Product placement nation

After a long day at school and work, I, like a lot of other students, like to sit down and watch a little television. When PBS is not my channel of choice, I go in fully expecting a bathroom break every seven minutes or so. But commercials are becoming so invasive and insidious that they are literally inescapable. \nBy the time most students arrive at IU, they will have seen hundreds of thousands of advertisements in general, and it's only getting worse. \nThe lines between television shows and the commercials that sponsor them are becoming increasingly blurred. Television has become a mirror of "The Truman Show;" characters drink Coke or Pepsi, buy cakes from Baskin-Robbins or work on an advertising campaign for Burger King. Unfortunately, digital video recorders are not yet able to edit out product placement.\nLikewise, commercials emulate the format of the show, such as the Sierra Mist advertisement that imitates "The Office," and coincidentally, is the first commercial aired during breaks from that show. \nAdvertisements are wholly unavoidable -- whether you pass through the IMU building, research a project on the Internet or drive home to visit your parents, they are there. Consciously, most people cease to even notice them.\nThey become naturalized. It's as if we begin to believe that once a year, billboards spawn, and our cars carry the little seeds to another point along the highway, where little billboardlings begin to grow.\nThe scary thing is they flow into society so slowly that any change is hardly noticeable. \nWe have become a culture wherein it is impossible to not be a consumer. When our culture becomes media-savvy enough to ignore one type of advertisement, corporations invent new ways to advertise to us. Want to see a movie? Good. The characters will remind you when it's a good time to drink a Coke. \nIt's hard to imagine the multiple effects on our culture. For example, during the past election, it seemed less that we were voting on a president and more that we were "buying" a presidential "product." Did you purchase Kerry's "Plan for America" or Bush's "Moving America Forward?" Are you the cowboy-type, or do you prefer worldly diplomats? Somewhere between the elections in 2000 and 2004, Bush and Kerry ceased being politicians and became brand names instead. Unlike people, brands cannot be trusted to govern world affairs.\nWe as a society are less likely to receive intellectual discourse and more likely to receive slogans and images. Because it works for toothpaste, it obviously works for world politics. \nIs there any way to end this flood of advertisements? To begin with, we can turn off our television. Any station on public airwaves has to serve the public good; if no one's watching, no one's "good" is being served. Write the Federal Communication Commission when the station's license renewal comes up, and mention how there's too much advertisement. Write the networks and the sponsors. \nWrite the IU administration every time it allows more advertisements into the dorms, the IMU, anywhere on campus. Write public officials about billboards. Eventually, if enough people write, someone somewhere will have to listen.\nAs long as we're buying more, corporations won't change their advertisements. Until the amount of advertisements invading into daily life reaches a critical mass (which doesn't seem to be coming yet), we're stuck.\nI fear that one day my children's books will be filled with commercial interruptions. Imagine Hamlet saying "To be or not to be ... and now, a word from our sponsors"