Solomon
What
we see is what we get, or so the adage goes. But when we see the designs of mass
media, what do we truly get? That’s a troubling question for those who wonder
what the constant barrages of media-generated images are doing to our lives.
Journalists who use words on the job are not the only media professionals who
have cause to doubt the merits of their labors. The visual images that surround
us — whether on screens, printed pages, billboards, T-shirts or store shelves
— are the products of highly skilled designers, enormous amounts of money and
state-of-the-art technology. Behind the images, some of the talent is growing
vocally restless.
For a
couple of years now, many designers and art directors have hotly debated "First
Things First 2000," a global manifesto urging "a reversal of priorities in favor
of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication — a mindshift
away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new
kind of meaning." The original signers, 33 prominent design professionals, have
been joined as endorsers by hundreds of colleagues.
"Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and
brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment
so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way
citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact," the statement says.
While
assessing the arguments sparked by "First Things First," the latest issue of
Adbusters magazine (www.adbusters.org)
offers observations that are directly relevant to various aspects of the media
industry. Today, we face "the desperate need to preserve a space for other forms
of thinking and ways of being — a protected zone free of the commercial
inferno."
When
dissident designers lament the impacts of prevalent visual images, their
comments also apply to routine journalistic output. Rick Poynor, founding editor
of the international journal Eye, puts it this way: "What we are rapidly losing
sight of, in the rush to add seductive stylistic value to commercial goods and
services and to transform life into a brand- and status-obsessed shopping spree,
is the idea that design, as a way of thinking about systems, structures and
relationships — large and small, conceptual and visual — could have uses other
than commercial promotion."
Visual design, Poynor suggests, "might also be an imaginative tool for solving
non-commercial problems; for shaping a sustainable environment and an equitable
public realm; for encouraging democratic participation and new kinds of social
interaction; for expressing ideas, values and ways of feeling that originate
down below, among ordinary people — us! — in our own neighborhoods, from our
own concerns." Creative design could be used "in service to our collectively
determined community needs, not just to deliver top-down fashion diktats and
purchasing imperatives from megacorp boardrooms and conquer-the-world marketing
teams."
Privatization of public space — from sports stadiums and museums to buses,
classrooms and "public broadcasting" — has been on an insidious bender for
decades. We become accustomed to what was once unthinkable, and the trend moves
in only one direction. Public reclamation of corporately privatized space is
rare. Big money commonly rolls over other concerns.
Reversing such momentum would mean reclaiming truly public areas while banishing
the endless panoplies of logos, branded concessions and investor-driven joint
ventures. But even when no commercial interests seem to be involved, the heavy
hand of capital often provides a strong tilt, with key media outlets
continuously inflicting their relentless priorities on the public.
So,
simultaneously, on one afternoon in late June, the hosts of programs airing on
CNN and MSNBC were talking about the by-now-famous incident in San Jose when a
man flung a dog named Leo into oncoming traffic. Ostensibly about a murdered
pooch, the coverage reflected the ability of profit-fixated networks — owned by
companies like AOL Time Warner, Microsoft and General Electric — to focus
national attention on psychodramas like the gruesome demise of a doggie.
This
enormous power to subject the American public to serial triviality is far from
trivial. It has everything to do with the leverage exerted by
multibillion-dollar media conglomerates as they skew the words and images
undergoing mass distribution.
We’re
told that the public’s appetite for human interest stories about crime and
punishment is insatiable. But most of all, the latest breathless news sagas are
cases of force-feeding. Crammed down the throats of the public, the scoops and
scandals of the day seldom tell us anything about dominant power structures and
ongoing inequities while we consume the latest frothy media sensations.
Norman Solomon’s latest book is "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media." His
syndicated column focuses on media and politics.