Now that election season is over and in the brief window before the jockeying for the 2012 presidential begins, I want to take a moment to talk about – elections. (Sorry. If you want to go do something else, you have my permission.)
If you stick around, though, you might find it worthwhile, because you may have experienced the same electoral phenomenon I have. In recent months, I’ve gotten emails from folks asking me to vote for someone – usually a young person – in an online election.
These young people – candidates, as it were – are fine kids, surely deserving of whatever they’re running for. These “elections” often have something to do with winning a scholarship. What could be wrong with that? Send a kid to school, make the world a better place.
So the email says something like “My nephew Melvin is a finalist in the OWottaWorld Scholarship essay contest. If he gets the most votes, he wins a $10,000 college scholarship. Please click here to vote for Melvin pass this along to everyone in your address book.”
So you click the link for OWottaWorld.com (don’t look for that, I just made it up), which takes you to a page with a photo of Melvin and another 19 kids. They’ve each written an essay, which you can see by clicking a link under the kid’s photo.
But you didn’t click the link. Not on Melvin’s essay or any other one. We’re just not big consumers of essays anymore, if we ever were. Certainly not high school essays. Instead you just click the link that says, “Vote for Melvin,” because really, you just want this experience to be over and get on with your life.
Now a screen pops up that asks for your name, email address and street address and phone number. Well, of course, you don’t want someone’s mother voting 1,400 times, so there have to be controls, right?
On the other hand, now you might be excused for thinking that the point of the whole exercise might not be scholarships, but the opportunity to harvest information and sell it to advertisers. It’s a neat trick, too. Depending on how the “contest” is devised, the organizers can target a particular segment of the population and then the most gullible among that segment identify themselves by filling in the data. (Why not just fill in the blanks with bogus data? “fake.name@mybutt.com”? If that’s the level to which you wish to descend, go ahead but it’s your sense of self-worth.)
Is this what we want for our kids? Has the state of public education in this nation become so dreary that we need to use our kids as spam bait to give them a shot at college?
Speaking of education, what kind of civics lesson is this for the kids? The short version of the message here is: “Rig the election!” No one is even going to pretend voters will read all those essays, weigh them objectively (even if said voter had the capacity to do so) and make an unbiased choice.
Instead, it’s a competition to see which child (read: which child’s parents, aunts and uncles) can herd as many of their friends and associates into the cyber corral and induce them to give up their demographic information to the advertisers.
Look at the state of real (if one can call them that) elections in this country. Look at the last one, contemplate, if you dare the next one. The candidates and campaign managers and voters in these elections did not participate in bogus online contrivances when we were 12, so imagine how bad things may be by the time Melvin is running for the US Senate.
All this comes served in a glutinous sauce of emotional blackmail. Is it really too much to ask? Last year little Melvin was selling subscriptions to magazines you didn’t want so passed on that (and felt guilty), so how bad could this be? Besides, the insidious “contest” organizers have the total votes each kids has already received under her or his photo and poor little Mel, with 5,383 votes is in third place, but there’s another week left and with a great effort, yada, yada, yada.
Resist! Feeding these animals only encourages them. If you still feel guilty, buy Melvin a biography of Thomas Jefferson. He’ll need it.
Vote for Me!
Now that election season is over and in the brief window before the jockeying for the 2012 presidential begins, I want to take a moment to talk about – elections. (Sorry. If you want to go do something else, you have my permission.)
If you stick around, though, you might find it worthwhile, because you may have experienced the same electoral phenomenon I have. In recent months, I’ve gotten emails from folks asking me to vote for someone – usually a young person – in an online election.
These young people – candidates, as it were – are fine kids, surely deserving of whatever they’re running for. These “elections” often have something to do with winning a scholarship. What could be wrong with that? Send a kid to school, make the world a better place.
So the email says something like “My nephew Melvin is a finalist in the OWottaWorld Scholarship essay contest. If he gets the most votes, he wins a $10,000 college scholarship. Please click here to vote for Melvin pass this along to everyone in your address book.”
So you click the link for OWottaWorld.com (don’t look for that, I just made it up), which takes you to a page with a photo of Melvin and another 19 kids. They’ve each written an essay, which you can see by clicking a link under the kid’s photo.
But you didn’t click the link. Not on Melvin’s essay or any other one. We’re just not big consumers of essays anymore, if we ever were. Certainly not high school essays. Instead you just click the link that says, “Vote for Melvin,” because really, you just want this experience to be over and get on with your life.
Now a screen pops up that asks for your name, email address and street address and phone number. Well, of course, you don’t want someone’s mother voting 1,400 times, so there have to be controls, right?
On the other hand, now you might be excused for thinking that the point of the whole exercise might not be scholarships, but the opportunity to harvest information and sell it to advertisers. It’s a neat trick, too. Depending on how the “contest” is devised, the organizers can target a particular segment of the population and then the most gullible among that segment identify themselves by filling in the data. (Why not just fill in the blanks with bogus data? “fake.name@mybutt.com”? If that’s the level to which you wish to descend, go ahead but it’s your sense of self-worth.)
Is this what we want for our kids? Has the state of public education in this nation become so dreary that we need to use our kids as spam bait to give them a shot at college?
Speaking of education, what kind of civics lesson is this for the kids? The short version of the message here is: “Rig the election!” No one is even going to pretend voters will read all those essays, weigh them objectively (even if said voter had the capacity to do so) and make an unbiased choice.
Instead, it’s a competition to see which child (read: which child’s parents, aunts and uncles) can herd as many of their friends and associates into the cyber corral and induce them to give up their demographic information to the advertisers.
Look at the state of real (if one can call them that) elections in this country. Look at the last one, contemplate, if you dare the next one. The candidates and campaign managers and voters in these elections did not participate in bogus online contrivances when we were 12, so imagine how bad things may be by the time Melvin is running for the US Senate.
All this comes served in a glutinous sauce of emotional blackmail. Is it really too much to ask? Last year little Melvin was selling subscriptions to magazines you didn’t want so passed on that (and felt guilty), so how bad could this be? Besides, the insidious “contest” organizers have the total votes each kids has already received under her or his photo and poor little Mel, with 5,383 votes is in third place, but there’s another week left and with a great effort, yada, yada, yada.
Resist! Feeding these animals only encourages them. If you still feel guilty, buy Melvin a biography of Thomas Jefferson. He’ll need it.
© Mark Floegel, 2010