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.