I saw an ad in the subway from a bookshop chain (and yeah they do sell my books 🤷🏻♀️) that I thought was a li’l bit clever but I wanna add some nuance.
The add was all the text from (supposedly) a real 13 yo’s 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 Jackson’s 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 wouldn’t 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. I’m sure it’s 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.
It’s like that Proust quote I like to trot out all the time:
Ce que je reproche aux journaux c’est de nous faire faire attention tous les jours à des choses insignifiantes tandis que nous lisons trois ou quatre fois dans notre vie les livres où il y a des choses essentielles. Du moment que nous déchirons fiévreusement chaque matin la bande du journal, alors on devrait changer les choses et mettre dans le journal, moi je ne sais pas, les… Pensées de Pascal! (il détacha ce mot d’un ton d’emphase ironique pour ne pas avoir l’air pédant). Et c’est dans le volume doré sur tranches que nous n’ouvrons qu’une fois tous les dix ans, ajouta-t-il en témoignant pour les choses mondaines ce dédain qu’affectent certains hommes du monde, que nous lirions que la reine de Grèce est allée à Cannes ou que la princesse de Léon a donné un bal costumé. Comme cela la juste proportion serait rétablie.
TL;DR: “as long as we’re 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 decade”.
But my problem with the ad (beyond the fact that it’s a consumerist ad that promotes shopping products from a huge corporate chain as the solution) is that it doesn’t go far enough. Of course extracting the text from a kid’s TikTok feed looks terrible, TikTok is garbage, but if we would extract the text from a radio station’s 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 kid’s social feed.
That’s absolutely not to show leniency on TikTok or Facebook, I hate them, two wrongs don’t make a right; but it is to cry out that the subway and streets should get cleaned up from all these ads!