Category Archives: Communication

Advertising

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Maybe it’s just me, but one thing that really gets my goat is advertising. It seems to be taking over the world.

I know that the time per hour allowed for adverts on tv has increased over the years, to something like 20 minutes per hour. If you just zap through the channels, it does seem like it’s all adverts. It isn’t, of course, but it seems that way.

I used to play Words With Friends (= on-line Scrabble). It was quite fun, but got to the point where every move generated a full minute’s advert. You either sat through it all, or quit the app and started again. I gave up and stopped playing.

Facebook got worse. The adverts seemed to be covering the screen and were not relevant to me. Had they been, I would particularly avoid the companies advertising. Twitter is going down the same road.

I remember when you could get movies on tape or dvd and there was 5 or 10 minutes of advertising at the start. Disney were particularly bad. You could wind through tape, but the dvd menu system could be disabled to you were stuck with it (more or less). This seemed to have gone away, but is definitely coming back now.

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Mobile phone

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The first ever mobile phone I had was this one:

It’s the Sony CM-R111 analogue phone.

I got it for free when I bought a bulk order of floppy disks. Of course, the contract, which was with Securicor (now included in O2) was not free.

It was a very small phone with no display, as you can see, ten number memory (I think) and a good battery life.

But, on the way home one day I had a phone call. Did you call so-and-so plumbers?, I was asked. No, said I. No, we thought not. Your phone has been hacked and you need to move over to digital. Which I did.

It was a super little phone, not much bigger that a box of matches.

Is spelling important?

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OK, I know there are people who find spelling and recognising words difficult. I also know there are people who are dyslexic who revel in it, use it as an excuse for pretty much anything.

I watch YouTube and similar from time to time. There are some interesting clips on audio, photography, travel, tv, music… things I am interested in and want to learn more about. I assume the people making clips on a topic are experts, they know something I don’t, something I will be interested in. I assume they speak with knowledge and authority.

But then you watch videos and you see simple spelling mistakes, with words you would expect them to know, simple words sometimes.

Like the travel man not being able to spell WIMBLEDON (“Wimbleon” he put while standing outside the station), the hifi man (“Turntabel”), someone talking about movies (“Moveis”), “UBS” (as in memory stick), “Weinsein” (as in the film man) and the list goes on.

To be honest, it is very rare to watch something that has no spelling mistakes at all.

How do I feel? well, if you know you have a difficulty and you are putting something out for the world to view and judge, don’t you make an extra effort, or get someone else to check? How hard is that? Five minutes perhaps.

So I look at these badly made clips of people telling me stuff with rubbish written on the screen, and I discount what they say and, to be honest, don’t take them seriously.

And feel disappointed.