Annoyability
by Bob on August 20, 2007
Annoyability. Being annoyable. Being annoying. Being able to be annoyed. Forcing one's will onto another by pestering them in a sometimes deeply psychological and even subliminal way, if that is inherently possible.
Modern life is full of such manifestations.
Telemarketing calls. Inserts in magazines. Advertising all over a subway car. Road signs. TV ads.
Back in the old days in the music busniess and industry we musicians were told it didn't matter if the public or audience loved you or hated you -- as long as they noticed you and were not complacent. This was devilish talk from music managers but it was almost a rule etched in stone.
So, as long as someone remembers you or what you represent, then the deed is done and successful. They won't easily forget you.
Consider annoying pop-up ads on a computer and its browser, or spam mail. We delete it rather quickly or close pop-up windows but our eyes see and do process what is popped up or even if we don't open spam mail, we see in its subject header in the email the actual message of advertising itself.
So we are getting information force-fed to us, quite subtly.
Information overload, as Alvin Toffler wrote about in his sagacious 1970 book "Future Shock". Or what the Police sang about in their song "Too Much Information". Toffler also talked about "information anxiety": being so overloaded with information that we are forced into a neurotic state of anticipation and frustration.
Consider the "do not call" list in some countries. If you are on it, telemarketers are not supposed to call you. But there's an interesting set of exemptions in the United States law about it. If you are a non-profit, or charity, or have done business with the company in the last year, or others. So it's unclear.
What is clear is that it is the biggest database of "annoyable" people in existence. Anyone who doesn't want to be annoyed by telemarketer calls is implicitly saying that they are vulnerable to being worn out or convincible.
Consider most spam email. Some of these emails say "click here to be deleted from the mailing list". Well, that's a sucker punch. If you click you are of great value to the marketers because you just showed (a) that you are not a cold fish and quite alive and read the email, and (b) that you can be annoyed into submission. So the result is likely that you won't be deleted from any lists but your email sold to other list makers as a vulnerable, convincible, annoyable persom. For five cents a name or something like that.
All this makes for a very unsure balance between marketing, selling ice to Eskimos, and water to a Pacific Islander.
Modern life seems to be about convincing people to do things that in no real sensible way, they ought to do at all.
Like a little lady I saw tonight in a huge "Yukon" van, driving nowhere, when she could have been walking around the block to get her groceries. Someone sold her on the big van idea.
Marketing. The Psychology of Consumer Behaviour. Definitely topical in our times. Palvov and Skinner are alive and well in such theories.
I'm remembering the tune from the Byrds, "Turn, Turn, Turn". And a time to every purpose under heaven.