Static Mindprints vs. Carbon Footprints

We’ve got to the place where we’re at least aware of the negative effect of flying and can even calculate the environmental cost–the carbon footprint.

How far are we from awareness of the negative effect of advertising, much less calculating the mental cost—let’a call it the static mindprint?

Globally we are surely as inundated and polluted mentally by omnipresent, intrusive advertising as we are physically by the noxious products and by-products of airplanes (and cars, and trucks, and power plants etc.).

We took the blue sky for granted until it started to disappear.

We don’t even notice the disappearance of peace-of-mind, so pervasive and powerful are the effects of advertising.

What, me worry? What, me think? How can I? Why should I? Everywhere I go admonitory messages impinge on my consciousness, sink the hook to buy-get-go-do.

What, just turn off the TV or the radio, you say? But those are social, public information sources which occupy and use vast swathes of the electromagnetic spectrum to spew their messages.

To whom, we must ask and ask again, does that spectrum belong? And do those who use it not have a responsibility to use it well, where "well" is defined as something other than global mind-pollution?

When will we become sufficiently concerned that we will devise a way to measure and compare the static mindprint of Fox and that of, say, the BBC?

Garbage and offal filled the streets of medieval Europe until we got to the place where awareness of disease led us to confine the filth to one place by developing sanitary landfills.

Now, the mental disruption, the cognitive static of advertising is everywhere, filling all available space, both public and private.

Working our way out of the mess we’ve made of the physical environment is going to require first of all a lot of clear thinking. How good at clear thinking can minds be that are filled to overflowing with buy-me/ingest-me/ wear-me/drive-me messages of the loudest, cleverest, most persuasive kind?

Turn it off? Tune it out?

Very well. And then what?

The only escape now is hermitry, and that seems a strange, high, and selfish price for the mass sins of ignorant society.