Originally posted June 2018.
When the Internet Invades Your Bathroom
My favorite category of consumer product is “has a bad joke printed on it for some reason.” You know the kind: usually a labored setup leading to a lazy pun, like “What animal can you find at a baseball game? A bat!” or “How do you know that the moon has had enough to eat? It’s full!” (The punchline invariably ends with an exclamation point, signaling that it is to be shouted at your audience so that they know it is time to laugh.) Who needs joke books when you can read a juice-stained Popsicle stick instead? (Side note: those sticks really should have been designed better. You could read maybe half of the setup of the joke, the rest obscured by the Popsicle itself, which meant that unless you found a way to eat your Popsicles backwards, you’d reveal the punchline before being able to see the full setup. Then again, those jokes were so old that chances are you could have figured it out just from the first few words anyway.) As a kid, I even had jokes printed on the little paper cups I used to rinse my mouth after brushing my teeth, because I truly believed that every day should start and end with the thought “Yes, I recognize that this is a joke.”
Recently, in a bid to reclaim some of my childhood/find a distraction from the general gloom of modern society, I purchased a box of those paper cups, jokes and all. This will be nice! I thought. Jokes every morning and evening! I’m a fun person! Take that, anxiety about the state of the world! Laughter is the best medicine! I was ready. Hit me with the puns! That night, after brushing my teeth, I took a look at the cup I had used. “What kind of bug rises from the dead?” Easy, I thought. A zom-bee. Or maybe a zom-beetle. Definitely one of those two. Only one problem: there wasn’t an answer printed on the cup. Instead, there was a little drawing of a smartphone with a caption that read “Blipp now for the punchline!” You have to download an app just see the punchline of a joke on a paper cup.
As the kids say: wut
I decided to do a little research into this. Not download the app, mind you; it had become a matter of principle that I wouldn’t give into this unnecessary added step of forced digital interactivity. But I did a search on “Blipping” and discovered that it’s the work of a company called “Blippar” that specializes in augmented reality. According to their website, augmented reality “lets you communicate at key moments drawing consumers in by offering value rather than pushing out content indiscriminately. Finally and crucially augmented reality advertising provides data and insights about how your audience is engaging with and using your product” (augmented reality is also apparently a reality without commas).
Now, I’m not against AR. Blippar’s website offers some really interesting potential uses of the technology, such as using it to virtually “try on” new outfits, or creating a sort of heads up display that identifies parts of your car’s engine by using your phone’s camera. This is the future we were promised (give or take a jetpack or two). But not every product is begging to be modernized and technologized. There’s a vast difference between using an AR app as a real-time guide for helping with an engine repair and using it to see the punchline of a joke on a product for kids, one that could more easily just be printed on said product. What does the extra step add? Maybe some cute animation, but again, that shouldn’t preclude the manufacturers from just printing the punchline. It seems like a weird thing to harp on, but what of the kids whose families can’t afford smartphones? Suddenly, something as simple as a joke for children to enjoy during their daily routine has a financial and technological barrier that didn’t exist before, and one that has no real benefit to either the consumer or the manufacturer (unless Dixie Cup data analysts are somehow surprised to find that their product is usually used first thing in the morning and right before bed, or are concerned that including the full joke constitutes “pushing out content indiscriminately”).
It’s just a larger symptom of the “Internet of Things,” the growing network of everyday devices that are now hooked up to the internet. Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself (though naturally, anything involving a network will raise major security and privacy concerns). After all, many people enjoy the convenience of being able to adjust their thermostat from their phones, or being able to open up an app to check on their dog when they’re away from home. But was the world clamoring for juicers that won’t make you a drink when there’s a Wi-Fi outage? Were guests really taking advantage of soda fountains at hotels to the point that it was necessary to create souvenir beverage cups with radio frequency tech that allows free soda refills for the length of your vacation, but not one day more? And what happens when your “smart thermostat” company hits hard times? Does it try to find a new way to monetize their product, or will your device just stop working altogether?
The internet is not inherently good or bad. In fact, often the bad we see comes as the flipside of the good. Social media, for example, can give voices to the previously voiceless and introduce people to new viewpoints and experiences that they themselves might not have considered before. Unfortunately, this applies just as much to hateful voices as it does to constructive ones. More generally speaking, just by being online we’ve sacrificed some privacy. Sign up for Facebook, an email account, or even just an app, and now a big company has your information. Is it avoidable? At this point, I’m not even sure. And I’m not advocating for a complete disconnect from interacting with apps or the existence of smart devices. But I do think that each of us needs to really consider where we draw the line. Do we need a smart toilet that will collect health data and send it to the doctor for us (I wrote this sentence as a joke, but then found this article from three days ago, so…)? Do we need an oven that texts us when our roast beef hits the right temperature? And do we need Dixie cups that require an app and an internet connection just to tell us a joke?
To find out, download my new “Blog Post Conclusion” app and scan this page!
Chris Larsen's Writing Portfolio 