xkcd describes itself as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language,” so of course it’s right up my alley.  I pulled this comic from Friday, April 17, 2009:

We’ve beaten the dead horse with the outbound marketing stick to an unrecognisable pulp, and we’ve reached a point where if we even smell a hint of blatant advertising, we run for the hills.  Or, more literally, we fast-forward through the commercials because we’re watching the TiVo’d recording.

Today, everyone’s wary of whatever it is those folks behind the curtain are selling, regardless of whether or not the product is actually of any use or not.  After gigabytes upon gigabytes of spam, the hundredth infomercial for the phone-dating service promising that there are countless attractive young people in the area waiting for our phone call, and the subway stations wallpapered with adverts claiming that certain wristwatches are sexy, we start to turn a blind eye to anything that “looks” like an advertisement.  Rather than listening to the overly analytical reviews of paid critics, we prefer to heed the opinions of “people like us” who will be blunt and relevant about their experiences.

While we’ve successfully managed to block out most of the rubbish flooding the media world, xkcd poignantly muses that perhaps not all outbound marketing is spam, but how do we recognise when something may in fact merit some sifting?  It would seem that we, the audience members, need to be convinced that picking through adverts and determining which ones are worth our attention, or the marketers need to find a new method of communicating with us.  Considering that we equate the speed of life with the speed of Twitter, I’m going to go ahead and vote for the latter.