I’ve turned into some kind of angry letter-obsessed old man! But to be fair I write these up pretty quickly and don’t bother checking them (there are several purposeful spelling and grammar errors in this – see if you can spot them).
But anyway, there was an advert on ITV1 tonight for Confused.com which claimed the internet was the most important invention of the 21st century. I know, I know, it hurts on the inside. So I wrote to them about it.
To Whom It May Concern:
I have just been watching ITV1 (it is currently just before 8PM on Thursday 30 September) when I saw an advert for your website.
On the advert, the voice over woman described the internet as “the most important invention of the 21st century.”
As I am sure you will be aware, the internet was in fact not invented in the 21st century. Indeed, it was invented well before the 21st century with its foundations lying as long ago as the 1960’s.
Indeed not only does the internet date back this far but it’s wide spread adoption really occurred in the 1990’s and by the time we reached the end of 2000 the Dot-com bubble had already come and gone.
I therefore believe the claim made on the advert was erroneous.
While you could make the claim that although the internet was invented before the 21st century it is still the most important invention of the 21st century, I do not believe this makes any more sense because if you are opening it up to any invention ever then surely there are more important inventions that proceed the internet – for example the invention of computers to run the internet on, electricity to run the computers on or even the agricultural revolution which first gave us a surplus of time to expand beyond mere hunter gathers. Or going the other way, why not the world wide web which is arguably the real revolution that the internet has enabled?
I believe this kind of erroneous information is a problem for two reasons.
Firstly, it does not fill me with confidence in confused.com as I believe it looks unprofessional. Particularly a site yours, which holds large amounts of my personal data.Secondly, I believe it could lead to a wide spead misunderstanding of history by the general population on a topic which, as your advert points out, is incredibly important.
Thank you for your time.
Best wishes,
Chris
I decided against making a pun on the idea that they may have been confused. Oh well.
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Tags: advertising, confused, itv, letters, tv
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 30th, 2010 at 10:13 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.