Advertisement is one of the hallmarks of contemporary culture. Ads can improve the life if a young person pays attention on the phone number for help to addicted to drugs or reads more about the medicine promoted at the main web server. It also can cause anger if reflects a weird social response to main events in our life. For instance, after a series of shootings last year, most popular ads in Utah – about gun shows – have changed the color from yellow to orange adding a new text: free guns will go away with the visitors. These ads have been placed huge on the highways or main roads (and now even on the buses). The residents feel in a position of consumers of aggression that they pay for – beyond federal and state taxes every year they also pay for their car registration for the roads: money given to watch aggressive ads about gun shows and now (after shootings) to learn that visitors even can leave the show with guns. Most remarkably: when the author wrote in past about these ads, there was a comment warning her to have shut up, then, the ads have been obviously distributed not at good will, but with visible and invisible power that make all the society shuts up (they often stay more than a month after the shows). Do we really need to know that there is a gun show around and that we can even take a free gun leaving this show? Who make such tough decision to allow such ads everywhere and make them most popular in a state context?
Aggression and violence is also embedded in another types of ads – they show up when one wants on open or close sites on web or to see a specific part of the site. You just cannot see immediately how to close the ad. Such mechanism to make you read or click on the ad is a violence in culture and lawmakers need as soon as possible to create the frames how the ads to be posted on web.
Aesthetics is a primary issue together with violence and aggression. One wants to make money with medical or dental surgery or with medical pills, and for this reason we even pay servers to watch non-aesthetic ads from the kitchen of human culture. Weight lost really helps many people but why do we need to watch ads which do not represent only the beauty of people?
Making money is immanent for people. However, how one makes money is not an individual, but a social problem. Ads that promote violence, non-aesthetics and aggression help some people to make money but they also hurt much more people and culture as an achievement of millions of year built and reproduced norms, values and responses.
Having global standards for advertisement will assist the efforts of the better part of society to achieve the dreaming life of balance, beauty and non-aggressive communication in our social environment – at home, in the streets, at work, on Internet and everywhere. We neither need to know that there is a gun show around nor how somebody looks before weight lost program.
Comments