Thumbing through the most recent edition of Vanity Fair, a magazine that might best be described as the "mother lode" of modern advertising, I came upon an appeal to buy "Smart Water." The advertisement used a picture different from but substantially similar to the illustration here.Smart?
Click this link to get the real story on bottled water, from "The Story of Stuff" website.
Conclusion: bottled water is NOT smart!
Meantime, I'm remembering what Bob Dylan had to say about advertising:
Advertising signs they conLife in our human world is largely based on the manufacture, consumption, and disposal of various items of "stuff," like plastic water bottles, that actually undermine the natural environment that sustains all life. Advertising helps this process move along at an ever more rapid pace. If we were truly "smart," we would ignore the pretty pictures, and look at what is really going on all around us:
You into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.
Advertising and stuff is really going on all around us. That's the problem.
ReplyDeleteMore important, advertising and stuff is going around in our culture as normative behavior. Those of us who question the culture of stuff and the advertising and economic system that supports it, are considered abnormal.
My wife and I don't shop, that is, we only buy new things that we need: food that we don't grow at home, underwear, toothpaste, wine ... let me think... that's it. Everything else either comes to us free from our friends and neighbors (we have a Free Table in our mobile home park), or, in the case of clothes or shoes, from thrift shops such as Gray Bears.
We also don't see advertising. We don't watch TeeVee, we don't subscribe to magazines, we don't travel by car so we don't see billboards. Our computers have AdBlocker software. We don't use cell phones and such so we don't know if there's any advertising there.
So we live in a world devoid of artificial desire created by advertising, so we have no desire to buy things we don't need, so we don't have a lot of stuff.
Well, truth be told, we do have some stuff. It's just old, free stuff, such as books, tools, music and photographs.
As I learned as a child: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."