The Neediness of the Web

Jesus!  They just won't leave you alone, will they?  The internet is just full of people making demands of you.  Right now I'm being harassed by some meerkats over some bloody cinema ticket deal which I'm apparently eligible for because I bought my car insurance via their site.  I can see that I'm going to be forced to take up the offer just to get them out of my inbox, despite it being pretty pointless as I rarely go to the cinema anymore (I can't afford their prices).  Moreover, I'm one of those strange people who likes going to watch films on their own and the offer has to do with getting two tickets for the price of one.  But anything to stop them from pestering me!  But if it isn't the meerkats, then it's bloody Amazon wanting me to rate and review purchases, in this case, a couple of French DVDs I recently bought.  The thing is though, I haven't watched either of them - i bought them to watch over Christmas.  Besides, why would I want to review them on Amazon's site when I could do it here?  As for all that rating of the seller and the transaction, that's fine, except that they also want you to leave a comment.  What do they want me to say?  Surely the number of stars you've given tells its own story?

It's the same with bloody eBay.  Mind you, even worse, every time I look at something and don't bid on it or buy it, they start sending me emails asking if I'm still interested in it, (I wasn't actually interested in the first place, I was just browsing) and if I'm not suggests a load of other stuff, (which never seems to have any relevance to the item I was looking at in the first place).  But its the constant attempts to get you to give 'feedback' on everything you do online, every site you visit, which really gets me down.  When did the web become so needy?  But it isn't just the constant pestering, there's also the constant attempts to organise you.  I was checking what my phone had automatically uploaded to Microsoft's cloud storage a while ago, only to find the storage system attempting to organise my photos and videos in various ways: landscapes, buildings, etc.  Just fuck off, was my reaction.  They don't need to be bloody organised in anything other than chronological order.  Maybe. They are my pictures and I can find what I want without these attempts at 'organising'.

 I have to admit here that 'being organised' is one of my pet hates amongst workplace jargon.  There's this strange idea that to be organised (and, by extension, efficient) you have to have everything in neat piles and straight lines.  As I've explained to various managers, just because you have your desk neatly organised with all your pencils in straight lines, it doesn't mean that you are organised.  All it means is that you are good at arranging things into neat geometric patterns.  It never goes down well.  So, as you can imagine, I don't react well to having web applications trying to algorithmically organise my stuff.  Anyway, all these intrusions into my personal business have left me yearning for the days when entertainment wasn't interactive.  Damn it, I remember the days when the only thing a TV demanded of you was your attention while it showed you stuff you wanted to watch.  Nowadays they are all 'smart' and trying to second guess your viewing habits.  Fuck off, I say.  I'll be the judge of what I want to watch, not some bloody algorithm!