Reply With QuoteNext they will be naming towns after products and corps. Then, like they talk about in Fight Club...Planet Starbucks. The Time Warner Galaxy? Line up here for your corporate tattoos and inplants.
Corporatization of American society
Friedman's articles are usually repetitive but this one is on the mark, I am also troubled by increasing corporatization of american society, everything from stadiums, schools, theatres, we are endlessly bombarded by advertisement.
I've been to Cuba where advertisement is non-existent, and it seems like US and Cuba are at 2 polar opposite extremes. Travelling through Europe, for example Czech REpublic, you instantly feel the difference between these societies. European advertising is more subdued, feels less cheap and is not everywhere at all times. Their stadiums and civic gathering places are named after national heroes or landmarks, not over peddlers of sugar drinks and auto-insurance companies.
Here in US, every minute and every place is pumped with ads for crap. Even our civic institutions. Its absolutely disgusting and degrading, like a nation of whores willing to sell their soul for another buck.
This Column Is Not Sponsored by Anyone
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
PORING through Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel’s new book, “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” I found myself over and over again turning pages and saying, “I had no idea.”
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
I had no idea that in the year 2000, as Sandel notes, “a Russian rocket emblazoned with a giant Pizza Hut logo carried advertising into outer space,” or that in 2001, the British novelist Fay Weldon wrote a book commissioned by the jewelry company Bulgari and that, in exchange for payment, “the author agreed to mention Bulgari jewelry in the novel at least a dozen times.” I knew that stadiums are now named for corporations, but had no idea that now “even sliding into home is a corporate-sponsored event,” writes Sandel. “New York Life Insurance Company has a deal with 10 Major League Baseball teams that triggers a promotional plug every time a player slides safely into base. When the umpire calls the runner safe at home plate, a corporate logo appears on the television screen, and the play-by-play announcer must say, ‘Safe at home. Safe and secure. New York Life.’ ”
And while I knew that retired baseball players sell their autographs for $15 a pop, I had no idea that Pete Rose, who was banished from baseball for life for betting, has a Web site that, Sandel writes, “sells memorabilia related to his banishment. For $299, plus shipping and handling, you can buy a baseball autographed by Rose and inscribed with an apology: ‘I’m sorry I bet on baseball.’ For $500, Rose will send you an autographed copy of the document banishing him from the game.”
I had no idea that in 2001 an elementary school in New Jersey became America’s first public school “to sell naming rights to a corporate sponsor,” Sandel
writes. “In exchange for a $100,000 donation from a local supermarket, it renamed its gym ‘ShopRite of Brooklawn Center.’ ... A high school in Newburyport, Mass., offered naming rights to the principal’s office for $10,000. ... By 2011, seven states had approved advertising on the sides of school buses.”
Seen in isolation, these commercial encroachments seem innocuous enough. But Sandel sees them as signs of a bad trend: “Over the last three decades,” he states, “we have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society. A market economy is a tool — a valuable and effective tool — for organizing productive activity. But a ‘market society’ is a place where everything is up for sale. It is a way of life where market values govern every sphere of life.”
Why worry about this trend? Because, Sandel argues, market values are crowding out civic practices. When public schools are plastered with commercial advertising, they teach students to be consumers rather than citizens. When we outsource war to private military contractors, and when we have separate, shorter lines for airport security for those who can afford them, the result is that the affluent and those of modest means live increasingly separate lives, and the class-mixing institutions and public spaces that forge a sense of common experience and shared citizenship get eroded.
This reach of markets into every aspect of life was partly a result of the end of the cold war, he argues, when America’s victory was interpreted as a victory for unfettered markets, thus propelling the notion that markets are the primary instruments for achieving the public good. It was also the result of Americans wanting more public services than they were willing to pay taxes for, thus inviting corporations to fill in the gap with school gyms brought to you by ShopRite.
Sandel is now a renowned professor at Harvard, but we first became friends when we grew up together in Minneapolis in the 1960s. Both our fathers took us to the 1965 World Series, when the Dodgers beat the Twins in seven games. In 1965, the best tickets in Metropolitan Stadium cost $3; bleachers were $1.50. Sandel’s third-deck seat to the World Series cost $8. Today, alas, not only are most stadiums named for companies, but the wealthy now sit in skyboxes — even at college games — that cost tens of thousands of dollars a season, and hoi polloi sit out in the rain.
Throughout our society, we are losing the places and institutions that used to bring people together from different walks of life. Sandel calls this the “skyboxification of American life,” and it is troubling. Unless the rich and poor encounter one another in everyday life, it is hard to think of ourselves as engaged in a common project. At a time when to fix our society we need to do big, hard things together, the marketization of public life becomes one more thing pulling us apart. “The great missing debate in contemporary politics,” Sandel writes, “is about the role and reach of markets.” We should be asking where markets serve the public good, and where they don’t belong, he argues. And we should be asking how to rebuild class-mixing institutions.
“Democracy does not require perfect equality,” he concludes, “but it does require that citizens share in a common life. ... For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the common good.”
Next they will be naming towns after products and corps. Then, like they talk about in Fight Club...Planet Starbucks. The Time Warner Galaxy? Line up here for your corporate tattoos and inplants.
Already done. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dish,_TexasOriginally Posted by custodes
yawn...another slow news day. people sell ad space, big whoop. dont like it? stay home.
Gross! Kill!
Thanks for the input, Einstein. Someone didnt read the article.
Nice response, Geldoff. Yes, someone did read the editorial, dismissed it as bleating, and gave it a well thought out, and measured response...in direct proportion to the thought that went into it.
*edit (it being the editorial)
Last edited by seraosha; 05-17-2012 at 03:10 PM. Reason: clarity for fools
capitalism. Everyone is a potential customer and everything has a potential customer, including wall space.like a nation of whores willing to sell their soul for another buck.
is it any different than nationalistic slogans/propaganda found in communist and/or authoritarian countries?
To be honest, I do find all the billboards, huge store signs, sign posts and all around advertising crap filling my view in the USA a bit obnoxious and ugly. Especially when returning CONUS after bouncing around other lands. Just makes the scenery and roads that much more cluttered compared to many places I've been.
Not like the good old days when they had all that funny sculpture and art on route 66.
Ever met a Harley rider that wasn't also a Harley advertisement?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
Relevant
LOL aint that the truth. It seems all of their clothing has a HD logo. it always makes me laugh when I see them.
Have you ever been to a HD dealership? half of the show floor is taken up by merchandise and the other is by bikes.
A Harley Boutique.
Well Harley merchandise does look good. But still, i got 2 catalogs from them. And the one with merchandise has more pages.
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