Welcome to the Web, a voyeur’s paradise

I’m not really liking the turn technology has taken lately.

It has become creepy and invasive, but somehow society is OK with that.

Some of the newer features of Facebook are social readers that show up on our news feeds. They inform us of what news article our friends are reading on particular websites. I’d be embarrassed if my friends had to see how many articles I read about the Kardashian sisters — unlike some of my friends, apparently — so I don’t use social readers very much.

Neither does anyone else these days. At its peak, the Washington Post Social Reader reached about 18 million monthly active users. As of the first week of May, the tool had about 9 million monthly active users. Oops?

Social readers from the Guardian and Dailymotion aren’t doing so well, either; the Guardian had about 600,000 daily active users in the beginning of April and fewer than 100,000 daily active users in the beginning of May.

People aren’t so excited about having every detail of their Internet lives broadcasted to all of their friends. But the point of social networking sites is to connect, or reconnect, via common interests, right? There just has to be a limit to what we share with certain people.

Which brings me to Google’s latest ad campaign.

Google has released some pretty powerful commercials in recent years; its “It Gets Better” ad for Google Chrome is more than a year old and was created with the Google Creative Lab’s newest theme, “The web is what you make of it.”

Like any campaign, the creative videos were designed to sell us something — or to sell us on the idea of something.

Eventually those videos turned into the “Search Stories” series. One of these, titled “Parisian Love,” premiered during the 2010 Super Bowl. It follows a fictional love story between some faceless dude and his French girlfriend; the story evolves and ends with the guy searching for directions on how to assemble a crib.

First of all, cribs come with assembly directions. Second, the ad was made without any clear definition of how time was passing, so I have no idea how soon into this relationship he was thinking about having kids. Whatever, I can put my jaded soul aside for a bit and appreciate this guy’s journey to find love.

Fine.

But now Google has released something even worse.

Let me introduce you to Mark Potter.

Potter is certainly trying to make the most out of his web experience by attempting to win over his ex-girlfriend with a Da Vinci Code-esque Google doc of shame.

The ad seems to be a wild plea to fix a relationship gone awry; it’s not exactly clear if the couple split or if they’ve just had a fight. Either way, as the “Jen” in this video, are we supposed to feel flattered that he went to so much work to win us over or do we need to reiterate the “no means no” lesson?

Because so much of our lives is kept on the web “cloud,” Potter is able to pull up an awful lot of old memories of their relationship and put them on display. It’s some sort of weird grand gesture; are shame docs the new mixtapes?

Good luck, Mark Potter.

Your crazed mission to win Jen back is only fueled by how much of our lives is already virtually scrapbooked, which does a lot of the work for you.

Sami Main is a journalism senior at UF. Her column appears on Tuesdays. You can contact her at opinions@alligator.org.