But, like driving a car, pretty much any idiot can be behind the steering wheel of technology*—and often is. There's something worrisome about a 4,500 pound vehicle hurtling through the city at 40-80 mph, driven by someone with a red rubber ball for a nose. Likewise, there is something disconcerting about massive digital power hurtling through our lives at death-defying speeds, being directed by the same clown.
The following are odd (but harmless) ways that advertising and news stories are appearing lately, thanks, I suppose, to automated "design," lack of professional standards, and just plain goofy "thought leaders."
From Facebook:
I know my first reaction upon learning that thousands of snow geese have fallen dead from the sky in Idaho would be a hearty, "Yahoo!" But unless you do something about it, the first image on the webpage link you enter into your FB post is the one that appears by default on FB, so this logo must have been the first image (there are worse possibilities). And all those poor geese came in second place.
How can you do something about it? http://preview.tinyurl.com/otrdj7v [Open in new window]
From an online news service:
It's difficult for me give the story the gravitas it deserves, and also empathize with the injured victim, when I see a photo of a generic ambulance floating in space during what appears to be the final moments of the ill-fated planet Krypton. I thought for a moment that this might be an ad for a mobile ice-cream vendor.
I think the victim deserved something—anything—better regarding the event that left her in critical but stable condition... even if it's nothing more than a picture of the boring old ambulance that actually took her to the hospital. Everyone on the planet has a cell phone camera, for god's sake. Now that we have endless access to cheap instantaneous photography, this news service is buying generic photos of "the news."
Care to ski Paris in the summer?
That's right, this ad implies a Colorado ski lodge in the Champ de Mars (park) in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France... 4,997 miles away. On a lovely summer day. But I definitely want to stay at that lodge, since you get a two-for-one: skiing Colorado and a tour of Paris.
Stock photography; take a closer look:
To read their submission rules, you'd think they haul in the U.S. Cavalry to evaluate the quality of photographers' submissions before accepting any image, but apparently no one noticed this young lady is happily knocking on a door that has a padlock the size of her head not 3 inches from her nose. At least Photoshop it. Probably nobody's home (so to speak).
The solution:
There may be very little we can do about it—the news will continue to display irrelevant stock images in an effort to grab your attention, bizarre or inappropriate images will continue to appear above headlines, FB will continue to snag the first image out of the chute when you link to a web page, and oddball images will appear among the countless stock images we have available to—as the Apple Dictionary defines it: "...add graphic pizzazz to your desktop-publishing project."
But if the driver behind the wheel will take off the rubber nose, and put on a thinking cap, some of these absurd advertising and news pratfalls might go away, and advertising and news might become better for it (providing no one is actually reading the stuff—but that's a comment for another time).
*Those behind the "steering wheel of technology" are NOT the programmers. They are the same crowd that have always given the orders, made the demands, taken the bows, reaped the rewards, and left a quivering mess in their wake. You probably know one.
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