Guilty! Your post was a question about an aspect of advertising, and I went further.
"But rights to what, exactly? Screen space? Eyeballs? Bandwidth along the pipe? Who's pipe is it, anyway?"
It seems to me we can question the underlying assumptions governing our use of broadcast media (internet or otherwise). "Bandwidth", yes. Energy usage, too. Spectrum.
Upstream, you ended a post with the following:
"That is, until the power grid takes a sustained hit. At that point, all bets are off."
At some point, the power demands of transmission and reception are going to expose ALL communication to questions about the "usefulness" (lacking a better term) of content.
The concept of endless growth is now being rejected as unsustainable. Advertising is a companion to that concept: "create demand".
Energy issues will expose whole populations to questions about what they need, as opposed to what they want. Not now, maybe not in our lifetime. But eventually, those questions will permeate every aspect of peoples' lives, even after a new equilibrium is found.
In that context, guaranteed that a user with a tight budget for communications is not going to waste it on Thighmaster videos. At the content creation and transmission end, the criteria will be equally stringent.
OK, in one form or another, advertising will never totally disappear. But I recall, when living in Europe, that TV advertising was confined to exclusive blocks of time, and did not interrupt content. The "rules" we live with are no rules at all. They're a peculiarity of our form of capitalism.
"Not that there's anything wrong with that!!" ;)
Jim |
