want to be 40 before I finished.He said. Dani. You are going to be 40 regardless. You want to have a degree and a career that suits you or not by the time you are 40?.
So here I am. Turned 40 in May. 😅
I may need to explain why it took me so long.
I did my associates and bachelor’s half time because I worked full time during those degrees. So they took me 8 years. Then half a year gap. Then 1 year masters. Then 1 gap year. Then started PhD. 6 year program. I have 2 masters now. In the same exact field.
I was not competitive enough to get into a PhD program without research experience. That’s why I had to get a master’s first.
Younger people with more free time often work as research assistants. I didn’t have that option as I had a full time job plus school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outdoor_advertising#Regulations billboards are banned in several cities and, surprisingly, in four entire states of the US.
I’d join. Ads do nothing but damage to society. How much? Well they manipulate people to make suboptimal choices and waste at least as much as the advertisers budget (on average), or they would stop doing it. So it’s at least 775 billion dollars per year. Rising annually. Enough to end world hunger and homelessness.
My eyes opened when a videogame in a company I worked for (I worked on another title) was made under hard conditions, polished, pushed under almost burnout conditions to be finished “in time”, and the budget for commercials was 4x the dev budget…
Im here to remind you that someone is wasting untold millions marketing GTA6.
Rockstar could literally say nothing, preview nothing, zero demos, zero screenshots and drop GTA6 randomly one weekend and make a billion dollars.
Yet the money is wasted.
Just make a new 2D isometric Iceland Dale and it will sustain a small dev team no problemo IMO. Then don’t push the tech but write new stories and expand the world. But no, it doesn’t have microtransactions and you can’t get funding without selling your soul I guess.
I’d love working on a project like that, I miss the old game dev days 😊😌.
You know, if I gained that knowledge as an employee I would go apeshit and probably quit. Now I’m going to find out how much my employer uses on advertising and find a way to throw it in their face…
Advertisements are a thing where you can turn them off and basically suffer none of the negative externalities (escaping the tracking is a LOT harder). There’s no real reason to form a movement over a basically solved issue.
On your phone, browser, yes… Highway bilboards, gas pumps, mcdonalds screens, supermarket screens, eyedoctor appointments, clinic waiting rooms, public spaces, and … baiscally anywhere outside of home… littered with ads everywhere you turn.
Just stare at your phone instead like a normal person.
Tell me you’re terminally online without telling me you’re terminally online
Depends. Fediverse challenges advertisement. Adblockers challenge advertisement. People switching to piracy after amazon and netflix pushing for more adds challenges advertisements.
Is there a united movement? No. But that’s partly because those that do care have an adblocker and rarely see ads.
You’d have to advertise an anti-advertisement campaign. 🥲
But seriously, I think most of this concern would fall under a subsection of a comprehensive Privacy Act.
I had to scroll way too far down the pageto find this (i trynot to duplicateanother’s comments). At the core of some of thescummy advertisements is profiling, enhanced by privacy violations. Remove the abikity to track you around the internet and IRL and advertisements become less obtrusive.
The other side of the coin is that it costs so little to add adverts to a web page, so why not collect a little cash to help offset your hosting costs? Remove the profiling and Google & friends don’t have a leg to stand on, so then when you visit a cooking blog you see ads for kitchen utensils. No biggie. Looking for auto repair articles? Check out this awesome wrench! At least you now don’t go to show your mom some wedding venue you’re thinking about renting alongside an ad for ED meds from the dark market.
not until poverty ends
I have become an advocate not only against ads but for mental integrity as a whole. No more deceitful manipulation of the mind allowed. No more disinformation or dark patterns accepted at all. I know it’s naive to think that possible, but why even try if we’re not aiming for the perfect utopia?
You are right there isn’t much Kelly community on that. But there is some materialized movement. You should have a look at https://subvertisers-international.net/zap-games/ (I don’t know subvertisers-international, but I participate multiple time to the ZAP games)
There is relatively big ones including political organization who cover ads, or sue all ads not matching environmental laws, and a whole ad-free social media trend like for example Lemmy
It depends what you mean by movement, and where you mean.
There are already some direct action movements on the ground, like Subvertisers International, Adbusters and historically B.U.G.A.U.P to name some famous Western ones.
