Leave Northampton on Route 5 headed toward Holyoke, and you'll be hard-pressed to miss, in the middle of pleasant countryside nestled up against Mount Tom, a billboard. It's bright red in a sea of green, and it says "So much flavor the bun called for backup."
It's from one of our many elegant purveyors of high-speed comestibles. It also provides me with a nice spike in blood pressure. The logic is beyond screwy—do buns serve as a counterpoint to "flavor?" Where is this cooking school? And since when do I want a bun capable of using a phone? I would never eat a hockey puck of extruded cows anyway. And yet this blaring red thing distracts me every time I take Route 5. And I resent that.
To put it simply, I loathe advertising. To put a finer point on it: I loathe advertising that tries to conjure up a need—a desire, really—from thin air. I hate focus-grouped little nuggets of manipulation; I hate being the subject of well-funded experiments in money extraction. I hate being defined as a "consumer." I think every creative act pushes back against the forces who wish us to consume well and often.
On the page—on this very page, even—things are a bit better. You can turn the page anytime you like, fold it over, frame it, whatever you want. But plop a billboard in the middle of a field, and like Wallace Stevens' jar in Tennessee ("It made the slovenly wilderness/ Surround that hill"), it provides a centerpiece for our vision.
Then there's the worst incarnation of the fine art of manipulation: on screens. On little screens, blaring away in the corners of rooms all over the nation, and on giant theater screens one pays admission to sit in front of—King Kong-sized mayonnaise jars parade in front of us before movies start, for heaven's sake. Dare to look around while mayonnaise jars or toilet brushes the size of trucks bloom before you, and there in the semi-dark, you'll witness a sea of faces bathing in the glow like rapt violets. Have the forces of desire manipulation gotten so powerful that we can only rarely escape the urge to turn toward bright moving images, no matter how ridiculous they are?
Such subjects are seldom considered (except by people like the fine folks at Northampton's Media Education Foundation), and the ceaseless flood of "better" media technology is a force, incapable of reflection. It's considered uniformly good, when it is in fact a tool, used for good or ill purposes.
Just take a story aired on NPR's All Things Considered on June 29, in which Omar Gallaga, who covers "technology culture" for the Austin-American Statesman, examines the new varieties of thinner screens which will be available soon. Gallaga explains that newer screens will be mere millimeters thick, yet offer visuals similar to or better than current high-definition technology.
Then Gallaga lays out the shape of dystopian tendencies to come. He says screens will soon be embedded into clothing. That's bad news—it's hard enough to talk to people when they've developed a distracting iPhone habit, never mind when they are broadcasting moving images or, no doubt, advertisements.
It gets worse. Gallaga says watching screens may soon be an interactive affair. He brings up Spielberg's film version of Philip K. Dick's "Minority Report," in which advertising is customized for passersby.
Gallaga says of this new kind of screen (coupled with cell phone technology): "It knows who you are and can recognize your face." He excitedly tells host Robert Siegel that you could show your screen a picture of an item you'd like to shop for, and it will help you find it. After Gallaga lays out the new world of interactive shopping that breaks over the horizon, Siegel says, "I look forward to it."
Well, I don't. There's a world of possibility when it comes to such technology, all sorts of interesting incarnations of the creative process, intriguing social interactions, you name it. It is a wonderfully rich but pre-squandered artistic medium; we've apparently grown so accustomed to being advertised at in America that we mostly manage to think of great new ways to invade each other's mental space. Perhaps that limited thinking will finally halt the evolution of the species, and begin the devolution that will bring us back to dwelling in caves. Caves covered in bright, interactive ads.
