I'm Being Marketed

I had a problem with my Nook yesterday, so I googled and tried a couple of things which of course didn't work.  So first order of business this Sunday morning was to call the help desk.  Since help desks tend to have a minimum of people answering a maximum of calls, and horrible music interrupted by recorded voices telling you how important your business is and to please hang on, so that it's impossible to do anything constructive while waiting, I have learned that Sunday morning is the fastest way to get a human.

Despite the fact that Barnes & Noble probably don't have enough people on hand to tend to telephone help, they still manage to have someone answer the phone and take down your totally non-relevant information, email address, snail mail address, etc., before they put you on hold so someone from their "technical support" desk can help you.  I assume the middle-man was there in order to get you back on mailing lists, B & N data lists, etc.

So by the time I got the poor guy who had to help me, and he asked me the same personal questions the first person did, I was waving my middle finger around the room, but being polite to my assigned helper, which I learned to do in order not to be verbally rude and nasty to the poor guy on the other end, who is, after all, not at all to blame.

My help desk guy didn't seem to know much about my Nook (one of the older, cheaper, simpler "Simple Touches").  He had to keep looking things up, would forget to tell me to take a important step, or tell me to do something I had already done.  And of course, he had to eventually, more than once, "consult" with someone.

At one point, I realized that the questions that were being asked had to do with the validity of the book I had transferred that would give me an "account not activated" message.  Basically, the help guy was trying to find out if the problem was maybe I had "stolen" a book.  Without saying as much.  When I realized what was going on, and informed him that I only had library books on the Nook, the line of questioning changed immediately.

Eventually we got it worked out.  It was indeed a simple solution to a simple problem, and hopefully I learned something as a result of the 45 minutes we explored that little slice of technology together.

But it continues to infuriate me the extent to which my Nook tries to have a relationship with me.  It gives me recommendations; it needs to know how to contact me; I need to be attached to Barnes & Noble in order to own and use my Nook.

In all the centuries we have been reading, brief attempts at marketing in books (inserts, product placement) have been limited, and scorned.  Yet online we have the Brave New World of marketing.  Everywhere.  In every single aspect of our lives, including the books we read, much like in a J. G. Ballard story.  And it seems to be okay with us.

I would just like to ask anyone who may be reading this to step outside of the internet world and look objectively at all the electronic conveniences that stem from that world.  The mail that has advertising personally directed to you based on analysis of your emails.  The ads that are all over Facebook and Words With Friends.  Paid advertising on blogs, in newspaper articles, in search engines.  The ever more ubiquitous YouTube ads.

If you really paid attention, you might find that it was at the very least annoying, but at worst these messages control us.  We may not run out and buy what is being sold (although the assumption is that we just might), but the advertising is affecting the way we use our time, forcing us to sit through ads, or interfering with our reading of an article.  And for god's sake, they almost entirely represent electronic snooping into our computers.

We're all being marketed online, and we might just want to do something about it.  While we still have enough consciousness left to do it.