Each Segues column starts with something tech-related before quickly branching out from there into a tangentially related thread. These articles are born from my thought and speech patterns that regularly contain quickfire transitions. For one of my birthdays, a friend made me a crown that said “King of the Segues”. Actually, it said “King of the Segways” and that was the day we learned how to spell segue correctly.
Hidden amongst you is a world rife with technology you don’t notice. No, I’m not talking about nanobots or Harry Potter-inspired invisibility cloaks. Technology is employed in places and ways you might not suspect until it’s pointed out to you. It shows up in trickily placed advertising to mess with your subconscious and can erroneously have your driver’s license revoked when it marks you as a possible terrorist or identity thief.
Old Shows, New Products
Product placement is nothing new. The idea of slipping products into scenes of TV shows or movies without directly calling them out has been done since the earliest days of cinema. This became a lot more prevalent in the 80s, so most of us grew up with product placement. The guys at FilmDrunk did a great retrospective on the whole sly advertising phenomenon in movies.
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wACBAu9coUU’]
At this point, we’ve come to expect product placement. It can even make characters more relatable to see them drinking Dr. Pepper instead of a soda with a made-up name like Dr. Fizz. However, when ads for current products are retroactively placed in old movies and reruns, we start talking about a whole other ball game. Recently, such time-traveling ads were discovered and placed on reddit. The screencap shows a large poster for Zookeeper, a movie destined for a Razzie Award if there ever was one, appearing in an episode of How I Met Your Mother that originally aired four years before the movie was puked out by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions. The link to Sandler here isn’t likely coincidental if you know how he treats product placement in his own films (see examples of this blatant advertising in the FilmDrunk video). More pictures showing the insertion of Zookeeper into the background of scenes and another similar ad for the movie Country Song, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, have showed up on flickr.
Check out the Zookeeper ad placed behind and to the right of Cobie Smulders in the second picture. Images by stjarna, flickr
Image by Abir Majumdar, flickr
What’s particularly interesting about the time traveling insertion of these movies into past episodes of HIMYM is that both Zookeeper and Country Song turned out to be critical and financial failures. Maybe movie studios only plan on using this retroactive product placement into reruns of popular TV shows if they have no faith in the movies to stand on their own feet. Unfortunately, that might have the counterproductive effect of making good things looks bad by association.
Mistaken Identity
When John H. Gass picked up his mail in March, he never thought he’d receive a letter from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles telling him he had just over a week until his driver’s license would be revoked. That’s exactly what happened though when an antiterrorism computerized facial recognition system marked his face as fraudulent among the 4 ½ million drivers in the state. Instead of being a terrorist or a grifter (thanks, Leverage, for putting that word back in my vocabulary) with multiple fake identities, Gass just happened to look like another driver. According to the article from The Boston Globe:
Last year, the facial recognition system picked out more than 1,000 cases that resulted in State Police investigations, officials say. And some of those people are guilty of nothing more than looking like someone else.
Found when looking for a facial recognition picture. Nope, not creepy at all. Image by Steve Jurvetson, flickr
As of this moment, 34 other states use the same facial recognition system, which means cases like Gass’s likely happen nationwide. While troubling to many (those who follow and believe Alex Jones quickly come to mind), the system does have its positive merits such as helping to stop underage people from purchasing alcohol (they can depend on older brothers and homeless guys who hang outside convenience stores for that) and preventing people with previously suspended licenses from obtaining new ones, real or fake. Gass, who drives for a living and lost wages due to the 10 days he spent trying to get his license reinstated, says he’s not upset about the whole situation. At least, he’s not upset that the system exists or that it flagged him, but he is upset at the way the whole situation was handled.
“No one is angry about the work they have to do to track fraud, but once they saw the error, even the words sorry would go a long way. But I got nothing,’’ he said. “The overwhelming attitude was they couldn’t care less.’’
Whether it’s the incestuous behavior of movie and TV studios working in collusion to try to implant the desire to see crappy movies, our lack of sympathy over someone’s stolen identity in the name of the greater good, or any other number of ways in which technology has stealthily seeped into our lives, people will always react to these technological additions to our lives and not always favorably. That reaction, favorable or unfavorable, seems to be forgotten or simply tossed to the wayside. But you shouldn’t take these moments of recognition for granted. More importantly, the people who institute this type of tech shouldn’t take people’s reactions for granted.
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