To walk down the street in Taipei is to subject yourself to a barrage of noise. Signs, banners, billboards, advertisements, and warnings, all vying for your attention and urging you to buy, spend, eat, drink, play, love, be, do. Daytime screams with logos and slogans plastered on every available space. Nighttime glows neon with overwrought superlatives and misspelled English. Low-tech shopkeepers shout the day’s specials, their hi-tech counterparts use bullhorns and prerecorded carnie pitches.
In the end, you’ve got to wonder- does any of it get through? Surely survival would require some passive filtering techniques. Information everywhere, rudely interrupting. How can you tell the good information from the bad? Doesn’t it all titillate for a moment, then overwhelm with regret and jealousy and desire for more?
No comments yet.