The way much online advertising is structured to respond to words used in text on the page, all in the service of consumerism, is often jarring.
Fat-acceptance blogs, for instance, tend not to have such advertising (which would help them fund their activism) because the ads would all end up being for the exploitative weight-loss and cosmetic surgery industries, which is exactly the sort of pressures they wish to educate readers away from. Feminists also tend to shy away from such contextual advertising because they end up with a sidebar full of ads for lapdancing and XXX-online services.
Other publishers aren’t so careful. I went looking for Sara Vowell’s well-known 2001 essay on white Americans comparing their pet causes and activism to the American civil rights movement: You, Sir, Are No Rosa Parks and found a nasty example. To begin, here’s a quote from Vowell’s essay:
It’s not just people on the right like Katherine Harris and Ted Nugent who seem especially silly being likened to Parks. I first cringed at this “Rosa Parks c’est moi” phenomenon last October at Ralph Nader’s lefty rally at Madison Square Garden. Ever sit in a coliseum full of people who think they’re heroes? I was surrounded by thousands of well-meaning, well-fed white kids who loved it when filmmaker Michael Moore told them they should, like Rosa Parks, stand up to power, by which I think he meant vote for Nader so he could qualify for federal matching funds. When Nader himself mentioned abolitionists in Mississippi in 1836 and asked the crowd to “think how lonely it must have been,” he was answered, according to my notes, with a “huge, weird cheer.” I think I’m a fine enough person “” why, the very next morning I was having people over for waffles. But I hope I’m not being falsely modest by pointing out that I’m no Harriet Tubman. And I’m certainly no Rosa Parks. As far as I’m concerned, about the only person in recent memory who has an unimpeachable right to compare himself to Parks is that Chinese student who stared down those tanks at Tiananmen Square.
Vowell’s article is powerful, and important, stuff. So what are the three ads generated by contextual programming?
Sponsored Ads
Bad Credit Auto Loans
Auto finance for bad credit, bankruptcy or credit problems.Failed Open Back Surgery?
Patented arthroscopic procedure can correct pain from problem surgeriesBarack Obama Store
Get Obama T-Shirts, Signs & More at the Official Obama Campaign Store
Three ads that play on stereotypes of African-Americans as financial deadbeats, people with obesity-related conditions, and people who will automatically vote for Barack Obama because of black solidarity. The Barack Obama ad is at least not totally insulting – he certainly is reaching out to anyone sympathetic to the societal problems caused by the continuing American race divide, and that is also exactly the demographic that the article itself is aimed towards. It makes a certain sense for Barack Obama’s campaign advertising team to tie their ads’ keywords to mentions of Rosa Parks, civil rights, segregation, the NAACP and abolitionists.
But this article uses the phrases “skin color” and “people of colour” just once each. Same with “black woman”, “white man”, “white kids” and “white guy” – one hit each. That’s all it takes to get targeted ads for bad credit ratings and back surgery based on fat stereotypes? I very much doubt it. It’s more probable that these ads have also had their keywords tied to mentions of civil rights and racial equality.
It seems redundant to hate on advertising for being cynically manipulative and often downright offensive. Advertising scarcely bothers to pretend to be anything else. But it does bother me that the various contextual keyword algorithms for online advertising services haven’t been tweaked to give niche websites better control over the advertising that appears on their sites.
It appears we either give consumerism a free reign to wallpaper our sites with their advertising of whatever, or else we have to opt out entirely. This constrained choice will, of course, be used as a club of “but you choose to not accept advertising” if any activist who refuses to have inappropriate and offensive ads appear on their site, as if all “free choice” takes is for any choice to exist, even a choice between different negatives.
Bah.
Categories: social justice
Lengthy closures of schools and childcare centres will end mothers’ careers 
Getting out the ‘yes’ 
The 109th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
Hoyden About Town 
This is precisely the reason that I have never signed up for the advertising programs for Dervish. I have severe problems with the un-ethical practices of many advertising companies and their clients ANYWAY so I would naturally be very choosy about what products I would want to endorse. And as they don’t offer me a real way to have control over advertising, I won’t sign up for Adsense etc.
Ugh, I didn’t realise they had stooped SO LOW re: the stereotypes of race.
As a mere punter, I presume what’s talked about here is something along the lines of the old TV network deals, when the buyers had to buy nine dud shows to get to the one half decent show they were really after.
Jeb Bush and Kathleen Harris…
Now there is a truly grey Gothic configuration.
One supposes that the US left in retrospect would have eagerly embraced Gore as the far lesser of two evils, given hindsight. But then maybe mainstream and third way Democrats should have been more inclusive or at least heeding of the legitimate concerns of the left before the 2000 election.
Funny how close the parallels to Aussie politics, including the catstrophic consequences.