We Are Magnetic

Ever since the power sift from a corporate controlled, classically one-way focused TV experience, to a  freely ‘user controlled’, highly personalised, social web experience, there’s been a dilemma we have all been faceing:

Users want great content that they don’t have to pay for, but that’s also free from unwanted advertising. And advertisers want to supply great content that users love, but along the way they want to sell some product.

With the groundswell in digital devices allowing us to ‘ignore’ advertising, and a world turning to their ‘fiends’ for advice on what products they should be investing their hard earned cash in, you’d think that advertising really had acquired the evil edge that some would have us believe.

Personally speaking, I don’t subscribe to the theory that all corporate advertising is created to perform some kind of mind control trick, brain washing me into purchasing their product against my will, or at least my better nature.

I also don’t think, although it has many highly endearing qualities, that the social web is the answer to a free thinking utopia, where the individual is unshackled from the influencing powers of the few.

Without advertising we loose so much. We loose the ability to discover products that our friends don’t have. We loose the ability to hear, from the horses mouth, how these products could help us in our lives. We loose the ability to virtually try before we by – seeing the product in action. We loose that ability to decide for ourselves what we want to buy.

Following this path one could imagine a world where we’d all end up with a homogenised set of utilitarian essentials, things that we could all understood, could talk to one another about, but were indistinguishable from one another. That doesn’t sound like progress to me!

And lets not assume that the social web, with all its freedom, is free from ‘social influencers’. It’s not… (more…)