Ever so often, a wide assortment of advertisements, some legit but mostly irrelevant and suspicious, bombard my accounts on social media, even as I, with full effort, try to report or block each one as being not my preference. On the other line, the admins automatically return with a curt reply: you have blocked Mr. Wong, you won’t receive similar ads in the future. A few minutes go by and they are back with a vengeance.
A friend confides, it’s algorithms, bro. If you by chance happens to click, much less, indicate ‘like’ on a page, related topics will right away follow. It will be as though you have opened a digital portal wide enough for these bugs to come flying about.
That explains it, I mused; whenever I click on a recent tennis match or read about an NBA event, a string of similar events and endorsements follows afterwards. I have no complaints when this happens but I have never looked at these as the result of pesky algorithms. However, if by chance I read for even a few seconds those sponsored ads about breakthroughs in permanent blackening of white hairs or the latest cures regarding problems with the prostate… Heavy traffic right away.
I must have mentioned this many times. One of my favorite pop-sheets in college was this three-page essay on “how not to be bamboozled”. (since then, I have desperately tried to google-search it many times but what I always found was a totally different material. I have now deduced that my Logic professor must have produced a similar paper in his own words.) Anyway, the gist of what that short piece said was simple: how do we detect and fight marketing foolery, scams and relatedly, in modern speak, “budol-budol”. A do-it-yourself mini kit.
Among its comprehensively discussed tactics, is a list of argumentative fallacies which tell us what type of persuasion marketers today use in order to gain our trust and peddle their wares. My favorite portion is the primary usage of the declarative “so what” in each of the fallacies so as to deflect dodgy advertisement come-ons. For example, when your favorite content creator starts to say, “This soap is made in Germany!”, you counter with “so what”, not out loud, of course. Or whenever they print out “Along with the majority of pinoys, this is the one Kim and Paolo use for skincare!” You got it, whisper softly to yourself as in mantra-like, so what?
While it is true we can use this no end to ward off these (again) pesky ads which intrude so much into our personal spaces, it could likewise be used as an effective filter against whatever bruhaha is presently shown in the political arena, in preparation for next year’s Olympics.
While my knee-jerk response may be to say ‘so what’, on second thought, I wouldn’t want to go there.
