I've spent all day on a course about Mobile Social Networking. I do technical stuff normally. I knew this would be more business-oriented. But I had little idea how low everyone would stoop.
There's a site which has (or had, when the stats were collected) 80,000 subscribers: www.flirtomatic.com. The name kind-of suggests what it's all about. Those 80,000 subscribers have between them purchased 3.5m virtual roses. At a cost of something like 40c each.
American folks may not realise how comprehensive mobile phone (cellphone) reach is in the rest of the world. There are 3.3bn active subscribers in the world. But get this, market penetration in several countries (in Asia, and in Europe) is approaching 150% of the population. Yes, that's right, including infants and the very old. So a high proportion of the adult population has two mobile phone accounts. And there are a whole slew of products just coming onto the market for the under-12s.
Evidently a lot of people want a slice of that sort of action. I don't know what to think.
Leaving aside the profligacy of equipping everyone with an advanced instant communication device, the sheer balls of the marketing people who then want to relieve users of their hard-earned cash to buy virtual consumer goods is staggering. On one level, that's not consumptive - it uses very few resources - but boy, oh boy, it plays on people's deepest fears of failing to be at the heart of their social network. Studies have shown that SMS texting is as addictive as smoking - and that people deprived of their phones show classic symptoms of withdrawl.
Has our culture come to this? Yes, indeed. And, europhiles, look where all that exploitative marketing is coming from. Caring, sharing Europe.
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