the additive property of communication

"That is the voice of the current somnambulism...There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form...It has never occurred to General Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are" (Understanding Media 23).

FriendsGreen!

"We are a bunch of green-passionate software people who wanted to make a difference by doing what we can on the web. Every little thing we do can make a big difference. We realized how much searching we do each day and thought, "gee, how can we turn search into a green-friendly activity?" The FriendsGreen Search Engine (friendsgreen.com) is an online activism site that gives Internet users a free and easy way to help fight Global Warming and to save the Rainforests. Merely by getting in the habit of using friendsgreen.com to search the internet, users can donate proceeds from their searches to fund a portfolio of reforestation projects.

How do you calculate the amount of rainforest saved?
Squarefeet are saved both by conducting searches on FriendsGreen and by our advertising features of the (Lil) Green Patch application on Facebook (http://apps.facebook.com/greentrees). The number of squarefeet saved is a total of all squarefeet saved across the media properties owned by Green Patch, LLC. The amount of funding generated per search depends on the search term and actions completed after the search is conducted. You are the key to the success of the FriendsGreen Search Engine. The more visitors we have using our search engine each day, the greater the total number of squarefeet we can save together."

http://friendsgreen.com/

Can the success of this type of proposed activism be measured by its actualized rehabilitation of ‘the rainforest’, or can it only remark on an adaptation of consumer consciousness which is now provided with pathways of concern-distribution by both advertisers and software programmers indebted to a bureaucratic network of desire management? The ambiguity of the projected result for conservation is inconsequential for the user in a transaction that is already vague. In presenting a platter of web results, the search engine communicates discreetly with its partners in market research, which allows a paperless loop of consumer feedback and bolsters advertiser niche marketing, flawlessly monitoring desire and choice and rendering the survey functionally obsolete for electronic consumption. This process is typically made invisible to consumers. Except, of course, when their previously assumed passivity in the act of searching (aligned with an assumed passivity of vision itself) can be revealed for its transactive exchange and allow the individual to play in directing the flow of this operation. Consumer activism, under the jurisdiction of an explicit set of active input (the search query) and the collaborative output (the advertiser’s agreement to contribute to a predetermined charitable fund in exchange for market research) conveniently manifests in 1 sq. ft. cubes of rainforest; the tangible (yet unimaginable) magic of this transaction allows the individual to experience the personal satisfaction of measurable conscientious behavior. As consumers become more concerned with ‘going green’, their anticipated processes of adaptation are matched by adaptations in the artifice of revenue generation by which corporations present their bureaucratic methods as more transparent, more interactive, and potentially more charitable, if only for the game in which the consumer may now conspicuously meddle.