Advertising

Does gemini have advertising? This boils down to how one defines advertising, which like spam, porn, or bears depends on "I'll know it when I see it". A narrow ruling may mandate an advertising company, that is, a commercial involvement with intent to sell. This would exclude other senses such as public notices (road closed due to sinkhole) or promotions: book reviews, great gadget geekouts, the latest game addiction, etc. Gemini has very little of the first sense, but does have the second and especially third. One can, typing in vi, also do product placement. Some placements are less clumsy and more relevant. For instance, the Psi Corps advertisement in Babylon 5 followed a regular advertising block, to the point that you might not realize at first that the show was back on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjaBcuiseO4

Was that some advertising for the Babylon 5 franchise? Maybe!

Of course one must mention "The Space Merchants" (Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, 1953) which takes advertising to an extreme, something like the Snowcrash corpos but with less cyberpunk. It's a cautionary tale, but some use it as a manual—why else would there be ads everywhere, and a ruthless devotion to prosumption?

> French avertissement (“warning”)

Now that's a mighty fine definition. Warning! Brain influencions ahoy!

> La empresa usa los medios de comunicación y las redes sociales para hacer propaganda de sus productos

Propaganda? Uh oh.

Back in English, some would have it that all speech is political, is selling something:

> This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

> — "Politics and the English Language". Eric Blair. 1946.

Eric Blair might fly by as forgettable; the more marketable name is George Orwell. The advice is for politics, though certainly it applies to advertisements.

The promotions in this posting are probably tolerable (if not the plosives): Babylon 5, a brace of scifi books, Kubrick, Orwell, vi, and a Monty Python reference if you squint hard enough. On the old web this may be problematic; user-provided promotions conflict with ads, on the reasonable assumption that humans have a limit, like in A Clockwork Orange, to how much their eyeballs can take. Free user-provided promotions thus interfere with Mammon maximalization by ad, which is why one might see pivots away from niche user-supplied content to sites more advertiser friendly. An analogy might be the shift from traditional cheese to a Standard American Cheese-like Slabs™, a suitable slurry for safely atomized content consumers.

Therein may lie some discontent.

tags #adspam