The Hallelujah effect is about the working of “entrainment,” ‘effected’ as it is and most efficiently so by sound: one’s brain, so to speak, rather more literally than one thinks, aligns itself with certain wavelengths, heard and unheard (the sonic including both subsonic, as Goodman points out, and the supersonic), which last “unheard” can also  be same as saying what is in effect “heard” as Sharon Weinberger writes “only by you.” Weinberger's reference to this phenomenon has military applications and these in turn bleed over into popular culture, as Steve Goodman has explored this from a number of perspectives studying both the military uses of sound as well as the military influences on club and pop music. 

As all of us are well aware, beyond club music culture and apart from the military, everyday television shows employ distinctive opening sound sequences and certain commercial jingles are associated with certain brands.

This is your brain on drugs.

Like drugs, the joke in question can be varied: this is your brain on line: on YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitter.

 Consider the sing song AOL ping reminder, itself the eponymous title of the 1998 Hollywood film You’ve Got Mail.  

The movie itself offered a popular cultural riff on the erotic subversion that drove the AOL experience.

But the study of the connection between the larger phenomenon (and the even larger profit margin) of internet pornography, underscoring the internet as source for our absorptions has yet to be exhausted.

The very point of media is mediation, that is connection as the journalist Vance Packard and the communications scholar Marshall McLuhan both observed themselves drawing upon a phenomenon already adumbrated (and to be sure inaugurated) by Edward Bernays. 

Both the sexual and the social drive or ‘effect’ priming, programming, branding. This is how advertisement works and, to argue contra a popular internet meme, the internet is not so much full of cats as it is full of, suffused with, percolated through and through by ads, ads interrupted by further ads, ads everywhere, all the way down, and all the way up. 

Where ads once crawled across the page (drawing the user to track them and thus fixate upon them to click them away), today studies of eye movements are used to determine placement such that we are often unaware of the bill-boardification, as it were, of the webpage as indeed our email inboxes, spam filter and all).