Thursday, August 5, 2010

They Know You Know They Know You Saw Their Message

I was on the subway the other day and I saw an ad for blackberry messenger advertising the message confirmation feature. This is the thing where if you read someones message, they can SEE that you read the message and based on the amount of time between you reading the message and your response, they decide whether or not they’re offended. What this means in other words is that you can’t ignore your friends. This has to be the stupidest ad campaign ever conceived by man. Its like taking out an ad that says “Blackberries! Now ALWAYS on SPEAKER!” Social networking is based on people ignoring their friends. Be it for their benefit or that of their friends it is a necessary speed bump in any relationship. For example, your phone number falls in to the hands of the wrong person…I don’t know, say someone whose obsessed with cannibalism…openly, very openly, and voices this interest every time he OR she is with you…no matter who you’re in front of. For your own good you don’t want to associate with this person. But you ALSO don’t want to offend this person, lest they take a bite out of you next time they see you. So, when Hannibal Lectar sends you a message saying, “hey, wanna see my collection of knives and body parts?” you say neither yes or no, and instead ignore the message all together and pretend you never got it in the event that they find you and confront you. With this new BBM feature, however, this is impossible because whoever sends you a message will KNOW you read it. Really, this is less a preference of my own and more a safety concern for the public. Peoples lives are in danger when they cant pretend they don’t see or hear things. What if someone accidentally gets a message from a Mafioso where in he mentions the location of a body he recently got rid of. If you get picked up, YOU cant deny that you saw that message, he’s gunna be like “Are you tellin’ me you didn’t see the message dat waz clearly read here on yur’aa blackberry? Cmaaaan. What, are you sayin im stupid? Cmaaan. You KNOW im gunna have to take you out now eh? Forget about it. Shoulda gotten an iphone pison” The dangers are endless.
The other thing that bugs me about this ad is the picture that goes with it. This is an ad that is based on your ability to see the side of people they don’t want you to see. The ad I saw just had a girl on it who was looking at her phone. But everyone knows this wouldn’t be the case. Nobody is that ok with being annoyed. The only real picture you can use is a fat chick looking at her phone and crying after she realized Chad saw her invitation to prom and hasn’t responded in three days. This or some emo kid writing poetry with eye liner. Either way, the blackberry people should have realized here if not earlier that this was, in fact, a terrible idea. Anyways im going to fire this blog off cause its been on my desktop for a long time waiting to be finished.

Btw im listening to cat power.
..yea fuck you too, Francesco.

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