Asklemmy

Yeah but it needs good marketing

Adblocking is my movement

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outdoor_advertising#Regulations billboards are banned in several cities and, surprisingly, in four entire states of the US.

I think the abundance of tools available to block ads online hints at a movement in itself. We don't need a leader or a central committee.

The wrinkle I see here is that a generalized 'everybody' hates ads but 'everybody' is also aware of the fact that they finance a large swath of stuff that we would have to pay for otherwise.

People mentioned Ad Busters and others, but No Logo was pretty formative for me. It's not exactly what you asked about (it's a book, not a movement), but I think it continues to point that people have been acting against advertising for decades.

Just, you know, they don't have a ton of money...

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.

I dont think the main stream will ever meaningfully turn against advertising. We've collectively demonstrated that we're willing to accept advertising and trade our privacy in exchange for free content and services.

That said, the worse the main stream web gets the better the "side web" gets. The good parts of the web will always exist, even if they're not as popular as they once were.

I remember a time when webpages had banner ads that didn’t flicker and make it impossible to read the page, and that also weren’t based on corporations spying on you. If it had stopped there, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. Even a few second pre-roll ad before a video starts based on the video content and not the user’s history would be annoying, but something a lot of people would tolerate. But no, number must go up!

No it will not. In order for an anti-advertising movement to grow it will need to advertise..

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.

It was a thing back in the late 1990s as part of the antiglobalization movement. Look up old issues of the Adbusters magazine or Naomi Klein’s book ‘No Logo’

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.

I think if such a movement ever does arise (independent of a generally sympathetic unrelated movement such as a communist one) it will only be after things get a whole lot worse. Like they're going to have to be projecting ads on the moon, filling every inch of public space with ads, replacing all music at stores with nonstop ads, etc before people will start saying "hey, this is seriously too much" and then that may eventually lead to the public perception emerging that almost any advertising is too much.

Here people regularly smash those stupid add posters everywhere or replace them with militant ones.

Adbusters magazine

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?

Ads are just the tools of propaganda turned inward for the benefit of the market, right? I think we'd need more consciousness on just how much propaganda there is, and how much of society / our world is shaped by it, before there's a strong anti-ad backlash in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters

Unfortunately people are too addicted to stuff and tolerant of the rich and greedy to push back. Ads are accepted, along with the many other ills of consumerism and overreach.

how would you spread the word about it

the browser thing is pretty organic, it's another level to get people defacing billboards and shit. there's a little bit of that, i think mostly at bus stops.

you're better off doing something with local government to get stuff banned for spoiling the area's natural beauty like some US states do on the claim that it's better for tourism not to have ads everywhere.

I have met several people who told me they don’t mind advertising. Unfortunately, I don’t think you’re gonna convince enough of the normies to get rid of advertising wholesale

On the other hand, I think pretty much everyone can agree that the current amount of advertising is excessive, especially when consuming media. A movement against excessive advertising would be a lot more successful imo

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.

Billboards and other physical ads and such suck but are thankfully already mostly illegal where I live.

Problem with other kinds of advertising is that it can't be made illegal, not truly. People would still do it, it would just not be marked as such. I'm not sure how to fix this.

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

not until poverty ends

I fail to see organized attempts to challenge advertisements.

I think lot of that is embedded in the privacy communities/movement, so it gets easily overlooked as a separate part, even though most of the time it actually is the cause of the disease. Many times it's just easier to treat the symptoms ("just install adblocker, bro") because the real cure is to topple the entire system and challenge our late stage capitalism. That tends to be a bit too much for a "normie" who doesn't necessarily even see the constant flow of ads as a problem and even if they do, installing a browser plugin tends to be "lol, too much work"

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)