The Null Device

The Brazilian billboard ban

The Brazilian city of Sao Paolo may soon completely ban advertising billboards, which the city's mayor calls "visual pollution".

There are 2 comments on "The Brazilian billboard ban":

Posted by: Bizarro bizarro.typepad.com/lowbagger_world Fri Sep 22 06:27:53 2006

Last year I visited Cuba, where there are no advertising signboards other than the odd message from Fidel or a quote from Che. The absence of corporate propaganda is striking, there is no other way to describe it. Even in their revolutionary zeal, the state can't match the rapacious thirst for mindshare of the corporations, and the result is often more entertaining. You start to realise just how much visual pollution there is in our cities and how violent the war for the mental landscape, as the adbusters crew call it, has become.

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org/ Fri Sep 22 08:48:32 2006

Well, the Cuban state's messages have nothing to compete against. I suppose that a tidier mental landscape is one advantage of totalitarianism.