[HN Gopher] Fracking eyeballs at the turn of the 20th century
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       Fracking eyeballs at the turn of the 20th century
        
       Author : samclemens
       Score  : 63 points
       Date   : 2024-01-12 18:27 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (asteriskmag.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (asteriskmag.com)
        
       | aaronharnly wrote:
       | The author is affiliated with the Friends of Attention, a very
       | thoughtful and interesting collective of artists, academics, and
       | others who are dedicated to helping reclaim our attention from
       | its relentless "slicing, dicing, and pricing" by the Internet and
       | media economy.
       | 
       | They have a terrific trove of artifacts and guides on their
       | website:
       | 
       | https://friendsofattention.net/attention_trove
        
       | aaronharnly wrote:
       | Many wonderful paragraphs here, but to pull out perhaps a crux:
       | 
       | > If you were advertising a car, was it better to show a picture
       | of a car, or of a pretty woman? If one was selling shirt collars,
       | was it better to do so under the headline "Murder!" or the
       | headline "Quality Shirt Collars"? To make a long story short (and
       | to skip over the proto-pataphysical techniques by which Nixon
       | established what we might call a "science of irrelevancy"), Nixon
       | found that "irrelevant illustrations do attract more attention
       | and hold interest longer than do relevant ones." 8 Which is to
       | say: systematically doing violence to sense raised revenue. This
       | could be proven in his laboratory. Would it be wrong to say that
       | we live, in many respects, in the world evolved from that
       | finding?
        
         | rubslopes wrote:
         | Maybe that's why there's a trend in mobile games ads in which
         | the ad shows a gameplay that has nothing to do with the actual
         | game.
         | 
         | For instance:
         | https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/co8m3b/garde...
        
         | joshspankit wrote:
         | That tells you what works short-term, but fails at telling you
         | happens after people acclimate. Look at web ads: at first they
         | grabbed attention, but now everyone ignores them out of habit
         | which imo is a net negative.
        
           | mathgeek wrote:
           | I recommend trying to actively watch just about any ad out
           | there and trying to find one that doesn't show or sell you
           | the idea of something unrelated to that product. They are
           | rare.
           | 
           | For example: most ads for prescription medicine these days
           | try to show you folks or cartoons of people doing irrelevant
           | activities. They do that because it makes folks feel a lot
           | more positive than actually talking about the drugs.
        
       | FooBarBizBazz wrote:
       | Figure 4 is absolutely fantastic.
       | 
       | I'm getting real Adam Curtis vibes from this piece.
        
         | samstave wrote:
         | Holly carp! I just realized I was subconsciously reading in his
         | voice - specifically when thinking about eye movements.
         | 
         | The two documentaries to watch back to back are Human Resources
         | and Century of Self.
         | 
         | Utterly depressing truth about the source of PR.
         | 
         | -
         | 
         | Great article.
         | 
         | --
         | 
         | I wonder if one could wear uniform and seemingly opaque
         | contacts which would prevent determining exact eye
         | position/gaze?
        
           | Snow_Falls wrote:
           | Maybe colour lenses that have different colours and "stretch"
           | out random lengths in different directions. Colour to
           | confound determining what the pupil is and random stretches
           | to make it harder to determine where to eye is looking.
        
             | thfuran wrote:
             | Aviators are more readily available.
        
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       (page generated 2024-01-14 23:01 UTC)