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Misfortune
Mar. 25th, 2010 06:26 pmA friend and I went to lunch today. Chinese. The capper to every Chinese meal (or so we are led to believe thanks to our Americanized experience) is the Fortune Cookie. The fortunes were appropriately generic, but there was a surprise on the fortune's back:
These cookie fortunes double as advertisement space.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. Yes, I support the census; but just because the US polling of its citizens every ten years is a good cause, using something as sacred and traditional as a fortune cookie to get that message across seems to me just the thin edge of the wedge. What's to prevent our more insidious advertisers from taking advantage of that blank, blank piece of paper? What's to prevent fortune cookie makers from appealing to the Bottom Line, to cutting costs by leveraging additional revenue found in previously loss-leading spaces on the ledger book, from plastering our "fortunes" with pushes for Pepsi, Doritos, or -- to take a page out of China's own colonial past -- opium?
This bothers me. It doesn't help that I'm about half-way through Douglas Rushkoff's Life, Inc., a book that explores the history and rise of corporatism and its use of ubiquitous, pernicious advertising to promote its continued existence.
Sigh.
These cookie fortunes double as advertisement space.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. Yes, I support the census; but just because the US polling of its citizens every ten years is a good cause, using something as sacred and traditional as a fortune cookie to get that message across seems to me just the thin edge of the wedge. What's to prevent our more insidious advertisers from taking advantage of that blank, blank piece of paper? What's to prevent fortune cookie makers from appealing to the Bottom Line, to cutting costs by leveraging additional revenue found in previously loss-leading spaces on the ledger book, from plastering our "fortunes" with pushes for Pepsi, Doritos, or -- to take a page out of China's own colonial past -- opium?
This bothers me. It doesn't help that I'm about half-way through Douglas Rushkoff's Life, Inc., a book that explores the history and rise of corporatism and its use of ubiquitous, pernicious advertising to promote its continued existence.
Sigh.