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Man-eating digital billboards from outer space!!!!! (5)
The sheer vehemence of opposition to digital billboards in some U.S. communities continues to bemuse me. What is it that people who’ve presumably lived with TV, and with conventional billboards, for most or all of their lives – and with the Internet for the past decade or so – suddenly have against a medium that in some ways combines the best features of all three?
And the latest tirade suggests that either the residents of Los Angeles have attained a new level of dainty refinement since I lived there a couple of decades ago, or this writer in the Los Angeles Times just can't resist a spot of purple prose.
“Degraded future-world with video screens everywhere assaulting me with propaganda”? A city resembling “a congested constellation of 900 drive-in movie theaters”?
Sure, there are legitimate reasons to raise questions (rather than jump to assumptions) about traffic safety and power consumption, and light pollution if you happen to live next door to one of the things. But come on, guys – it’s not as if LA is some prelapsarian bucolic paradise rudely assaulted by War of the Worldsesque monsters.
There are better things to worry about, and if you (understandably) have a problem with illegally-erected billboards, focus on that – and its implications for local government and urban planning – rather than getting distracted by imaginary digital monsters.
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Man-eating digital billboards from outer space!!!!! (0)
Posted 17/10/08 08:47 by Malcolm Appleton
I agree with the residents of LA. The idea of so much digital advertising in public spaces, is appalling. The scale of visual assault on the senses is very stressfull doing nothing for our quality of life.