Advertising IS Noise Pollution

I am, undoubtedly, old.

One of the cliches of getting older is an increased desire for silence - or at least more regulated noise - and a decreased ability to handle the stuff that comes in from everywhere else, especially when it's noise from a generation below your own.  Hence the stand-off between parents and their teenagers and the "crap - that's not music" emanating from said teenagers' bedrooms, wafting under the door and mingling with the hypocrisy of parents on the other side who were once listening to their own version of said music crap some years prior :)

The MCG sports stadium is like a teenager and I am like its mother.  From the time I got there early to watch my football team be beaten by its nemesis again, and in every moment when the teams weren't playing, I was bombarded from the big screen.  Advertisements from the home team's sponsor, on-the-ground spruikers bleating whatever crap the home team Marketing Department has come up with recently, stupid promotional games sponsored by optometrists involving members of the audience being willing to put on stupid big glasses and make dicks of themselves in a bid to win some cash.

It's just not to be borne, dear reader.

Now, it's said that the world is noisier than it's ever been.  It certainly feels true for our public spaces.  (If, however, you walk around some of the suburban streets of Melbourne, you'd be forgiven for thinking a giant plague had swept through killing everyone in its wake.  Such silence).  Publicly, though, it's a different matter. Whenever large groups of people congregate, so too do the giant TV screens to continue plying their wares at us.

When do we say "enough"?  Is it just me and my partner, being old fuddy duddies who object to the public advertising bombardment?  I know I've written about this before, but this really shits me.  These are public spaces.  We peeps are losing the ability to interact face-to-face with strangers without despising each other or glassing each other.  We are losing our community and drowning in our consumption.  The communal spaces we have left for the former we should not allow so easily to be taken over by the latter.