Wellsbaum.blog

Writing about life and arts

advertising

  • Nothing is random

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    1 min read

    Discoverability will forever be twisted in the maw of internet algorithms. Nothing is ever truly random. We are data’s significant other with a bullseye on our back. Facebook has been triangulating our data for years, matching our likes with the highest bidder. Designers, copy-writers, and marketers work together to create internet ads that strangle our…

  • Walking billboards

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    1 min read

    We are all walking billboards. Logos and sponsors aren’t restricted to the chest of professional soccer and basketball uniforms. As consumers, we signal our own catalog of attention triggers — the Nike Swoosh, the Adidas stripe, the Bauhaus-inspired Apple AirPods, etc. We’ve been working for brands all along. Social media and the proliferation of images…

  • Adding to the pile

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    1 min read

    Another tweet, yet another Instagram — we keep on adding to the digital morass. Can we archive it all? Of course, we can. Google and Facebook are hoarding every little iota of data we create. They own our words, even the ones we put in drafts. The ephemeral qualities of a pixel are a treasure…

  • We, the data

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    1 min read

    Dissolved into data, we produce a feast of trackable interactions. They are the editors as much as much we are the authors. While we create everything, they produce nothing, yet the internet still owns our words.  The attention merchants munch on the aggregate and peel off the niches into targeted prey. Our eyeballs are the oil,…