Selling Silence

"We aim to please," reads the brightly colored plastic drain cover in the Science Center urinals--this clever pun comes thanks to the folks at www.maincampus.com, whatever they sell. Water in the renovated dining halls now has a brand name, as the soda machines and the potato chips have had on a regular basis. And, of course, in the Harvard T stop, first cnet.com and now American Express have invaded, monopolizing the traditional advertising spaces, pasting posters to the metal beams and spelling out the product name across the turnstiles.

It is hard to know when enough became too much, but whenever that point was, we have passed it. We now live in the Too-Much-Information Age, and it has begun to do screwy things with the way we think about the world around us.

We have come to expect advertising everywhere. In his 1991 book Making and Effacing Art, Reid Professor of English and American Literature Philip J. Fisher described how contemporary artists expanded their effects on perception by breaking from eye level and exploring the possibilities of art either on the floor or over the viewer's head. This idea seems to be the darling of the current advertising world. Pricing shelf space by eye level (or, at the counter, child-level) is old news, but the proliferation of ground advertising in the last five years is remarkable--now, as we stare at our feet at the mall, we can be sold Levi's as well. The Tealuxe spotlight that casts the company logo as a shadow on the sidewalk outside its Harvard Square store is a particularly nice example. Blimps and banners pulled by planes are similarly familiar, but negotiations between the Russian space program and Pepsi to put the company's logo on Russia's rockets a few years ago took the insanity, quite literally, to new heights.

This glut of advertising is not necessarily bad: Advertising can be quite beautiful, and is often much more innovative and funnier than the programs between which it is sandwiched. Ads for the Super Bowl and now for the Oscars have become premier events unto themselves and at times overshadow the presumed draw of football or movie stars. In 10 years, the top awards show is likely to be the Clio, the award for achievements in advertising. In some ways the Oscars are already as self-serving: We do buy the idea that movie people, renamed the "Academy," can vote to tell us each year what was the best movie. In a decade, the Clio will have joined the "must-sees" of annual television events.

What I dislike is the sheer proportion of our lives we have given over to advertising. Hardly a T-shirt in America exists without a logo or slogan emblazoned on it. The spaces in the T station and even in the bathrooms seem acceptable enough for advertising, but new "advances" seem to go too far. At last week's Ericsson Open (named for the cellular phone company) tennis tournament in Miami, the net was marked with a Mercedes-Benz symbol at each end. This was the first time I had seen this particular type of selling, though the behind-the-plate ads, both virtual and real, invaded televised baseball a few years ago. Examples abound: In one of the large office buildings in downtown Boston, elevators now have little screens that play commercials to the captive audience. Buying books at the Coop is an exercise in recycling all kinds of choice advertisements that came along with your books, as the Coop sells the privilege to get your name in a bag a Harvard student will carry. Can you imagine the boredom of being paid to pre-stuff the bags before the semester begins?

The overload really hit me while at the airport. Once past the souvenir shops and food court, one might reasonably hope to wait for a plane in peace. Yet in most airports, the buzz and whir continues right to the gates, with CNN's Airport Network the prime culprit. Sure, they feed our news addiction and send along the stream of stock prices (the symbols themselves some quixotic mix of advertising and investment), but they don't stop there: One "news" piece, more likely a subtle advertisement for a product or resort, is followed by the CNN logo and theme music, to keep the company and the product in the forefront of your thoughts. The headache these televisions cause should give one of the aspirin or ibuprofen companies (you choose your preferred name) a chance to advertise in this aggressive-advertisement traps.

What next? If taken on as a mission, advertising seems to have no bounds. Here at Harvard, for example, the University could make a little extra dough flashing slides along the Science Center corridors or projecting them against Memorial Hall at night. Why not have blue books sponsored, the way book covers were in high school? Desk surfaces could also be a justified sell, since so many different people pull them up in the course of the day. Of course, the door-dropping already gets advertisers' messages to our door, by means of this newspaper and other campus groups. Why not sell dorm room walls too? If we are going to be swamped by the ever-growing tide of advertising, we should at least ride the wave and make some money.

We could, but we should not. What is most alarming about the distracting and omnipresent advertising is what it is making the best commodity to sell: silence. Again, this isn't news: "We have no telephone" island resorts have known how to sell remoteness and disconnection for a while--to the elite, honeymooners and workaholics. What is becoming apparent, however, is that silence will soon sell to all of us, wearied as we are by the sensory overload of most public places. So far, to its credit, Harvard has respected our sanity (and has a big enough billfold) not to sell every flat surface in sight. But maybe a less well-endowed university--or the struggling public elementary, middle and high schools--might stoop to such tactics in an effort to find the dollars they need by any means necessary. One wonders if the Siren of the market might just be too strong.

Adam I. Arenson '00-'01 is a history and literature concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.