Procrastinet

GHOULS!

filed under: Idle Chatter

Last week I signed up for Google's AdSense, a program which places Google-selected text ads and pays me like a picopenny for each click through, or something. Everything I've read about it says that unless you've got mad traffic it's not worth the time, but I was bored and I like to feel proactive. The ads are picked based on the content of the page. For some reason, the first several days' worth were all chicken recipes.

Now, however, I find this:

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I started this post planning to make some snarky joke about it, but here we are at zero minute, waiting for a punchline, and I just don't have the heart.

Instead, in honor of the fallen pontiff, some pontification:

The hidden (or ignored) cost of all this webby interconnectedness is the reduction of people - whole, interesting, problematic people - to bite-sized stimuli. We read something sharp that someone wrote, or read something snarky that someone wrote about them, or see a picture of something stupid or brilliant that someone did, and we get the briefest of hits off of it and move on.

The problem being: there's a person on the other end of that snippet of information, and it gets harder and harder to give a shit that this is the case.

How many fights have you gotten into with a friend via email or IM which you would never have had in person?

So now some robotized advertising script tells me that eBay is the perfect place to buy me some Pope John Paul II. Ha-ha, WHEE! Look how kooky the internets is! While the pope, a very real, very dead person lies in state at the center of billions-wide grieving. And the anonymizing, dehumanizing erosion ticks on.

Posted by rjt at April 4, 2005 11:06 AM