As more and more websites get savvy on detecting ad blockers I find myself ever more inclined to stay away from content. That said, there is one emerging practice which I find extra annoying, and that is video advertising. Something about the forced, in-your-face, often too-loud, or too-different audio makes me seethe.
If I’m listening to something calm I don’t fucking care to hear about Disney schmaltz. If I’m watching something informative I don’t give a rat’s ass about grammerly (my current reflex is just to mute the audio since I’m a prisoner of the video). When BBC precedes a multi-media clip with an ad, I just close the window. No, sorry, I just don’t.
Many news providers will pop up a window asking you, with a gentle arm-twist, to disable the ad blocker. Most will provide a teeny tiny text link that will allow you to proceed. Worst case I reload and then cancel the refresh to get just enough of the text. I will read text partially visible though overlays. But with ads getting more garish, taking up more of the screen, and being ever more distracting, I simply refuse to deal with it. Which is, in the end, a good thing because it hits my desire for fresh information with the baseball bat of aversion therapy.
In other words, I won’t check the news at all. Which is where I really need to be.
Still, I do like to know a little about what is going on, and given my choice of poisons, I will chose text over anything with audio or video. I also like to think that there are others out there who feel the same.
I remember over the decades hearing the lament of how illiterate we’ve become, that television, cable, and now the internet has made us all slaves to multimedia. I think I disagree. Text is a mainstay, yes it evolves, but it’s here and it’s still the best way to really understand a topic, at your own pace, at your own convenience. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a sentence can be the equivalent of a million thoughts. And those thoughts are all your own.