Imagine walking into a store and being blind. Now image that you are not blind, but oblivious. Yesterday’s VentureBeat interview with Tony Bartel might have revealed that our modern society is becoming oblivious to everything that is happening around ourselves. You may say that this is a problem. But, I believe it is just a step in our evolution to super-humanity.
Yesterday, GameStop’s president Bartel, said this to VentureBeat. “Believe it or not, only 40 percent of the people who walk into a GameStop store today know that we accept trades of games,” he said.
Now, anybody who has ever been to a GameStop and looked around the store would know that this is impossible. How can only 40% of their customers are able to see the advertising on every window and every shelf in the store? How can 60% of their customers be deaf to their plea for trade-in games at the register? We know that every cashier asks us before the transaction starts if we have any trade-in games. Therefore, this can not be the fault of GameStop, as a company, because advertising and register-monkey spiel are bleeding from every nook and cranny of that store – it must be that we have evolved our comprehension of advertising.
I suppose we can trace the origins of this phenomenon to the turn of the century, when our magazines were being weighed down by metric tons of America Online floppy disks, when our parents turned homicidal because of dinner-time telemarketing, or when webpages turned into minefields of porn advertising.
One can only assume, that either most GameStop customers have no idea what the words “trade, used, or sell” mean, they are oblivious to everything that is going on around them, or they have evolved to such a point that advertising of any kind will not go through their blinders.
There are three ways to look at this situation:
1. We, as a society, might have a problem with processing everyday information.
2. We evolved in response to our overly advertised environment.
3. We have an ever increasing number of morons in our society.
