Psychology for the Short Attention Span
I’ve been away from writing on this site for a while for a couple of reasons.
The first was that the site was constantly being hi-jacked so that you, my friends, were forced to fight your way through full page ads to reach the site. I’d said ‘no’ to offers to advertise on MysteryShrink for reasons that have most Americans certifying that I am nuts which is always a possibility.
When I click on a subject, I expect to reach that subject without battles to find the danged ‘x’ for each advance. I don’t expect for the person inviting me to their page to steal a piece of my life-time. To me (and I realize I’m a relic) when an unrequested page jumps up in front of me, it’s like I’m strolling down the sidewalk enjoying the universe, the flowers, the people–all of life–and then someone jumps in front of me and forces me to stop immediately my intentions and to pay attention to them.
To me, that’s an invasion of personal freedom. If I person did what these obnoxious blockers do, we’d call it bullying. And not “business as usual, to be expected, what can you do?”
You want to hear something funny? Back in graduate school, we were all in knots about something called ‘subliminal’ advertising. With this method, you could be watching a movie and a barely discernable flash of a box of popcorn would faintly contact your brain and theaters would sell more popcorn.
Should this invasion of personal liberty be legal?
A little background. My parents were not excited consumers. They would not buy a car unless the dealer would unscrew the company name from the back of the car. We were not allowed to put a college decal across the back window of the car because not everyone had the opportunity to go to college, so to advertise your good fortune was rude. Forget class rings. Basing your sense of self on “likes” would have been a crime. My Danish father’s words: “If you are a worthy person act like one. Let ‘who you are’ tell ‘who you are.'”
