The book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1982) is written by a former Librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin. That is the book that taught me about pseudo-events, happenings of little or no importance except as content of announcements and as attention getters. The first example I heard about was Senator Joseph McCarthy's practice of announcing that an announcement would be made tomorrow afternoon. If a busy reporter made his way to the indicated location tomorrow afternoon, he would find that an announcement was indeed made. The announcement announced that an important announcement would be made the following day at 10 AM.
I might feel that any news item was the same old stuff and not really of any interest. But to learn that the item was the same old thing, I need to pay some attention. If you are trying Pavlovian conditioning on me, you might develop a habit on my part of reading the announcements from your office. I might even be disgusted with the time-wasting you promote but continue to check things from your office, just to see if you continue in your irritating ways.
The worldwide web, with its Uniform Resource Identifier (the familiar URI, for instance of this page, the "web address", the information that usually starts with and gets a connected computer to this page http://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com
is a relatively new medium of communication. Bad manners and irritating practices happen.
Reading rooms in libraries are usually quiet and mannerly. But take a stack of single sheets advertising your tavern or your baked goods into the reading room and just walk along, dropping one sheet across the page someone is reading. See what sort of reaction you get.
As you may know, these days, it is not uncommon to experience the same impolite intrusion when reading on the world wide web. You are reading along and suddenly an ad for a sale of winter coats or new cars plops itself across what you are reading. You can take the diversion and read the intrusion. You can, in irritation, close the web page and move to something else.
You can use the Firefox browser and do a right click to get to the short menu and save the page into Pocket. You can find and learn to use Reader View which just shows the main page connected to that address and not inserts or videos. You can imagine how much more irritating an irrelevant interruption is if that interruption merely announces an important interruption coming up in 7 minutes from now.
You may know that to make a page-like presentation of words and pictures, the computer housing the page code needs your computer identification to send it the page code. If we can keep you on our page a bit longer, we may be able to scoop up more information and sell you the car you have been wanting.
