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# The Page Flow Ad
I saw an ad in the subway from a bookshop chain (and yeah they do sell my books đ€·đ»ââïž) that I thought was a liâl bit clever but I wanna add some nuance.
The add was all the text from (supposedly) a real 13 yoâs TikTok flow, typeset as a book page with ligatures and ragged right margin. It was really effective both at making us cranky old boomers get appalled at all the adds and messed up messages kids are exposed to, and at making a real book seem way more appealing by comparison. Not literally (since I had Shirley Jacksonâs Dark Tales in my purse which is one of the best books of all time, and yet I read the entire page in the ad instead) but in the long run it made it seem so much nicer to dream away with a real coherent story or non-fiction book. I wouldnât get through a whole book of the kind of junk that was in this ad.
And then the slogan underneath was all about trying to get parents to give books to teens. Iâm sure itâs effective, not for the kids themselves or even for their day-to-day guardians (parents) but for patronizing tut-tutting pearl-clutching concern-trolling grandmas and aunts like yours truly.
Itâs like that Proust quote I like to trot out all the time:
> Ce que je reproche aux journaux câest de nous faire faire attention tous les jours Ă des choses insignifiantes tandis que nous lisons trois ou quatre fois dans notre vie les livres oĂč il y a des choses essentielles. Du moment que nous dĂ©chirons fiĂ©vreusement chaque matin la bande du journal, alors on devrait changer les choses et mettre dans le journal, moi je ne sais pas, les... PensĂ©es de Pascal! (il dĂ©tacha ce mot dâun ton dâemphase ironique pour ne pas avoir lâair pĂ©dant). Et câest dans le volume dorĂ© sur tranches que nous nâouvrons quâune fois tous les dix ans, ajouta-t-il en tĂ©moignant pour les choses mondaines ce dĂ©dain quâaffectent certains hommes du monde, que nous lirions que la reine de GrĂšce est allĂ©e Ă Cannes ou que la princesse de LĂ©on a donnĂ© un bal costumĂ©. Comme cela la juste proportion serait rĂ©tablie.
TL;DR: âas long as weâre stuck to our feeds on the daily we should put some essential philosophy in there, and then the trashy gossip could go into those deluxe hardcovers that we barely open once per decadeâ.
But my problem with the ad (beyond the fact that itâs a consumerist ad that promotes shopping products from a huge corporate chain as the solution) is that it doesnât go far enough. Of course extracting the text from a kidâs TikTok feed looks terrible, TikTok is garbage, but if we would extract the text from a radio stationâs ads or a TV channel or even the text I saw in all the other ads on that subway ride itself it would look just as terrible. We live in a spam hellhole drenched in constant ads! Huge flickering screens, posters and stickers everywhere. Even the escalator is full of ads. My entire life (as soon as I leave my cozy house) is as bad as that poor kidâs social feed.
Thatâs absolutely not to show leniency on TikTok or Facebook, I hate them, two wrongs donât make a right; but it is to cry out that the subway and streets should get cleaned up from all these ads!
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