March 28, 2024

BY TYLER BATTEN

Intrusive broadcasts, steeped in politically nonsensical rhetoric and force fed to the senses around election season, need to be outlawed and exiled.

Just because someone owns a car doesn’t mean they need to be a mechanic. In order to cast an informed vote one shouldn’t have to be a master linguist.

Language aside, advertising has no place in politics. The nature of these two subjects is completely different, their delivery and reception should remain divergent. Ads are made to capture attention; they make false and unrealistic claims in order to trick consumers into voting, or rather, buying.

It’s time that political parties respect their age of majority constituents.

The most educated, informed and curious cohort of all time is becoming increasingly apathetic and growing callous to the very idea of politics due in part to the constant bombardment of lame ads aimed and fired at them.

The advent of the television in the 1950s, and to a greater extent the obligatory advertisements that followed, saw politicians chase voters down the rabbit hole into the depths of that hot medium, with its marquee lights, explosions and theme songs all riddled with false and disconnected, yet easy to understand, promises.

In the spirit of late communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, within the irony of this generation — the hipster — there lies a testament to the renewal of individualism within an old and tired global village, but the real irony is that the solution which guides the renewal of individuality has become marketable itself.

The individual’s problem is a fisherman’s hitch — the greater the solution the tougher the problem, that is, the more authentic the idea, the more popular it will become.

The current political class, standard and dull, are again chasing this generation down to their agora — their meeting place — their place of individual connectedness.

The Internet medium is a place where messages can be paused, played back or all together avoided. Tuning in is a completely autonomous act and if anything is known about this generation it’s that their hand will not be forced.

Voter turnout is on a steady decline in Canada because what the antiquated political process has failed to understand is that capturing a vote does not mean finding voters who will listen, but rather developing an appropriate and transparent medium in which to talk.

The need for a separation of ad and state now, more than ever, must be recognized and implemented. Active and engaged citizenry and a revival in the reverence of democratic values will occur naturally if Hollywood-inspired slam ads and fictional accounts of fallacious arguments are exchanged for truth, transparency and respect.

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