An Article About Information Pollution That's Not Annoying

I never thought I'd see the day there was an article about 'information overload' I didn't find either condescending or arm-flapping woe-is-me, but here it is. Dustin Wax points out some common marketing strategies and offers suggestions regarding filtering your information. I was particularly interested in his theory about dumb parents in television:

Watch a kids TV show recently? Watch a few? You might have noticed a trend — dumb parents. Uncool, hapless, clumsy, dorky, way-out-there dumb parents. Remember the parents of yore? The Bradies, the Cleavers, even the Wah-Wah-Wahing parents of the Charlie Brown universe? They were pretty with it — voices of sanity and authority in an adult world kids struggled to grasp. Not any more — today’s TV parents are hopeless.

Why? Because that’s what media producers’ customers want. Not the kids — viewers aren’t customers, they’re product. You don’t buy Jimmy Neutron. The advertisers whose spots fill the commercial breaks during Jimmy Neutron buy you — the cartoon is just a way to get enough of you watching to make it worth the advertisers’ buck. Well, not you — your kids. You’re just a wallet with legs — what they really want is to show your kids really cool stuff that they’ll get you to buy. And of course, you’re going to say “No”. That’s where the show’s content comes in — your kids have just spent 4 hours learning that parents are uncool idiots who say “No” to all the coolest stuff.

Very true. My personal advertising bugaboo is dumb guys. Those bumbling fools, always needing a woman to save the day. I can say this is annoying; I'm a woman myself and I'm tired of men being presented as idiots. If it's insulting if I swap the genders, it's not good.