Ok, so something's really been bothering me. There's a T-mobile
commercial where these teenagers all text each other on their "sidekick" mobile devices and converge on this downtown building. Some are on the 2nd floor, some on the 1st. Someone texts "now" to everyone and they run for the escalator and when they meet at halfway, they all silly-string one another and all the other people who are unfortunate enough to be on the escalator and make a run for it, out running the armed security guard. This hopefully, is what one does with a T-mobile "sidekick," silly-string, and no role model. Most importantly, the missing ingredient is some sort of social-conscious of the world around them. Not of their actions and the repercussions for themselves (doubtful that got a lot of thought) but for others. No, i'm not even hugely concerned with the people who got innocently silly-stringed, but they are part of it. Some poor janitor is gonna have to clean stair after stair of hardened silly string between all those stairs on the moving escalator that are going to gum it up. Someone who already likely works 12 hours a day at this job and probably holds another job too. Someone who has a wife who works two jobs and two kids who just want enough money to buy lunch at school occasionally, not even a cell phone or a "sidekick." According to the US Census, 70% of all economic activity in the US is service work. Does this thought enter the mind of the advertising agent making six figures a year? The typical employee at a T-Mobile store? Catherine Zeta-Jones, their spokeswoman? The typical teenager watching this? Yours? How many times did i have to see it before it occurred to me? i've worked service industry jobs and worked along side folks in the service industry. i've seen a woman have to spend hours scraping the gum off the bottoms of furniture in a college student union because countless students at a liberal arts college don't think about who cleans it. i've seen a man spend hours scrubbing a sink that someone poured black paint down to avoid finding a safe place to dump it. How hard do we make the lives of others in our own daily routine? recreation? How disgusting or gross are the tasks we set before others by our lack of forethought? How would we live if those thoughts came before all else?
Ok, so something's really been bothering me. There's a T-mobile commercial where these teenagers all text each other on their "sidekick" mobile devices and converge on this downtown building. Some are on the 2nd floor, some on the 1st. Someone texts "now" to everyone and they run for the escalator and when they meet at halfway, they all silly-string one another and all the other people who are unfortunate enough to be on the escalator and make a run for it, out running the armed security guard. This hopefully, is what one does with a T-mobile "sidekick," silly-string, and no role model. Most importantly, the missing ingredient is some sort of social-conscious of the world around them. Not of their actions and the repercussions for themselves (doubtful that got a lot of thought) but for others. No, i'm not even hugely concerned with the people who got innocently silly-stringed, but they are part of it. Some poor janitor is gonna have to clean stair after stair of hardened silly string between all those stairs on the moving escalator that are going to gum it up. Someone who already likely works 12 hours a day at this job and probably holds another job too. Someone who has a wife who works two jobs and two kids who just want enough money to buy lunch at school occasionally, not even a cell phone or a "sidekick." According to the US Census, 70% of all economic activity in the US is service work. Does this thought enter the mind of the advertising agent making six figures a year? The typical employee at a T-Mobile store? Catherine Zeta-Jones, their spokeswoman? The typical teenager watching this? Yours? How many times did i have to see it before it occurred to me? i've worked service industry jobs and worked along side folks in the service industry. i've seen a woman have to spend hours scraping the gum off the bottoms of furniture in a college student union because countless students at a liberal arts college don't think about who cleans it. i've seen a man spend hours scrubbing a sink that someone poured black paint down to avoid finding a safe place to dump it. How hard do we make the lives of others in our own daily routine? recreation? How disgusting or gross are the tasks we set before others by our lack of forethought? How would we live if those thoughts came before all else?
1 comment:
to what extent do you think t-mobile commercials represent a pervasive attitude?
how big of an influence do you think these kinds of commercials are?
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