Tags
Advertising, book reviews, books, Fiction, George Saunders, Magazine Section, Media, New York Times, Privacy, Social Media, Tenth of December
So reads the front cover of The New York Times Magazine Section. It catches your eye and attention. “Best of..”
We have so much information thrown at us, or available to us, that we need to have things simplified to keep from overloading. It is not about content, but about sorting. Google and other media ventures aim to do this for us by promotional placement. It is advertising in another medium. Stores have been doing it for years with product placement. The dress in the window cost more than if it was on the rack.
Applications, social media and other GPS devices have been monitoring our movements, purchases, interests, residences, and acquintances. It all might be useful to us if we were directly requesting the service instead of the broad acceptance of the advertising medium through a generalized free service. Would the addiction end if the choice was offered to buy the specific service or application at the expense of no privacy invasion or qualified privacy release. The choice is not widely offered as a substantial part of the economy is premised on the current advertising model.
From an advertising perspective the development of individual profiles makes a lot of sense. It also may be a nightmare, as direct correlation between advertising and sale could be more closely monitored. It might reveal that apart from name recognition, it is substantially a canard.
So why would The New York Times suggest that ‘Tenth of December’ by George Saunders will be the best book you will read this year? What publicist and publisher was awarded this plum endorsement?
I have never read anything by George Saunders and he may well be an excellent writer. This or his other books and short stories might be very well written. This book “may” even be one of the best books I will read this year, but The Times, is unqualified. It “will” be the best I read this year. Who am I to argue? It has been sorted for me.
