Being interested in the advertisements that abound on the web also means understanding society.
This article is taken from the #Règle30 newsletter, which is sent every Wednesday at 11 a.m.
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Although I live in a very different world from that of my parents, my cultural practices are sometimes similar to them. Every morning, I eat breakfast while reading news newsletters on my smartphone, in a not-so-distant echo of my father who read The union while drinking his coffee. Even on YouTube, my habits are similar to a ritual that I loathed as a teenager: I often watch a video to accompany my dinner, in the same way that my family never missed the 8 p.m. news. This resemblance extends to the omnipresence of advertising in our evenings.
Of course, there is a major difference between my experience of media today and that of my parents back then: the advertising I am exposed to online is much more targeted than that on television, and I can hardly escape it . She has followed me for years, reacting to the slightest change in life (my move to another city) or via lame guesses about my personal desires (since I passed the age of thirty, I regularly have unsolicited promotions for pregnancy tests). She also displays sexism that horrifies me. Because I watch a video dedicated to a subject seen as feminine, I am then served an advertisement for soap where a mermaid warns me that my genitals could smell like fish (on this subject, I recommend this article from Release on the demonization of vaginal odors among influencers and the business that results from it).
While I was complaining about the rude siren on social media, several people told me that I could block these ads. Except I don’t want to all make them disappear. Of course, I don’t want to be harassed by advertisements, especially those that prevent me from doing what I had planned on a site or application. But I’m curious about the clichés that advertisers associate with my life. For example, on the subject of gender injunctions, I very much appreciate the work of Gabrielle Stemmer and her desktop documentarieswhich reveal how women are spoken to on YouTube by simply showing the content of a screen.
Is the internet broken?
We are in a period of online change. We almost have the impression that the internet would be “ broken ”, to use the terms of MIT Technology Review. In this articlejournalist Katie Notopoulos underlines that the free model which has established itself on the general public web over the last twenty years would be its “ original sin ”, because he put advertising at the heart of his architecture. “ When you think about everything that’s going wrong—like bullying, the rise of political extremism, or the deterioration of adolescent girls’ mental health—it’s not necessarily easy to connect it all to online advertising ( …) But because it demands attention, it has allowed it, and it feeds the worst sides of humanity.»
Hence the rise of competing models such as paid subscription (to a media outlet, to a videographer’s Patreon), collective financing (on Mastodon, many servers are financed by their own users) or alternative practices, such as people who selectively disable their ad blockers to support the work of an individual or collective (as a journalist, whether I like it or not, my salary is partly funded by advertising revenue from the media that hire me).
But while waiting for the eventual transformation of the web and its economic models, it is estimated that 40% of American adults use software to block online advertisements (when it’s possible). This means that a majority of us see ads every day. Observing these advertisements, and asking why they appear before our eyes, raises and documents important political issues. Why is France the first country targeted by the advertising campaign of the Israeli government against Hamas ? Why does Facebook accept advertisements for male condoms? but censors those for menstrual panties ? Why do racialized Internet users not necessarily see the same ads as white people? including for job or accommodation offers ? It’s not that I like advertising. It’s because I don’t like to act as if it doesn’t exist.
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