You can request that junk or spam mail not be delivered to your mailbox. There’s also a way to be put on the Do Not Call list so that your phone number will not be bombarded with telemarketers. What I would like is a Do Not Call list for advertising on the tv.I’m not just talking about no advertising during hours where kids might be watching tv or websites kids frequent, I’m talking about a total ban. If you are paying for a private internet service or a tv service why can’t you have some sort of filter on it. They allow you to set parental controls for shows with certain ratings and advertising has been proven to be harmful not just to those with brains still significantly developing but all of us, so why can’t we block those? I don’t care if for 12 minutes of every 30 minute show (how ridiculous to begin with) the tv screen just goes blue and silent. This would probably encourage people to do something else anyway, perhaps homework or a brisk walk to the kitchen, anything to get that heart rate up. As long as you don’t spend the time snorting cocaine or ingesting packets of sugar chances are the time would be better spent than being brainwashed in to believing you need useless junk to fulfill yourself.
I would like to surf the web without being bombarded with ads telling me what foods to avoid, how to please my man (never how to please yourself) or degrading women that don’t fit into these narrow cultural “ideals”. Some might say, well the corporations put a lot of money into advertising so you can’t just block all their effort and financial contribution. My answer to that is why the hell not? I don’t owe them shit. I especially don’t owe them an ounce of my unconscious storage space. It took a long time, for obvious financial reasons, but smoking was finally proven in a mainstream consciousness sort of way to be generally bad for health and look at what happened; you can now enjoy many restaurants, bars, clubs, offices, homes, etc etc where smoking has been outlawed. The studies are just beginning to show that advertising messages create terrible self-hatred in many people which sounds pretty harmful to me. Unlike smoking bans, advertising “choices” are not asking for bans in the public sphere but just the private if it is the owners choice. I’d say that’s a pretty conservative request.
freedomfromyself 