advertising, demystified.

Q: Why is this funny?

A. Because the MTA can’t do anything right.

B. Because attempting to use the display as a touch-screen fails, and therefore common citizens cannot change the input device for the greater good of advertisers and audience.

C. Because advertising is generally an opaque process, with billboards and posters plastered up at night, and seeing the fallibility of the systems supporting advertising reminds us that advertising is not inevitable and is bound by the same technological limitations—and hindered by the same common glitches—as everything else.

D. Because S-Video is listed as an option.

E. All of the above.

Thomas Geminus, 1545

Secunda ossium tabula

This image is available in the New York Public Library Digital Collection, call number 1157693.

Selected works by Mae Saslaw are available on this website.

More.

I am this month’s guest editor at The Corresponding Society. Visit today and again later this month for more- I’ve just posted an unfocused essay about David Foster Wallace on the anniversary of his death.