

Ethics of Subliminal Messaging: Carnegie Mellon's Gates Center - jchonphoenix

I'm curious to know, what are your views on the ethics of using subliminal messaging on students?<p>The reason I ask is that I'm currently a CS student at Carnegie Mellon University. As many of you may know, the Gates Center was built due to generous funding from Bill Gates. However, as I walked through the halls of the new building for the hundredth time, I realized something quite intriguing.<p>In certain areas of the building YOU CAN HEAR VOICES! No these are not ghosts. After some investigation, I found extremely small hidden speakers designed to project sound towards one location. However, they spoke so softly that the average person would not realize that there was even any noise.<p>However, at closer inspection, these speakers appear to say three phrases repeatedly (at least that I could make out): "Microsoft Server", "Dell", "Computer Science."<p>Seeing as how Bill Gates himself funded the building, and Dell provided the computers inside the building, this hardly seems like a coincidence that subliminal marketing is occurring within the Gates building itself.<p>Now I pose the question: does anyone else find a problem with the fact that students at Carnegie Mellon are subconsciously being enticed to buy from sponsors of their university?
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achew22
Has anyone reported this to the school? I would be willing to bet your
school's paper would LOVE to do an expose on this. He donated the funds to the
school and while that may give him some authority in the program that
shouldn't give him the rights to attempt to subliminally message students.
Academic halls exist for freedom of information and that information shouldn't
be pay to play. Talk to a department chair who works in that building and see
what the deal really is.

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jchonphoenix
I'm pretty sure the school knows about it. After all, I'm not the only
undergraduate around who's noticed these things and some professors have
commented on them too.

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_pius
Wow, that's pretty stunning to me. Seems very strange. Are you sure this has
been happening all the time or is it an experiment some class is running this
semester?

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jchonphoenix
As far as I can tell, its going to be permanent. The setup would require that
a speaker system be ripped out of a wall for it to be taken down (a little
drastic for a class experiment).

