Saturday, December 08, 2007

The voices in your head are going commercial

And are asking if you need life insurance or a new credit card:


A&E is literally targeting consumers with hypersonic beams on billboards. The rays broadcast sound in a beam, so the noise is inaudible unless the consumer/victim strays into the target area--in which case they may experience the sound as a voice in their head.
Lovely. I'm sure the government is looking into this as a crowd control device, sowing confusion amid the protesters for example....

What a horrific intrusion of privacy... forced to listen to ads in your own head.

6 comments:

Steve Bates said...

If I personally experience such a device in action, I shall attempt to locate it, and if I succeed, I shall fucking destroy it. I shall destroy the device as an act of civil disobedience, turn myself in, go before the court and ask the judge to treat me as she would treat her own elderly father if he were subjected to the same invasive device.

There is a more or less unmitigated right to free speech, but there is no corresponding right to force people to listen. Yet that is effectively what this device is designed to do. Anyone who destroys one enjoys my support, not only as a citizen but as a civil libertarian. If nothing else is a zone of privacy, the confines of one's skull should be so.

ellroon said...

In the grocery store I use they have had an unusual amount of 'new' advertising equipment. One being tested was a small black box mounted on the edge of a shelf. As you passed by, the movement triggered an ad.

So I spent my time testing how low I had to bend, how fast or slow I could go to avoid triggering the device. I'm sure others did the same because it soon disappeared.

Voices that come uninvited into one's head will set off a bunch of lawsuits from schizophrenics and others of fragile mental health. Not even discussing the car crashes by women driving alone or small fearful children....

mahakal said...

It's a bad idea on so many levels and would be an act of social justice to destroy the unwelcome thing.

But on a technology level it sounds like it might be fun to play with. I do want to project sound to specific spaces and create waves of moving sound and particles as part of my project.

ellroon said...

I understand what you are saying, Michael, in the artistic way you could use this, but this is a corporation invading our private space. I think their ideal would be to force our eyes open with toothpicks and demand that we look at their products 24/7.

If they start intruding into my brain, I'm going to go ballistic.

Sorghum Crow said...

Shouldn't bother me, I hardly ever do what the voices in my head tell me to.

ellroon said...

We need to make that a bumpersticker, SC.