Cyber Monday: The success of a forced meme


Cyber Monday is a marketing term/event invented in 2005 by Shop.org, an association of online retainers. Over the years, the association has continued to promote the idea, and now, in 2011, it seems to have finally hit critical mass.

Watching the growth of this idea over the years is a fascinating look into how a “forced meme” can be constructed and spread, with the help of news media, in particular. (For some historical context, read some of the posts on slashdot back in 2005.)

If you think about it, before that press release, nobody had heard of Cyber Monday. Then, one press release later, an idea is born. Give it a catchy name, an easy-to-tell story and some questionable statistics and it becomes newsworthy enough to be worth covering. And, because it is issued by an association of retailers, i.e. a big organization that has money and makes money, it automatically becomes important. (Can you imagine a random individual issuing a press release, or even Occupy Wall Street issuing such a thing and having the news media cover it at all? When people or groups with money speak, we listen.)

Another important thing is to repeat the press release each year, and update the statistics, which surely will go up and be “record-breaking” each subsequent year if you start out small enough, and you’ve got yourself an idea that’s got wings. “Record-breaking” is such an easy term to exploit.

Now, ask yourself, how did you come to “learn” about Cyber Monday? Did your neighbor tell you about it? Did a coworker mention to you about some great deals they found? Most likely not. Most likely you heard about it on the news, in the guise of ‘helpful tips’ to get ‘the most’ out of ‘Cyber Monday’.

If you do a quick search on YouTube for Cyber Monday, you’ll see all sorts of news media coverage of how much money it’s going to bring in for online retailers (that’s “newsworthy” because it affects the economy, stupid), or tips on how to find great deals and not be done in by fake websites. (“Cyber Monday” and “fake” in the same sentence? I shudder to think.) My personal favorite is the one from CBS which features a “personal finance” contributor outright telling you which websites to visit for deals. Is this news?

It’s fascinating how effective it is to simply presume something to be true, and instead of researching its validity, pointedly discuss issues surrounding it. Not unlike asking your friends what they will be buying your imaginary friend for her birthday this year, asking your mother what her thoughts are on the latest teen sensation, Fakey Mcgee, or presenting a plan to rid your foe of weapons of mass destruction, treating something to be true and

Chalk up another one for the marketers. As Goebbels said, “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.”

How to stop Google from tracking your clicks

Every time you search on google.com and click on one of the results, Google records that click. They’ve likely been doing this for a while, but I’ve only really started noticing it lately because their redirect servers are oftentimes slow, so you can actually see the hand-over happening.

Google is pretty clever about hiding the fact that they are recording the clicks by presenting a different URL when you hover over the a search result. Try this: do a search on google.com and hover over one of the results.

Look at the bottom of your window and see what the link’s URL is. Hey, looks okay, right? Google isn’t redirecting you to one of their servers or anything, right? Well, try clicking on the mouse, but don’t release the mouse button yet. Now look at the status bar:


(This works on Firefox. I’m not sure how it appears on other browsers.)

Aha, the browser reveals the truth. What’s happening is Google is taking you to another site to record this click, then sending you to the real site. There’s two reasons why this is annoying: 1) privacy and 2) it slows down your browsing experience. I’m not really going to discuss the privacy issues here. If you don’t mind Google tracking your clicks (perhaps because they are providing you a free service), that’s fine. However, from a pragmatic point of view, it does slow down your browsing experience.

So how do you turn it off? I’ve discovered a quick way: use Scroogle. Scroogle provides a way to do searches on Google anonymously and doesn’t track your clicks. If you are using Firefox and like to use the search field in the top-right corner of your window, you can install a Scroogle search plugin from here.

I’m going to round up some other ways of bypassing search tracking and will post them here when I get more info. In the meantime, here are some more posts about this issue from other bloggers:

– How to Stop Google, Yahoo & Bing from Tracking Your Clicks
– Why Google keeps your data forever, tracks you with ads
– Facebook Is Tracking Your Every Move on the Web; Here’s How to Stop It

Go watch Troll Hunter—it’s streaming on Netflix

I just watched Troll Hunter. I only just heard about it two hours ago while looking at the new films available for streaming on Netflix. Without giving too much away, it’s a Norwegian film that starts off as a sort of Blair Witch Project found-footage documentary. Some students are filming some recent bear attacks and come upon a strange man who goes hunting at night and returns in the morning.

That’s all you need to know.

It’s a fantastic little film and you should go watch it now. It really is one of those films where the less you know about it, the better. Just go see it.