Sao Paulo is/was ad free starting in 2006.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1Nmnv0Ospg#t=77
If commercial ads are pollutive to the mind what image on a billboard would not pollute?
Ad Free City
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Impenitent
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Re: Ad Free City
language itself corrupts, and the lack of language even more so...
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WanderingLands
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Re: Ad Free City
I don't know, because advertisements have always been made to persuade and draw people's attention, and especially in the 20th century has been done through social and psychological manipulation, and even from the various mind control research.
Re: Ad Free City
Yes exactly, those that know this detest ads even more. They come over as natural or as neutral as a tree. But like you say have been designed to make you want. The ads that we see all follow a similar path and are defined by the system. They uphold the values of the system. The opposite of ad is no ad. And maybe that is it, the best. What are the ads in Utopia, they're not called ads as they are doing something totally different, they do not pretend but actually are, in some way.
Re: Ad Free City
Good for them! What a relief it must be to walk down a street with no advertising....
When you look at travelogues, documentaries or even movies set in any city now, all you see is frenetic neon and huge pouting lips - not the heroic monuments, the classic architecture or the historic boulevards.
It's obtrusive (you can't hear yourself think,) it's hideous, (the antithesis of public art; it lowers people aesthetic awareness) it's nearly all in bad taste (offending and irritating people, adding to the already high stress level of urban life) it's disorienting (hard to tell where the street signs and crosswalks are. I wonder how many traffic accidents and seizures it causes.) And it's ineffective: with that much colour and motion going on everywhere, you just try to shut it out and concentrate on where you need to go. Even if you made out one ad among the many, half the time, you can't even tell what is being offered, let alone decide to buy it.
Just down that page https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTEK9yr8zR4 Shudder!
When you look at travelogues, documentaries or even movies set in any city now, all you see is frenetic neon and huge pouting lips - not the heroic monuments, the classic architecture or the historic boulevards.
It's obtrusive (you can't hear yourself think,) it's hideous, (the antithesis of public art; it lowers people aesthetic awareness) it's nearly all in bad taste (offending and irritating people, adding to the already high stress level of urban life) it's disorienting (hard to tell where the street signs and crosswalks are. I wonder how many traffic accidents and seizures it causes.) And it's ineffective: with that much colour and motion going on everywhere, you just try to shut it out and concentrate on where you need to go. Even if you made out one ad among the many, half the time, you can't even tell what is being offered, let alone decide to buy it.
Just down that page https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTEK9yr8zR4 Shudder!
Re: Ad Free City
Yeah it is great I'd like see it! Thanks for the link. Here's a director talking about what sounds like an interesting documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVcDJQzk4rE
http://vimeo.com/31912968
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVcDJQzk4rE
http://vimeo.com/31912968
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The Voice of Time
- Posts: 2234
- Joined: Tue Feb 28, 2012 5:18 pm
- Location: Norway
Re: Ad Free City
I'm a great opponent of advertisement, I think it weakly but over time massively disturbs people's peace of mind.
Because one of the essential features of knowing how to read, and read well, is to recognize language. This includes images and drawings or film. And when people abuse these, they are effectively making us hostage to our own skills. We get ideas put inside our head all the time that fills it with doubts, falsehood and distortions, contributing to a lack of focus, a lack of priority-regulation and confusion. We think about stuff that doesn't help us to think about, we buy stuff we don't need or have any use for and treat problems that don't exist or are negligible, and in all this we suddenly don't know why we do it all!!!
Like my thread in the political forum, the only way advertisement can survive when people get their heads up for banning it, is by becoming something sought instead of something forced. First and foremost by becoming a teaching about how to enjoy products, so that people will seek out the products because they've been offered good ways to utilize it: they've been empowered to be able to enjoy more products. This rather than exploitation of people's uncertainties and weaknesses. Also, the game of persuasion must be formalized so that producers compete like scientists and not like politicians, with valid arguments and full admitting of meaningful weaknesses in their product capabilities and easy ways of comparison of the full range of ups and downs.
As a sidenote: small companies must also have the opportunity to work with the products of bigger companies so that we can benefit from genius that happens to not have the capacity to make everything from scratch, but can independently contribute to other amazing products. This is a note on copyright and compatibility, particularly with software, where giants like facebook and google make you choose either/or instead of perhaps having an independent producer make your chat which combines chat history and message relay from both g+ and fb, have a google+ account for viewing information streams, and having your facebook account send its status updates and images to your g+ stream. Or maybe just have everything sent to a completely independent third party. There is waaay too much domination in this market.
Because one of the essential features of knowing how to read, and read well, is to recognize language. This includes images and drawings or film. And when people abuse these, they are effectively making us hostage to our own skills. We get ideas put inside our head all the time that fills it with doubts, falsehood and distortions, contributing to a lack of focus, a lack of priority-regulation and confusion. We think about stuff that doesn't help us to think about, we buy stuff we don't need or have any use for and treat problems that don't exist or are negligible, and in all this we suddenly don't know why we do it all!!!
Like my thread in the political forum, the only way advertisement can survive when people get their heads up for banning it, is by becoming something sought instead of something forced. First and foremost by becoming a teaching about how to enjoy products, so that people will seek out the products because they've been offered good ways to utilize it: they've been empowered to be able to enjoy more products. This rather than exploitation of people's uncertainties and weaknesses. Also, the game of persuasion must be formalized so that producers compete like scientists and not like politicians, with valid arguments and full admitting of meaningful weaknesses in their product capabilities and easy ways of comparison of the full range of ups and downs.
As a sidenote: small companies must also have the opportunity to work with the products of bigger companies so that we can benefit from genius that happens to not have the capacity to make everything from scratch, but can independently contribute to other amazing products. This is a note on copyright and compatibility, particularly with software, where giants like facebook and google make you choose either/or instead of perhaps having an independent producer make your chat which combines chat history and message relay from both g+ and fb, have a google+ account for viewing information streams, and having your facebook account send its status updates and images to your g+ stream. Or maybe just have everything sent to a completely independent third party. There is waaay too much domination in this market.