Tom’s Wordpress Blog

I’ve been noticing the ubiquitous sound track of everyday life. Not in the metaphorical sense, either. You hear background music in almost every eating place, coffee shop, store or other place of business. It’s so everywhere that it’s hardly noticeable. Except that it is. And the ear isn’t the only one being assaulted with ubiquitous information being slung our way. Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See An Ad adds blank spaces to the endangered list. And a pretty good bit of newspeak from one of the slingers:

“We never know where the consumer is going to be at any point in time, so we have to find a way to be everywhere,” said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive at the Kaplan Thaler Group, a New York ad agency. “Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.”

Elevator music and printed ads on air sickness bags are part of what I see as a larger issue - unrequested information. Advertisements, junk mail, telemarketers, spam, or whatever. Now I realize that sometimes advertising is the tradeoff you have to make for so-called free content. But ads printed on on the paper liners of examination tables in pediatricians’ offices? Come on!

Unrequested information costs a lot in time and money. It’s not only distracting, but it takes time and sometimes money to deal with some of it. An entire industry has grown up to deal with spam, and sometimes you have to buy extra software dedicated to that task. Privacy managers from phone companies cost extra and don’t always block tele-marketers. Shredders have become a routine part of home offices.

Of course we can ignore all of this. After all, one of the ways our human nervous system deals with low impact stimulii is to ignore them. If you can. Another approach is a bit more academic. In Attentional Economics , the idea is to give you something of value for your attention. Maybe this is what have to expect when the cost of producing and distributing information falls to almost nothing. You’re gonna get information, whether or not you asked for it. And you can also make and distribute information )read: content) yourself. Witness blogging, podcasting and the like.

So, the soundtrack plays ever on. If only it were composed by Bernard Herman instead of Hermans Hermits.