Dear internet, stop being such a nag

I’ M CALLING IT: we’re living in the Nag Age of technology. Half the sites I visit pop up a “Sign up to our newsletter” box as soon as I get there. If I stop for a coffee in the real world, my Android phone asks me if I want to leave a review. An hour later, Google pesters me to add the venue to my timeline. If I buy something from Amazon, an email arrives the next day prompting me to review it.

I’d love to leave a huge DO NOT DISTURB sign somewhere in my internet presence, but not only would it do no good whatsoever, it would be like the “little Dutch boy” trying to stop the flood with a thumb. It wouldn’t stop the BBC asking me, constantly, to check out its new beta site and leave feedback. Or Dell, or HP, or Lenovo, or any of the sites I aim to fleetingly visit but halt me in my tracks with nagging pop-ups.

Whenever I use sites such as Upwork, to find freelancers for specific tasks, I’m compelled to fill out numerous star ratings before I can finally close the job. Not only must I rate each freelancer for communication, quality of work and personal hygiene (okay, not that, but it won’t be long), I’m also prompted to write a few words to describe my experience on the site.

Then there’s LinkedIn, with its ridiculous option to recommend people you’ve worked with. Let’s face one simple fact: nobody, I repeat nobody, trusts those recommendations. In fact, the more recommendations I see someone has, the more I think how desperately they want to be recommended, in which case they’re either on the search for a new job or so bad at what they do they need constant approbation.

All of this is on top of my nagging computers. Perhaps it’s my fault for being the go-to-techie in my family, but with an office Mac, my laptop, a phone, a Surface RT and three other Windows computers of various ages in my house, I’m constantly being asked to update the OS, apply Dell’s update, update programs, update apps. I’ve set everything I can to automatically do its thing without bothering me, but it’s starting to feel like I’ve got one of PG Wodehouse’s infamous aunts on my shoulder all the time.

So, technology has become a nag. But what can we do about it? Marching on 10 Downing Street doesn’t seem like a particularly viable option, and I’m already thinking of setting up a petition to stop online petitions. No. We only have two weapons.

The first is our own actions. That we stop leaving reviews, or do the equivalent of a spoiled ballot paper and write about our holidays in the “leave your comment here” box (unless, of course, it’s a box in which you’re asked to write about your holidays).

The second thing we can do is remind the people who make these reminders happen – the algorithm masters, the marketing teams that set the auto_popup_newsletter value to 1 – that we’re human and we’re fed up with being asked for our input for every single online move we make.

All of which makes me somewhat hypocritical, because I have a genuine favour to ask. You see, we’re running an online survey for PC Pro: your favourite sections, columnists, the kinds of products you’d like us to review. In return, how’s this: I won’t nag you with the same question until 2018. Let me know at pcpro.link/272survey.