Our car has been nagging us for ages about getting it
serviced. Yesterday we finally had the job done which stopped it flashing up a warning and
treating us to an imperious beep every time we started the thing. It makes its
own decisions too. If I switch on the windscreen wipers it turns the headlights
on as if to say “you should have thought of that”.
Windows 10 nags me about all kinds of things. It keeps
telling me that my copy of MS Office is out of date and do I want to upgrade? Although oddly enough, ever since I left a comment somewhere about moving to
LibreOffice the nagging stopped for a while. Spooky that.
For some reason YouTube thinks I could be a fan of Abbott and
Costello. I’m not and never was, but perhaps it thinks I should be to comply with my profile. Perhaps it’s a
micro-nag. It will all become more pervasive of course - nudging and nagging.
3 comments:
perhaps it thinks I should be to comply with my profile
That's an interesting phrase, isn't it? People who don't comply with their profiles - in all sorts of situations - do tend to get nagged or nudged. When I engage in a bit of nagging, I tend to do it because people are not complying with a profile which I have mysteriously constructed. When I realise that, I'm able to stop, having seen how ridiculous it is. The problem with software, of course, is that it can't do that. It can be set up to stop when given the "correct" input. ("Remind me later"...."Click here to unsubscribe"...) But otherwise it's just a loop of prejudice that someone has set up to deal with our intransigence and our failure to act in ways they want.
A short tale of software prompting, I had a blue screen event last year that meant calling in the computer wizard, he re did what ever was neccesary and installed the best of my protection programs and suggested I download Kaspersky anti virus which I did.
All worked well and the anti virus seemed more than up to the job, so when renewal was due I recieved a "special offer" for the whole Kaspersky suite, to good to turn down I thought and purchased it at a price not much more than the stand alone anti virus.
It took awhile for me to realise something was amiss, I had according to the settings menu consumed a very large part of my free space and I had no idea why even clearing old files etc was only a temporary respite from the relentless eating into my disc, it after investigation turned out to be my new "special offer" software that has a restore and backup facility that does just that, back up everything all the time and with no way of turning it off even with a re install, there is a way of deleting the stored files but it is not complete and is time wasting and ardous, so the result was I ditched the whole Kaspersky suite and went back to free programs, result no problems other than wasted money, beware the prompts.
And yes the car prompts two months before they are due every time you start up are a pain.
Sam - and as the profiles tighten we see more nagging such that even reasonable people are nagged to be ever more 'reasonable'. A friend predicted this kind of narrowing over forty years ago.
Wiggia - I use Windows Defender. Seems to work well enough, possibly because I'm a low risk user who doesn't visit dodgy sites or click dodgy links. I've tried buying packages and like you I've had problems and ditched them. Like so much software they try to do to much.
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