4 ms·

This article is a good excuse to get rid of outdoor advertising for safety reasons. I was watching some tours of some very nice metro stations in China and Mos

by brikym 2y ago

This article is a good excuse to get rid of outdoor advertising for safety reasons. I was watching some tours of some very nice metro stations in China and Moscow. I didn't quite understand what was so nice about them until one comment pointed it out: no advertising blasting bright colors into your retinas. Advertising in public spaces needs to be banned. It's visual pollution and it's using publicly funded assets to make tangible profits while the losses are externalised easily because they're not well understood. If profit is all you care about then it's easy to justify turning your house into a brothel.

leohonexus 2y ago
I'd say the daily "visual clutter" of living in Chinese cities is on par or more than other cities, like Tokyo. In Shenzhen for example, it's not uncommon to see police wearing flashing sirens on their shoulders as part of their uniform. Motorcyclists share the same road as pedestrians, and with so many delivery app drivers you're always on the lookout to avoid being hit. On SZ and Beijing metro trains, video ads are projected inside tunnels, matching the speed of the carriage - example: https://youtu.be/sp7KDNKpVhY https://youtu.be/sp7KDNKpVhY Personally I've seen much more advertising on Chinese shopping apps like Taobao, compared to say Amazon. Cluttercore advertising seems to be a deeply rooted culture there.
- throwaway19972 2y ago
  > In Shenzhen for example, it's not uncommon to see police wearing flashing sirens on their shoulders as part of their uniform. Motorcyclists share the same road as pedestrians, and with so many delivery app drivers you're always on the lookout to avoid being hit. I don't think this is quite as distracting as semantic-laden graphics like ads. They quite literally pollute the mind as well as the view.
- hinkley 2y ago
  When I was in Tokyo in ‘97 they were already testing these subway displays. The ones I saw just showed fancy test patterns not ads, and were smaller.
bitpush 2y ago
Your heart is in the right place, but you negate all of that with either incorrect reasoning, or unnecessary hyperbole. First, you can make your point without saying "turning your house into a brothel". You and I both know, you said that to elicit an emotion reaction. It is an appeal to moral values, when you could have much rather said - "profit maximizing at all costs is bad, or not well understood". Second - "publically funded assets to make tangible profits". This is incorrect. Governments do all sorts of things so that private individuals / companies can make profit. For instance, they build roads and bridges and highways to enable commerce. They give our licenses to establish companies. They put up stock exchanges so that shareholders can speculate and make money. By doing both of these, you have diluted the core of your argument which is "outdoor advertising is visual pollution" and has some "safety concerns".
- SturgeonsLaw 2y ago
  > They give our licenses to establish companies. How generous of them to allow us to pay to bypass the barrier they put in place
  - xapata 2y ago
    A company is meaningless without a government and law enforcement. The existence of a barrier is necessary for a company to have practical value as a legal concept.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      That's not really true; in places without government, or adaquate aligned government, businesses have been known to form their own police forces and quasi-governments, even navies. Profit is a powerful motivator, if something business needs doesn't exist already they'll create it.
      - sdf4j 2y ago
        So, they create a government because it’s necessary for the businesses.
goblin89 2y ago
In Moscow metro my personal bane is the mind-numbing amounts of reverberating noise due to open design of stations with no soundproofing, but yes, there are also advertising screens in both trains and on stations. In Beijing metro while going from the airport I remember the looping propaganda on LCD screens with caricatures of how the West consists of bad, fat, ugly people who should be hated. It’s been like 10 years since I have been there so I forget the details, but I have some photos from the metro where ads ended up in the shot. In Shenzhen metro, screens with ads, screens everywhere on eye level. The highlight is when a screen is glitching. I think whether they also blast audible ads, so that you truly have no escape, depends on the train. In Hong Kong, newer trains do. People are often misled that because a country is ostensibly in opposition to the west, it is somehow immune to inconveniences and issues we associate with capitalism. All of those places are de facto capitalist, just with higher degrees of corruption and oligarchy, and (despite what propaganda paints) they suffer from all of the same issues, multiplied by lack of care from the authorities.
whoitwas 2y ago
I don't like marketers or advertising, but I don't understand what you mean by: "Advertising in public spaces". In the US, advertising is always on private property.
- m2fkxy 2y ago
  ...which is obviously designed to be maximally visible from the public space.
- ykonstant 2y ago
  Private property visible from a mile away :)
  - whoitwas 2y ago
    I don't disagree, but how would you propose regulating that? Laws are made with money, so the advertisers win unless we can outspend them. That seems unlikely to me.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      Many places have heavily regulated if not outright banned outdoor advertising. Businesses aren't quite as opposed to this as you might expect, since a lot of advertising is done to simply counterbalance the advertising their competitors are doing. If everybody is barred from it, everybody wins.
      - whoitwas 2y ago
        (Not the marketers). If this sort of logic held, health insurance wouldn't exist. I would love to be proven wrong, but I can't imagine it in U$A.
        lupusreal 2y ago
        There are places in the """U$A""" where outdoor advertising is heavily regulated. A handful of states have banned billboards and many more towns have too. The Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed that such bans are constitutional. Advertising companies may piss and shit themselves but pretty much everybody else likes it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Austin_v._Reagan_National_Advertising_of_Austin,_LLC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Austin_v._Reagan_Natio... > Austin is one of 350 cities and towns in Texas that enacted bans related to digital billboards along the sides of highways, generally as a long-term effect of the Highway Beautification Act as well as to avoid distractions for drivers along these highways. Basically, your defeatism isn't supported by the facts.

by brikym 2y ago

leohonexus 2y ago

I'd say the daily "visual clutter" of living in Chinese cities is on par or more than other cities, like Tokyo. In Shenzhen for example, it's not uncommon to see police wearing flashing sirens on their shoulders as part of their uniform. Motorcyclists share the same road as pedestrians, and with so many delivery app drivers you're always on the lookout to avoid being hit. On SZ and Beijing metro trains, video ads are projected inside tunnels, matching the speed of the carriage - example: https://youtu.be/sp7KDNKpVhY https://youtu.be/sp7KDNKpVhY Personally I've seen much more advertising on Chinese shopping apps like Taobao, compared to say Amazon. Cluttercore advertising seems to be a deeply rooted culture there.

throwaway19972 2y ago
> In Shenzhen for example, it's not uncommon to see police wearing flashing sirens on their shoulders as part of their uniform. Motorcyclists share the same road as pedestrians, and with so many delivery app drivers you're always on the lookout to avoid being hit. I don't think this is quite as distracting as semantic-laden graphics like ads. They quite literally pollute the mind as well as the view.
hinkley 2y ago
When I was in Tokyo in ‘97 they were already testing these subway displays. The ones I saw just showed fancy test patterns not ads, and were smaller.

bitpush 2y ago

Your heart is in the right place, but you negate all of that with either incorrect reasoning, or unnecessary hyperbole. First, you can make your point without saying "turning your house into a brothel". You and I both know, you said that to elicit an emotion reaction. It is an appeal to moral values, when you could have much rather said - "profit maximizing at all costs is bad, or not well understood". Second - "publically funded assets to make tangible profits". This is incorrect. Governments do all sorts of things so that private individuals / companies can make profit. For instance, they build roads and bridges and highways to enable commerce. They give our licenses to establish companies. They put up stock exchanges so that shareholders can speculate and make money. By doing both of these, you have diluted the core of your argument which is "outdoor advertising is visual pollution" and has some "safety concerns".

SturgeonsLaw 2y ago
> They give our licenses to establish companies. How generous of them to allow us to pay to bypass the barrier they put in place
- xapata 2y ago
  A company is meaningless without a government and law enforcement. The existence of a barrier is necessary for a company to have practical value as a legal concept.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    That's not really true; in places without government, or adaquate aligned government, businesses have been known to form their own police forces and quasi-governments, even navies. Profit is a powerful motivator, if something business needs doesn't exist already they'll create it.
    - sdf4j 2y ago
      So, they create a government because it’s necessary for the businesses.

goblin89 2y ago

In Moscow metro my personal bane is the mind-numbing amounts of reverberating noise due to open design of stations with no soundproofing, but yes, there are also advertising screens in both trains and on stations. In Beijing metro while going from the airport I remember the looping propaganda on LCD screens with caricatures of how the West consists of bad, fat, ugly people who should be hated. It’s been like 10 years since I have been there so I forget the details, but I have some photos from the metro where ads ended up in the shot. In Shenzhen metro, screens with ads, screens everywhere on eye level. The highlight is when a screen is glitching. I think whether they also blast audible ads, so that you truly have no escape, depends on the train. In Hong Kong, newer trains do. People are often misled that because a country is ostensibly in opposition to the west, it is somehow immune to inconveniences and issues we associate with capitalism. All of those places are de facto capitalist, just with higher degrees of corruption and oligarchy, and (despite what propaganda paints) they suffer from all of the same issues, multiplied by lack of care from the authorities.

whoitwas 2y ago

I don't like marketers or advertising, but I don't understand what you mean by: "Advertising in public spaces". In the US, advertising is always on private property.

m2fkxy 2y ago
...which is obviously designed to be maximally visible from the public space.
ykonstant 2y ago
Private property visible from a mile away :)
- whoitwas 2y ago
  I don't disagree, but how would you propose regulating that? Laws are made with money, so the advertisers win unless we can outspend them. That seems unlikely to me.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    Many places have heavily regulated if not outright banned outdoor advertising. Businesses aren't quite as opposed to this as you might expect, since a lot of advertising is done to simply counterbalance the advertising their competitors are doing. If everybody is barred from it, everybody wins.
    - whoitwas 2y ago
      (Not the marketers). If this sort of logic held, health insurance wouldn't exist. I would love to be proven wrong, but I can't imagine it in U$A.
      - lupusreal 2y ago
        There are places in the """U$A""" where outdoor advertising is heavily regulated. A handful of states have banned billboards and many more towns have too. The Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed that such bans are constitutional. Advertising companies may piss and shit themselves but pretty much everybody else likes it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Austin_v._Reagan_National_Advertising_of_Austin,_LLC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Austin_v._Reagan_Natio... > Austin is one of 350 cities and towns in Texas that enacted bans related to digital billboards along the sides of highways, generally as a long-term effect of the Highway Beautification Act as well as to avoid distractions for drivers along these highways. Basically, your defeatism isn't supported by the facts.