Influencing an online mind

Over the last two years I observed something strange and intangible happening with me when I was working, watching, living online. I am sure that it was there before but it never made itself clear to me as it did over this period. I am sure that you can also see it and maybe it is event happening with you.

Having grown up together with the internet and spending a lot of my time online, I have seen a lot of more or less interesting trends happening. Portals and social media sites coming and going. The style of the web changing and more and more companies trying to use the opportunities that technology brings us for their business.

Almost from when the internet was born, people used it to advertise products and services. Huge banners appeared on our favourite websites and sometimes even completely blocked our view for a few seconds. I developed kind of a filter for these things and I almost did not notice these banners after some time. People not being so lucky did not have to wait long until little browser extensions helped all of us to block these unwanted images from cluttering up every inch of digital real estate on the websites we were watching.

For some time now it almost seemed as if we would no longer have to watch those advertisements when surfing the web. That would have been too good to be true though. Over the last two years a new breed of advertisements emerged. Mixed within the posts of your friends you'll notice a very cool and hip looking gadget and only on the second glance you realise that you are looking at a paid post.

I have the feeling that also the products being marketed through these channels changed. You see a lot of "design" items, that are nice to watch but seem like they did not cost a lot in production. Things like free watches where you only have to pay delivery and the next best tech just launched on kickstarter are greeting you daily.

These subliminal advertisements hidden in your time-line are much more invasive and I catch myself more often falling for those products and I am wondering if you feel the same. Is our society steering towards the next level of consumerism?