Infovirus

"Why is information not flowing smoothly?"
(Adbusters, November/December 2008)

As alluded to earlier, I often read Adbusters magazine. Not for the ads, of course, but not the content. Often these articles and photographs are inspiring, engaging and thought provoking.
For example, one recent issue covered the issues involved with cutting through the technological advertisements to find out what the real message is.

In this month's issues of Adbusters, there is a photograph of a young girl sitting in her bed, with her computer running, her television on, her mp3 player plugged into her ears. The tag line of the photograph is "because an infovirus has infected our communications systems".
This tag line is effective because this girl has at least three different devices running and throwing 3 different messages at her. How is she going to remember or even process more than one of them? Further, is the girl even going to get any complete message from either sources?

I feel that this information overload problem isn't going away. In fact, this problem might just be getting worse. As you walk into post-secondary institution, there are ads for every possible event. Walk into the bathroom at a bar, there are more ads. There are tvs everywhere. Some major cities have televisions set up that are able to track you and your purchases. They use this information to provide better products for you/the consumer.

How am I, as a communicator, going to be able to cut through all this extra messenging and advertising? How can we make our positions and documents differently so that our messages are reaching the public? I know that we have tried to be able to reach our consumers and targeted publics. But we need to take a more minimialist approach to advertising so that our publics are being oversaturated.