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Tag Archive for eyeballs

Unnecessary Apology

October 20, 2015 future, Videogames, Writing Comments Off on Unnecessary Apology

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/10/15/amid-the-adblockalypse-advertisers-apologize-for-messing-up-the-web/

I think this may not be apology-worthy.  I mean, I can appreciate that the advertisers seem to have, essentially, shot themselves in the foot.  Sucking up bandwidth, chewing through the battery on mobile devices, ensuring that users are so darned sick of video ads that they are now willing to pay EXTRA for pop-up blockers, as opposed to having their browsing experience infringed upon.

Okay, yes, they may be apologizing to EACH OTHER, or maybe to new and upstart ad companies out there, but this overreach on their part is going to have broader ramifications.

More than a few science-fiction writers have given us a vision of the future in which branding and advertising pay for everything, where the primary currency becomes, in effect, the user’s attention-span.  Which has, ultimately, been the progression we have seen here on the internet (I happily pay of all kinds of things by letting ads play through).

But what this may herald is a shift in the way advertising handles things and that might mean that, in the future, our eyeballs might not be worth quite so much.

 

Optical bypass

February 12, 2013 Writing Comments Off on Optical bypass

It looks like an early form of the “bionic eye” will be arriving in the US.

I find these bits of science-fiction-turned-fact fascinating because of how they work.  They are, in effect, a simple bypass (okay, they are not “simple” at all from a technical standpoint, but the idea is simple, like bridging a crack in a circuit-board).  Which seems like it ought *not* to work, I mean, they are using the body’s own hard- wiring to do the job it was meant to, they just bypass the bit that’s not functioning properly.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/biotechnology/first-bionic-eye-sees-light-130206.htm