|
Every day now I'm spending upwards of around sixty minutes in a carpool going to work, and another sixty minutes on the ride home. To make these daily commutes easier our carpool goes through books-on-tape like whales go through krill. Although we sometimes consume some educational or deeply philosophical books, nine times out of ten we'll be listening to some action adventure or murder mystery – and most of the time the protagonists of these plots are pretty darn conservative. I mean, they sort of have to be... they believe in a sort of might makes right simplistic brutality that's perfectly fine in fiction, but rather distasteful in real life.
In any case, we usually ease into the ride by soaking in a good earfull of the day's events as presented by NPR or Democracy Now or whatever liberal talk radio is playing as we're loaded into the carpool. So it was just this morning when I learned that schools across the country are now willing to sell out our youth as a captive audiences to Madison avenue. A Needham Massachusetts firm called, appropriately enough, Bus Radio will be installing single station radios almost a thousand school buses so that children will have no choice but to listen to what's being shoved in their ears every morning. The firm will tailor the contents of their radio shows by "specifically targeting their geographic location, age level and ethnicity" to whatever demographic will be encased in their mobile marketing prisons. By the end of 2006 over a hundred thousand students in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston will reach "a larger concentration of teens and tweens than any other radio network." Bus Radio plan to go nationwide sometime in 2007. The Bus Radio (http://www.busradio.com) firm is selling this program to schools with claims that buses equipped with their radios are safer, have lower student noise levels, and in general have more well behaved students who stay in their seats... what good little drones. I almost wonder why Bus Radio just didn't install liquid crystal displays so they could work over the student's wee little brains more effectively with the televised bright and shiny content that today's youth are so used to. To potential advertisers Bus Radio is already describing their programs as being made up of short features and short spots, for short attention spans. I find it completely distasteful that schools are even considering this. How many parents will be put in the position of having to either accept that their children will be force fed commercials every day to and from school, or bite the bullet and find some way to re-arrange their mornings to transport their kids themselves? I find it even more disgusting that these companies have found a nitch in the market that should be filled by something funded by the government itself. We've got plenty of quality goods created by funding for arts and education, from Sesame Street to Nova to NPR. So if we've got a captive audience, let's at least put something wholesome in the little beasties' misanthropic chaos-loving skulls. |