*** From the Archives ***

This article is from February 21, 2002, and is no longer current.

For Position Only: Digital Wallscapes = Visual Pollution

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Being a proponent of digital publishing technology and a resident of San Francisco sometimes puts me in an awkward position. Like a few years ago during the dot-com boom: As I chronicled with great excitement the role of this new mode of communication and how it changed the way we think and work with print, I sadly watched my city become transformed by the dot-com gold rush, with the cost of housing driven up astronomically and the freeways becoming even more clogged than usual.

Now I find myself facing a ballot measure aimed at regulating outdoor commercial advertising, which has been become much faster and affordable thanks to wide-format digital printing technologies — and I’m going to vote for it, enthusiastically.

Bigger Than Life
Wide-format digital printing — now sometimes called “grand” or “super-wide” format — has matured greatly in the last few years. Early digital printers were expensive, and their resolution and ink capabilities didn’t produce output that would stand up to the rigors of outdoor presentation. But all that has changed. Today there are a variety of types of devices including inkjet, electrostatic, and dye-sublimation that can print anywhere from 300 to 600 dpi on all kinds of surfaces, including vinyl, and use UV inks and laminates to protect the signage from weather conditions and fading. Digital printing technology can produce signage in one huge, flat piece that can be hung from the side of a building, or tiled together from sections, or even wrapped around buses and taxies.

“The art of painting a wall sign is gone,” says Dee Dee Workman, the executive director of San Francisco Beautiful, a non-profit organization backing the proposition. “It used to take days and weeks to put up a billboard, but now it takes minutes or hours. They can be gigantic, and the resolution is very high, so you get these incredible images on them. It’s made a huge difference in how the industry has approached their advertising market.”

The dot-com craze of the late 1990s didn’t help matters any. (Isn’t it funny how we talk about the Internet craze “of the late 1990s” as if it were a century ago? Well it was, yes, but today’s economy is still very much reeling from the burst bubble.) The marketing money that dot-coms pumped into San Francisco often manifested in billboard advertising, but while so many of those businesses have vanished, billboard advertising here has not.

“They helped fuel [the abundance of billboards in San Francisco], yes, but it’s not as if since the dot-coms went away there’s less of a problem with general advertising,” Workman notes. Indeed, while technology may make it easier and cheaper to slap advertisements up on the sides of buildings — and bus stops and taxis — it’s department stores, liquor and cigarette brands, clothing manufacturers, technology vendors, and others that fill the space.

Drawing the Line
According to Prop. G proponents, there are approximately 1,500 billboards in San Francisco, or roughly 35 per square mile of urban space. If passed when San Franciscans vote on it next month, Proposition G would prohibit new outdoor commercial advertising signage and regulate the relocation of existing such signs. It would put San Francisco in company with 600 cities and counties in six states that have already imposed similar restrictions on billboard advertising.

“San Francisco, being one of the most unique and beloved cities in the world, has the prerogative to say, ‘No more! You don’t get any more,'” Workman says. “It’s not a radical approach. San Francisco is behind the times on this.”

Here, here, I say. While the many forms of communication and media we have today might make some old-fashioned curmudgeons bemoan the good old days before CNN redesigned its format, I’m not one of them. You see, CNN might have gone schizophrenic in order to appeal to younger audiences, but I don’t have to turn it on. In fact, I don’t have to turn on any TV channel, surf any Web site, or read any periodical that I don’t want to see. In that sense, I can control — or at least be selective about — both the content and the advertising that I experience.

But I can’t say that about billboard advertising — or wallscapes or any of the other visual clutter that seems to have proliferated in the digital era. And while it’s easy to get a bit high and mighty about how beautiful and special San Francisco is, I’m sure I’d feel the same if I lived elsewhere — much like residents of San Diego, Seattle, Denver, and the other localities that have already limited billboard advertising.

Grand-scale advertising (as with schizophrenic TV news formats) is a good example of just-because-you-can-doesn’t-mean-you-should. Or, as my mother would have said back when I was 16: “If all of your friends were going to jump off a bridge, would you jump, too?” When I was 16 I would have done anything just to freak out my mother, but my point is that while there are plenty of ways that technology has made our lives richer and our jobs easier, plastering advertising on the sides of buildings and around buses is not one of them. It has only made our world uglier, our environment more visually polluted. Yes, I know lots of people stand to make lots of money off of wide-format printing and advertising, but it seems to me that agencies, printers, and the other professionals who make a living creating and producing digital signage will still have plenty of space to fill and work to perform to fill the 35 billboards that already occupy each square mile in Babylon by the Bay.

And if and when the time comes to vote on restricting advertising on buses, or banning or restricting video-based signage, you can bet I’m going to support those measures, too. In fact, I’m looking forward to it.

 

  • anonymous says:

    I agree completely.

  • anonymous says:

    As well as outdoor visual pollution, the corresponding indoor visual pollution in stores is the screening of ads on supermarket floors. The trend by the advertising/marketing industry to fill every bit of blank space that surrounds a consumer is contributing to overwhelming sensory input. Quite frankly, you just begin to shut out and not focus on it any more. They are rapidly reaching the point of diminishing returns. No one can pay attention to this much information, it’s simply not possible or practical . . . or necessary. Empty spaces and quiet are good!

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