AT&T now sends its wireless customers a friendly video with bouncy music, giving you several shout-outs by name, leafing through your bill and calmly explaining it to you in comforting female tones. NBC News reports that the video bills are intended to calm irate customers.Kind of like those safety demonstrations on airplanes.
I'm suspicious of this motive on the part of AT&T. Why? One less person who needs their bill explained to him/her (and really, they're not that difficult to understand) ALSO means one less AT&T employee, even if it's a call center person working for tiny wages. The same thing happened 25 years ago when live operators in this country were replaced by automated voice systems.
Plus, there's something intensely big-brotherish in a way that bodes ill. If the technology exists to make personalized short videos, in effect, movies, then it's not hard to envision an eventual scenario where the megapiles of data being aggregated on your personal shopping/browsing/renting/viewing/Netflix habits are amassed and turned into feature-length movies/TV/content that you will pay for (or will click during strategic moments to buy crap featured during the show).
Then, because it's literally tailor-made just for you, you'll get even more addicted to that than to anything else so far. And worst case, you'll watch so much that that you'll never get up or pee or poo or eat and you'll watch that stuff until you die, like the fictional film "Infinite Jest," also referred to as The Entertainment in David Foster Wallace's novel of the same name.
Slight overstatement, perhaps. Or is it?
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