#howmanysleepstillyougrowup? (My Article for Me)

... or should that be ‘Your Article for You’?

I don't believe it!

Once upon a time, I lamented the loss of old-style PCs, the days of File Manager, the facility to create your own macros or work in MS-DOS. I blame Apple for the general infantilisation of our society. Apple Macs turned up, all new kid in town, claiming to be more user friendly (user friendlier?), with ‘My Documents’, ‘My Pictures’, ‘My Music’; it was the beginning of the end. Microsoft inevitably followed suit. I was flabbergasted. I imagined a toddler stomping a foot and saying 'MY Computer!'

Scary Haribo ad

It reminded me of that terrifying Haribo ad where the adults put on kids’ voices. But I’m not four. I can share. I don’t need to personalise everything this way or to continually assert ownership. Why aren’t other people at best patronised, at worse insulted by this system, which assumes the user is incapable of naming their own folders and that we all have the intellectual capacity of small children? I felt as if I were being condescended to by my own computer. I seemed to exist, a bit like Victor Meldrew from One Foot in the Grave, in a state of permanent indignation.

Then the trend spread like some insidious disease till it was everywhere, an out-of-control virus. No one would stand firm and behave like an adult. Everybody jumped on the bandwagon till it was completely overloaded. Adding a personal pronoun became de rigueur though many companies were confused as to whether they should use 'your' or 'my'.

MyWaitrose card

The shops jumped on ergo, perforce ... I now have a MyWaitrose card (it's still very 'in' to join words like this, hence YouTube, SoundCloud); Morrisons began to label their ready-meal sections Meals for Me, Meals for Us; Boots has sections in its magazine called 'Your Health', 'Your Beauty', what's wrong with just 'Health' and 'Beauty'? The media followed suit: MyTimes, MyMail, My5, My4, etc. ad infinitum.

Financial institutions knew no better. We now have MyBarclaycard (if I’m grown-up enough to have a creditcard, I don’t need to believe there’s a page that relates to me alone, called ‘My Account’, - why not just ‘Barclaycard’ or ‘Account’? - as I would hope that only I would be able to access my account details, and that I would not be privy to information relating to JackNextdoorsBarclaycard). My Dad’s not online but there’s no MyDadsBarclaycardBillforMetoPay page.

InjuryLawyers4U

We're told to trust InjuryLawyers4U because they're injury lawyers for you as if we can't trust a company which doesn't claim to be for us. Does this type of marketing really work? If it does, it's a sad indictment of our society and probably a result of the nanny state taken to extremes. I wouldn't trust a company that talked down to me like this. Do other people like being patronised? By the way, it's still considered trendier to use numbers and letters like this, I don't know why. Prince (RIP) was doing it back in the 80s. It was cool then, guys, now, not so much.

And let's not forget that every time something is branded/rebranded so pointlessly, the consumer picks up the tab somewhere down the line.

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Gok Wan

Anyway, I could go on but I think you get the idea. This is I'm afraid all part of a larger picture of a society dumbed down to primary school level. I have many other examples of similar trends, all symptoms of the same malaise. Don't get me started on Gok Wan's Activia ads with his 'Happy Tummy People' ('When your tummy smiles, you smile' – seriously?). Which demographic is this aimed at? People who still call their stomachs their 'tummies', people who never grow up. Perhaps it's the same so-called adults who write, in newspaper columns, stuff like 'Six sleeps to Christmas/Easter/whatever'. It gives me the creeps. I'm always tempted to ask 'How many sleeps till you grow up?'

STOP PRESS: Have to include the latest from Waitrose, an advert for My Authentic Greek Yogurt by Kri Kri!

Meanwhile — what did you decide? My Article for Me or Your Article for You? Or Our Article for Us perhaps?

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