by Sixstrings » Fri 26 Jun 2009, 00:35:34
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JJ', 's')omeone emailed me this...quite interesting (to me):
http://www.realitysandwich.com/ubiquitous_matrix_liesNice article.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'C')ontinuing on my way, I drive past the Colonial Park Mall, a generic, boxy edifice amidst a vast expanse of concrete.
There is no park here, nor is there actually any connection with anything "colonial," a word chosen to evoke an image of simple times, kind folk, and quality craftsmanship. The mall is home to a food court called "Café in the Park," a name chosen to evoke (who knows?) a Parisian café with outdoor tables under the shade of the trees. Basically, the entire name is a lie. No café, no park, nothing colonial.
This nonsense advertising speak is omnipresent throughout our society. Nothing means anything anymore, and names bear no relation to the things they refer to. My biggest pet peeve: the fact that nursing homes, cemetaries, and apartment complexes all have interchangable names. And none of them mean a damn thing.
My second pet peeve is a local issue for me -- contractors in my state love to give their subdivisions Italian names. This ranks up there with the automaker Mitsubishi, nameing all their cars in Italian -- neither Mitsubishi nor my Southern town have the slightest thing to do with Italy.
It's like it's a given that anything our culture comes up with is hollow and phony, and therefore a "theme" has to be fabricated.
My third advertising pet peeve is the use of stock photos. There's a story up on digg.com about how the Toronto City Council just used a stock photo of a family in an ad. Because they want to promote diversity, they cut the face of a black man from another stock photo and photoshopped it onto the white family. All the people in the photo are American, from various states. So what do these people have to do with either Toronto or diversity?
Using stock photos is just another way to Big Box the whole world. Local color no longer matters, developing local character and community don't matter. Just why somebody in Toronto can't drag their lazy ass out to take a picture of real Canadians is beyond me. And, is it really diversity if you can't even find a black and a white to take a picture of?
We live in the world of "1984," and surprisingly few people even notice.