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Beamed Sonic Advertising Is Coming
newtley writes in with a story from Ad Age a few days back. "Advertisers are determined to get into your head by one means or another, and Holosonic Research Labs has found yet another way of invading your privacy in the name of forcing you pay attention. You're walking down a street in New York when all of a sudden, a woman's voice whispers 'Who's that? Who's There?' No, you weren't having a psychotic episode; you were being subjected without your permission to 'sound in a narrow beam, just like light.' It was coming at you from a rooftop speaker seven stories up."
It makes one wonder about the concept of graffit... The process (usually illegal) of drawing symbols, images or words on private or public surfaces without permission. This really, is the process of using sonic graffiti that I can imagine would be readily open to hacking, sonic tagging and sonic vandalism. Of course this opens up all sorts of questions as well: What sorts of messages are appropriate to beam into someone's awareness? What about inappropriate messages? How about unintended consequences when someone with paranoid schizophrenia encounters these messages? What are the legal implications if someone else targets the same area with a different sonic message than the one intended by the advertiser?
Personally, I find this advertising practice offensive and a little ignorant of where the possibilities may lead to. Furthermore, I am disappointed that A&E television would engage in this sort of thing, but A&E has been sliding down the slippery slope into crass, base appeal lately, attempting to go for shock factor at the expense of cultural sophistication. Back on topic: Would the advertiser consider it offensive if their message was sonically blocked via interfering sound waves? Would they consider someone else beaming messages into the same "acoustic space" unfair competition? Would they consider it vandalism? What are the liabilities if in the very unlikely possibility, a paranoid schizophrenic were to become violent in response to such messages? (note: only a very small percentage of paranoid schizophrenic patients are outwardly violent)
If I lived in NYC, this would be a call to me for a little social experimentation with A&Es advertising campaign. But beyond that, think about the possibilities for social filtering, or even the surreptitious delivery of information, allowing the legal (or illegal) routing of people, goods and supplies via temporally discrete windows of sonic delivery.
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...for me if I encounter a device like this, is to leave and come back with a baseball bat and trash the device into pieces. This measure is clearly an invasion of privacy if I'm generous and assault if not so generous. I do not want to be bombarded by forced mind control that is advertising.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
... I could imagine that this advancement of the 'art of advertising' could do some harm to people that are not so stable.
I'm stable, as far as I know, and it might just cause me to fucking kill someone if I happen to hear it. Thus, I'm not so certain that it's limited to those who have fragile psyches.
How much fun would it be to beam things at politicos speaking at rallies? Confuse them and make them say things they didn't mean?
Or, by targeting the microphone itself, just speak directly to their audience?
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I expect you will hear it. It's a collimated sound beam that vibrates the skull. Listeners describe it as seeming like a voice from inside.
Woody Norris, the inventor of the device, spent some time spooking people at the mall. He claims he always told them what he'd done afterward, but you can see how someone might abuse such a thing. Easy to convince someone they're crazy.
I'm glad the device is in Times Square. I hope as many advertisers use this as quickly as possible. Right now, only a tenth of the populace at most knows about these things. Everyone else is as vulnerable to trickery as the natives in any colonialist short story about explorers pretending to be gods.
"Johnson, show the Ugabi your flashlight again!"
Natives: "EV-ER-ED-EE! EV-ER-ED-EE!"
Once enough companies are advertising this way, it'll be more like Scooby-Doo.
"Farmer Stoutworthy was using this projector to beam a ghost onto the barn wall, and for his swamp-thing mask he used phosphorous paint."
"I would have gotten away with it too, if you meddling kids had never been to a movie theatre or had a glow-in-the-dark toy!"
The trouble is that "stable" is a relative term, not an absolute one. "Stable" means stable in a given environment. The question we ought to consider here is how far this particular initiative is going to move the definition of stable away from the current baseline.
The worrying thing is that stability is most likely a bell curve. Which would mean that a small shift could result in a huge increase in instability in urban populations.
I think this is a valid cause for concern
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
FTA: "If you set up a loudspeaker on the top of a building, everybody's going to hear that noise. But if you're only directing that sound to a specific viewer, you're never going to hear a neighbor complaint from street vendors or pedestrians. The whole idea is to spare other people."
What the interviewee is conveniently omitting to mention is that putting a loudspeaker to blare all day in the street would be obviously illegal, so nobody is being "spared", we're just being forced to listen to advertising which is so invading that it would be illegal in normal circumstances.
It seems clear to me that noise laws that are currently described in terms of the dB level allowed on the street would have to be interpreted by a judge in terms of their effect on one's eardrum. So if these beamed messages appear to the listener's ear any different (eg. louder) than if they were played from a traditional speaker on the street, regardless of their power at the transmitter, then they'd be violating the law just as much as an obnoxious megaphone. Except that the beams would annoy only one person at a time, which would only mean that they wouldn't be as liable for "public nuisance" under those noise thresholds.
So you could just sue them (if you could find them - the law really needs to require anyone doing this unsolicited to identify themselves with every message, like a traditional speaker does) under the existing noise complaint laws, if not harassment, etc. Of course, your lawyer would have to realize the physics of transmitted vs received sound power, but every lawyer reads Slashdot, right?
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make install -not war
If they can annoy us, we have every right to take every measure within the law to annoy them.
Stand outside their doors at opening and closing times and shout at their employees with megaphones. Helpful, inoffensive things, like looking both ways before crossing the street and buckling up while driving.
Use public records to find out who is responsible for ad campaigns and beam audio at their children telling them to beg mom and dad for a pony.