Why must messages
be so dehumanizing?
One of the beauties of living in a small town is that loyal community members regard each other as partners. They talk to each other, not at each other. They do business together and communicate via local means rather than using high-tech multinational conglomerates to deliver messages in dehumanizing ways.
Some businesses apparently don’t understand this. They seem to prefer junk mail, anti-social media, spam email, and computerized robocalls instead of traditional, small-town ways in which businesses communicate.
Monday morning, many people received a robocall from a local medical clinic. In some households, multiple phones rang simultaneously with the exact same message. The uninterruptible, voice-synthesized message came in a little before 9 a.m. — a bit early for people who might still be sleeping, rushing to get ready for work, or trying to enjoy an uninterrupted breakfast.
It was voiced by artificial intelligence. So instead of it being about how flu shots being available at SAINT Luke Clinic, it was about flu shots being available at STREET Luke Clinic.
AI isn’t smart. It guesses based on the frequency words are used in such things as stories published in newspapers — immensely valuable data that AI companies have for years been using high-tech methods to steal and catalog without paying.
In an AI database, “St.” most often is used to stand for “street,” not “saint,” so AI will pronounce it that way.
Worse yet, about an hour later, St. Luke’s robocall was followed up by an equally dehumanizing spam email saying that dates mentioned in the robocall were wrong. It’s bad enough to do intrusive advertising once. But to have to follow it up with yet another intrusive ad is something else altogether.
The robocall spoofed the clinic’s actual phone number, which may lead various wireless carriers to block that number. The email came from an address that 32% of users of an anti-spam site contend should be blocked.
What some people seem to forget is advice rendered years ago by Walmart founder Sam Walton. He was asked how hometown businesses could compete with low prices of his big-box stores. The answer was simple: service, human interaction, actually caring for customers rather than treating them like so many data points to be manipulated.
Why choose to get a flu shot from a local clinic instead of a distant big-box pharmacy if the shots are announced in the same dehumanizing way? Cost won’t be a factor. Most shots are covered by insurance — at least until President Trump’s pseudo-scientists use Magic 8 Ball research to “prove” they do all sorts of evil things. Chances are that people will choose where to get a shot based on convenience. And big-box pharmacies will offer shots over a much longer time frame than a local clinic will.
Things like flu shot clinics used to be announced in neighborly fashion via ads and news stories in local newspapers. We at the Record ask repeatedly for both but to date have received zero ads, nor have we received news releases seeking free coverage.
A politically motivated, self-fulfilling drumbeat that newspapers are “legacy” media — code words for antiquated and irrelevant — seems to have captured the minds of amateurs thrust into making marketing decisions. They seem intent on switching to what they see as modern, big-city techniques in our quaint little town.
Small towns continue to exist because people who live here appreciate old-fashioned values like doing business with each other rather than with faceless mega-corporations from who-knows-where.
We try to practice that at the Record. We don’t, for example, seek ads from distant big-box stores, the nearest location of which is more than 50 miles away. One local publication that formerly called itself a newspaper does, but it’s no small coincidence that the same local publication no longer provides any degree of local news coverage.
Small towns flourish when community members agree to a social contract that includes shopping at home, making an effort to keep abreast of local news, and becoming involved with things other than those in which they might have a vested interest, like a particular sport their child might play at school.
Prep sports may be a dominant concern to someone during their childhood and parenthood, but what about the rest of their lives? The average age of a Marion resident is more than 47 years. Issues that tend to dominate among younger people often aren’t of the same overwhelming concern to others.
New-fangled messaging often seeks to deliver messages in ways more effective with the younger group rather than the older one. That’s despite the fact that the shots being touted are of interest primarily to the older group. Amateur marketers need to use the methods that fit their intended audience, not just the methods they personally use. They need to understand and appreciate that the audience consists of human beings, not just data points to be manipulated.
Some wrongly interpret lack of objection to marketing attempts as passive acceptance. More often, people who might object don’t do so because they have tired of being ignored or ridiculed after having spent years as loyal contributors to their community.
The biggest threat to our way of life comes not from immigrants, people of different or changing sexual orientation, or even people addicted to various substances or to living off the charity of others.
The biggest threat comes from people who seek to become what they regard as thoroughly modern without understanding that the techniques they favor can thoroughly unravel the fabric of what makes a small town a treasured community, infinitely better than faceless big cities where dehumanized approaches are common.
— ERIC MEYER