Sunday, October 12, 2008

Information: push or pull?

I've thought a bit about why advertisements annoy me so much, in my book the high treason of advertisements is delivery through the post to my front door. When I get ads this way I don't react with "hmm, this seems interesting", no instead I think "bloody buggers, one reason to never ever shop at their place". Might seem a bit radical but I hate being force-fed information about some random store and their current sales.

One possible reason has to do with this whole information-society we've got going now, every minute of every day we are fed information from lots of sources; magasines, blogs, podcasts, news and so on. The list just goes on and on. We have to establish filters to keep sane at all and these advertisements that get delivered to my home is harder to ignore, they try to force themselves through the filters and that gives me an ill feeling. And few postal officers seem to care about the "no advertisements please"-sign above my post box. But I do have a new sign in the works that might work better. Pictures coming up when done.

Advertisements notwithstanding, local news is apparently a big thing here. I receive not one but 2-3 local newspapers, without asking and they simply won't stop delivering them. I DO NOT CARE about local news. It's so small scale, I'm having trouble caring about some of the stuff in the national papers. People get riled in weird ways. Kill 3 000 civilians in africa and nobody raised an eyebrow, because everybody know people in africa die, kill 3000 civilians in the us and the whole world gets turned around. Kidnap a kid in asia and nobody notices. Kidnap a kid in south east asia and nobody cares. Kidnap a kid in Portugal or wherever it was and the papers write about it for bloody weeks.

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