Posts Tagged Force-fed media
New York Times is Wrong to Force-Feed Its Content
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise on March 5th, 2010
Like so many media companies, the New York Times is fighting a battle to maintain its place in the journalism order as people read less and, when they do read, increasingly do it online, where so much content is free.
But the venerable newspaper is putting itself on the wrong side of history by partnering with a digital out-of-home (DOOH) TV company whose business model is based on force-feeding content to people who haven’t asked for it and in some cases can’t get away from it.
The Times announced last week that it had signed a deal with RMG Networks, a company that operates tens of thousands of screens in public places where people either can’t or have to pay a high opportunity cost to get away from the unwanted content.
The newspaper says its content will be aired exclusively on 850 screens and more screens are in the works. Mixed in with its content will be advertisements. In commenting on the deal, Linda Kaplan Thaler, an advertising agency executive, says advertisers like these screens because people often have little choice but to consume the content because people become “captive for a while.”
In saying that its content will air on the 850 screens, the New York Times is being disingenuous. What it really means is its content will be force-fed to people who are in proximity to the screens and who can’t just walk away if they don’t want the unwanted intrusion.
Although we at Media by Choice understand the economic pressure even admirable media companies are under, force-feeding their content to people is a short-term tactic that adds to the visual and audio noise from which people today are trying to escape. We think the New York Times is smirching its good name by stooping to something as crass as digital out-of-home media.
The alternate reality of captive-audience media
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on September 9th, 2009
When you read material provided by media companies that specialize in captive audiences it’s impressive the lengths they go to to reassure us that we like being made captive to their media.
We learn from their press releases and Web sites that we like to have our lives improved upon by having infotainment and commercials to watch while we wait in line at a store or ride a bus or pump our gas. Captive-audience media companies have lots of surveys, too, that show us how much we love having audio-visual media pushed out at us. We certainly benefit from knowing that large percentages of us love to have a TV in front of us at all times to protect us from having to confront our world without the virtuous content of targeted and engaging programming.
It’s because we so clearly love having our lives improved upon by having media pushed out to us unasked for that it’s hard to understand why so many people dislike—and even get angry at or feel insulted by—being made captive to TV. It’s almost like the two sides are living in parallel universes or that one side operates in an alternate reality.
But there you have it. Despite the virtuousness of the content, there seems to be this large and vocal minority that just doesn’t get it and insists on taking issue with being made captive to intrusive and invasive media.
When captive-audience TV started showing up in gas stations, there was the inconvenient fact that quite a number of people made comments like this one:
“I will not go to stations that have [TVs on gas pumps]. So, as a result, I have not been to a Shell station in months. (I live in the Chicago area and they are the only stations with them so far.) I can only hope other people are doing the same thing. If not, this sort of irritating constant sales bombardment will start going on everywhere.”
And when TVs started becoming more common in grocery store checkout lines, there were off-message comments like this one:
“The minute I see my first TV at a checkout, I’ll tell the manager, ‘Watch me. I’m about to walk out of your store because I can’t stand TV. You won’t see me again until all the other stores in the area have the same damn thing and I must put up with it or starve.’ No, no, don’t try to tell me how Most People seem to like it. I’m not Most People, I hate it, and I’m leaving now, empty-handed.”
And when captive-audience ads started showing up on our cell phones as text messages, suddenly we started seeing comments like this one:
“I serve notice to all those who force me to see their ads by interfering with my ELECTIVE reading – NEVER would I purchase your product. At the same time, I will say the same thing to those who think it’s clever to blast my hearing with TV commercials that are 100 times louder than the programming. My solution is simple – I mute ALL commercials. Cha-ching. That’s the sound of the cash drawer slamming on your fingers.”
The reality is, many people don’t like having content pushed out at them. Audio-visual media is by its nature intrusive media. Unlike print, in which we can choose to consume the content or not, audio-visual media is “push” media that takes away our ability to choose. Rather, we’re given only the option to try to ignore it. And each of us differs in how effectively we can ignore push media.
To be sure, the U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in on the issue of captive-audience media and found in favor of the captors rather than the captives. But at the time the court looked at the issue, in 1952, push media was as rare as a Japanese car on a street in the United States. It was a non-issue, and the court looked at a single instance of audience captivity. Today, captive-audience media is becoming ubiquitous and stands to fill much of the space in which we conduct the business of our lives: stores, buses, trains, street corners, building lobbies, elevators, restaurants—you name it, it’s coming.
What’s more, the Court had looked at a different type of captive-audience media a few years before the commuter-train case and ruled against the captors in favor of the captives. That case, Kovacs v. Cooper, confirmed a municipality’s right to outlaw the broadcast of captive audio content on a public street. So the legal right of media companies to force-feed intrusive media to people is not at all clear cut.
Push media is replacing print and other “pull” media and is poised to become the dominant media of our future. For that reason it’s time to revisit the issue of audience captivity. Too many people simply don’t subscribe to the rosy picture that captive-audience media providers try to paint in their press releases and on their Web sites. The reality is, grave differences separate these two sides. We don’t live in parallel universes. We live in one universe, and these differences need to be reconciled.
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Is TV in public places good or bad? Let us know your thoughts in this Media by Choice survey on the good and the bad of TV in public places such as elevators, taxi cabs, subways, trains, buses, airport gates, doctor’s offices, office and hotel lobbies, and so on. Click here to take survey.
Lyle Bunn, others weigh in on Noise Wars
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise on August 25th, 2009
Digital out-of-home (DOOH) media insiders talk about Noise Wars: Compulsory Media and Our Loss of Autonomy
The digital signage blog Sixteen: Nine generated a little debate over captive-audience media and we’re hoping it will continue. Lyle Bunn, a widely-known digital signage consultant, says the concerns raised in our book on captive-audience media, Noise Wars: Compulsory Media and Our Loss of Autonomy
Without a doubt Bunn, who is referenced in the book (he authored a white paper that the book mentions) is correct. It is in fact the case that for every technological advance there’s a push-back by some people. And so Noise Wars: Compulsory Media and Our Loss of Autonomy
Bunn himself goes on to say that those on the cutting-edge of technology have always benefited from critics’ point of view because critics expose flaws with early execution. As he says about the book, “Thanks for the reminder… your points, vehemently made, which have been considered in every single project of this kind, will continue to help improve the process.”
That’s exactly what we hoped to accomplish when we set out to do the book, so we’re appreciative of Bunn’s comment.
Another commenter does a great job countering reactionary, uninformed comments about the book’s purpose. “It’s unwise to think one grasps the contents of a book without having read it. This book does not ‘rail against digital signage, etc.,’ but elucidates “the growing concern over our decreasing autonomy in choosing which media we consume willingly and that which is forced on us involuntarily.”
That is exactly the intent of the book. The commenter’s point is spot on.
You would in fact hope people would reserve judgment until they’ve actually read the book, because things are never as simple as they seem at first.
What’s encouraging, though, is that each of the industry supporters acknowledge, in at least a limited way, the validity of people’s concerns over captive-audience media.
Haynes, the author of the original blog post, says the book exposes what can happen when the content on these captive-audience platforms is bad. “There is a real message in here about content and strategy. One of the reasons people . . . don’t like some of these networks is that they offer no value in terms of the programming, and that programming is out of context with the environment or setting. The now-dead screens on commuter trains in my city offered ads and old TV news, and absolutely nothing about the basics, like which stop we were approaching or service disruptions. That really was just visual noise, and I can fully understand how people could grow to dislike those things.”
We would actually disagree with that point. Although good content is always better than bad content, the problem with out-of-home TV platforms is entirely separate from the quality of the content; the problem begins and ends with the fact that the content is dumped on people without giving them a chance to decide whether they want to be bothered by any content at all. The book talks about this issue at length. Matters of taste are accidental. One person’s good content is another person’s bad content. Content is irrelevant. It’s all about who decides when and where we consume content that everyone acknowledges is hard to ignore.
But the best comment of all, in our view, is the one by a reader of Haynes’ blog who says of industry people, ” You guys are too close to it. Some of what Freedman says is quite true. Audio [is] far more intrusive than video but on ANY level, I bet we’ll see sharply higher levels of resentment/anger over the next decade.”
That’s it in a nutshell.
Captive-audience media attracts 9,701 critics
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise, TV Turnoff on August 14th, 2009
Since launching this blog about four months ago, on April 19, there have been 9,701 visitors, or an average of 80 visits a day. We would call that a success, and we’re interpreting that to mean there’s considerable interest in the topic of captive-audience media.
The most visited post by far is On noise, a judge who gets it, from July 12, that looks at the justice meted out by a judge who threw the book at rude renters who did more than thumb their noses at neighbors who asked them repeatedly to turn down the music; they tried to vandalize their house, with some success. That post attracted almost 2,650 views and generated comment on far-flung sites, some of which I reproduce in another post.
The most clicked-on link so far in any of the posts goes to a database of malicious ads from car stereo manufacturers that’s maintained by Noise Free America. That this link is the most clicked-on is not surprising, because those stereo ads are, to put it mildly, unbelievable. Their common theme is that upsetting people with the loud noise of boom cars is a laugh, and the more upset people get, the bigger the laugh it is. The ads are the definition of incivility and Noise Free America deserves credit for assembling them in one place.
In our book, boom cars and rude neighbors who refuse to turn down the volume of their media, whether music from a stereo or chatter from a TV, are forms of captive-audience media because boomers and rude neighbors force their media onto others. Although they don’t try to monetize their captive audience the way commercial media companies do (ads on bus TV, for example), they commandeer common space for a private aim.
Here’s a rundown of the top 10 posts and the top five clicked links on this blog since its mid-April launch:
1. On noise, a judge who gets it, 2,646 views
2. Boom cars: the constitutionality of nose thumbing, 1,593 views
3. Boom cars and ATVs: cut from the same cloth, 157 views
4. Congress: make leisure time quiet time again, 141 views
5. “Ad loop” and “excitement” equal incongruence, 122 views
6. No-escape TV in 5 of 6 airports, 102 views
7. Knight Foundation errs on captive-audience news, 90 views
8. Outdoor video: what’s wrong with this picture?, 68 views
9. Serenos = serene: a definition mayors should know, 59 views
10. Captive-audience media: Charles Black was on the case, 50 views
Top five clicked links:
1. Malicious stereo ads
2. Kovacs v. Cooper (Supreme Court case involving audio truck)
3.Public Utilities Comm. v. Pollak (Supreme Court case involving captive-audience radio)
4. Algora Publishing (the publisher of our Noise Wars book)
5. Washington Post piece on checkout TV
Thank you to all the visitors who are helping to boost awareness of growing concerns over captive-audience media.
New book challenges out-of-home media
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on August 4th, 2009
The trend to introduce TV and other intrusive media to settings in which people can’t escape except at high personal cost is criticized in a book just released by Algora Publishing in New York City.
Although media companies are free to introduce TVs to buses, subways, and trains, among other settings where unwilling viewers are forced to watch it, many people don’t like being made captive to intrusive media like TV.
The new book, called Noise Wars: Compulsory Media and Our Loss of Autonomy, explores the rise of out-of-home TV and other types of captive-audience media and gives voice to critics of the trend.
First-ever exclusive look at captive-audience media, from Algora Publishing
By some estimates, TV wil be pervasive outside the home in as litte as five years. Within just two years, half a billion TVs are expected to be introduced to out-of-home settings. That’s two TVs for every person in the United States.
The aim to attract advertisers is the driving force behind the explosion in out-of-home media.
Critics take particular aim at captive-audience media in public schools and on public school buses. A coalition of more than 50 civic, educational, parenting, religious, and social organizations has blasted captive-audience media in schools and on school buses.
But, according to the book, captive-audience media in schools is just the tip of the iceberg.
Media captivity = enhancement. Huh?
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on July 28th, 2009
What part of “captivity” do media executives not get?
A press release dated July 17 talks about a distribution arrangement for an out-of-home media network that provides programming and ads for TVs in the waiting rooms of doctor’s offices.
There’s nothing out of the ordinary about the release, but like so many communications of this type, in which out-of-home media executives talk about their programming, there is no recognition that they’re force-feeding audio and video content onto people, at least some of whom do not want to have that content thrust upon them.
“One of our key company objectives is to improve the wait time experience by offering digital media that is entertaining and educational,” the head of the company says.
“Improve” is the problematic word. Embedded in this word is the assumption that adding TV to an environment where people can’t choose not to watch it makes the environment better. By whose standard? Who is the judge that’s decided, for everyone in that environment, that TV makes the environment better?
When we were researching a book on captive-audience media, we discovered case after case in which media executives say one thing—people love their TVs—while consumers say another—how much they hate being made captive to TV they can’t escape except at high personal cost.
No doubt executives of out-of-home media companies genuinely believe their TVs improve environments. What’s more, the content might be good. But many people resent being made captive to audio-video content that they can’t escape. Audio-video content is not like print content. It can’t be ignored. Media executives know this. Again, while we were researching our book, we came across quote after quote in which media executives tout their media platforms to advertisers on the basis that people cannot ignore the content.
Force-feeding audio-video content to people is considered offensive by many people and provokes resentment. Charles L. Black, Jr., the famed legal theorist whose work underwrites some of out most far-reaching decisions, like Brown vs. Board of Education, finds captive-audience media an offensive assault on our liberty. U.S. Supreme Court justices William O. Douglas and Felix Frankfurter do as well.
It’s safe to say that none of these renowned legal thinkers would find the waiting room experience enhanced by inescapable TV. So when media executives talk with such certainty about enhancing our experience, exactly whose experience are they enhancing?
First-ever exclusive look at captive-audience media, from Algora Publishing
If you’re interested in reading more about audience captivity, the book we referenced above is available from Algora Publishing in New York City. It’s called Noise Wars: Audience Captivity and Our Loss of Autonomy.
Social journalism’s evil nemesis
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise on July 22nd, 2009
It’s impossible to be in journalism today and not recognize the irrepressible force of citizen journalism. The use of social media platforms as a way to report what’s going on in the world is one of those developments few people saw coming in the early days of social media but that today is clearly paradigm-shifting. Who can help but be moved by the role of Twitter in spreading news from inside Iran?
And yet growing in tandem with this wonderfully democratic way to report news is its antithesis, captive-audience media. This is the force-feeding of audio and video media in places specifically designed to make us captive to content we haven’t asked for and from which we can’t escape except at great opportunity cost to ourselves.
Here the media is anything but democratic. The content is intended solely to deliver captive eyeballs to whoever is paying the freight. Riding in a public commuter bus? The TV delivers inane ads and infotainment to the captive riders. Riding on a commuter train or subway car? TVs are being introduced on these platforms to bring in ad revenue to cash-strapped transportation agencies.
TVs on taxis, elevators, in public restrooms, on street corners, even on street furniture like bus stops.
This new media is different from the prnt ads we’re so used to seeing in every nook and cranny of our world. Print media is what you might call “pull” media because no one consumes its content unless they want to. No one can force you to read an advertisement. But audio-video media is “push” media and pushes out to everyone regardless of whether they want to consume it or not.
It’s ironic that at a time when information is flowing more freely than ever before, we find ourselves at the beginning of a disturbing trend of captive-audience media, what executives in the business refer to as out-of-home video or digital media platforms.
In classic Orwellian fashion we’re told we like captive-audience media because it entertains us and provides us with relevant information at a time when we’re receptive to it. Of course, they might add that they’re bringing TV to us because we’re increasingly not at home to watch TV there. So, are they trying to provide us a service or find a way to recapture lost ad revenue?
To be sure, many people like having TV to watch while they’re filling their car with gas or riding on a commuter bus, but because “push” media isn’t something that can be ignored, it’s despotic to force audio-video content onto people who don’t wish to consume it.
This is not a new complaint. Fifty years ago, after a classic captive-audience case was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, the eminent law theorist Charles L. Black, Jr. decried captive-audience media as sinster, coercive, insulting, degrading, and, to top it all off, a thing to make your flesh crawl.
Joining with him in this opinion are some of our country’s greatest jurists, including William O. Douglas and Felix Frankfurter. The three of them know something about liberty and freedom. I’m guessing they would applaud citizen journalism as a trend that’s moving us closer to a democratic ideal; we already know they’re repelled by captive-audience media as the absolutely furthest thing from that.
How these two opposites can grow up in parallel is certainly one of the more curious developments of our new world of commuications.
If audience captivity is important to you, we invite you to support Algora Publishing in New York City, which is releasing Noise Wars: Compulsory Media and Our Loss of Autonomy, of which we’re the author.
First-ever exclusive look at captive-audience media, from Algora Publishing
Captive-audience media: Charles Black was on the case
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise, TV Turnoff on July 16th, 2009
If there is one person I wouldn’t want to go up against in a court of law it’s Charles L. Black, Jr., the famed professor of constitutional law at Yale and Columbia University. In his heyday, during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, his was one of the most prominent voices on desegregation (Brown vs. Board of Education) and presidential impeachment, and was widely regarded by his peers as one of the top constitutional authorities of his generation. Sadly, he was never appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court because, had he been, it’s very possible that captive-audience media, a cause de celebre in the view of this blog, would have been deemed a generation ago an unconstitutional abridgment of individual liberty, and we never would have had to launch this blog. Thus, all the time we devote to this blog could have been spent on much more bright and positive pursuits, such as talking about the good ways to offer information to people (there are such ways)—that is, ways that treat people with the respect and dignity they’re owed.
As it is, a divided Supreme Court in 1952 overturned a unanimous lower court and gave an okay to captive-audience media on a commuter rail in Washington, D.C. The end result of that decision is what we’re faced with today: TV on buses, trains, subways, taxis, elevators, street corners, bus stops, ad infinitum. Any place where people gather is now fair game for someone to impose TV or other intrusive media on whoever happens to be captive in that environment at that time. And make no mistake: the executives who operated the captive-audience media on that 1952 commuter rail totally understood what they were doing. One of the company executives described the service as “delivering a guaranteed audience . . . . If they can hear, they can hear your commercial.”
Of course, even the Supreme Court had some mixed feelings about audience captivity. Just a few years prior to that case it said it was okay for a city to ban the use of audio trucks for commercial purposes (trucks that drive around for the purpose of blaring out commercial messages to pedestrians. Such bans don’t represent an unconstitutional violation of free speech because it’s not the speech that’s being banned but the delivery mechanism. As the court clearly saw, allowing anybody with speakers on a truck to drive around pushing out whatever message they want turns people into captives because they have no opportunity to say no.
Why was audience captivity not okay in that case but okay in the commuter rail case? The difference turned on the idea of tacit permission. Since the train riders voluntarily took the rail service, they gave their tacit permission to be made captives to the commercial media.
To the judges who dissented in the case, that’s a pretty thin reed on which to draw a distinction. For some commuters, taking the rail is hardly a choice; it’s the only practical way for them to get in and out of town every day. Thus, as Justice William O. Douglas said, “Compulsion which comes from circumstances can be just as real as compulsion which comes from necessity.”
In any case, we are where we are in terms of captive-audience media. But as Charles Black made clear in what’s widely regarded as a classic essay on liberty, He Cannot Choose But Hear: The Plight of the Captive Auditor, which he wrote after the commuter-rail decision, the Supreme Court decision doesn’t mean we have to allow audience captivity. There are plenty of ways to fight it. Nothing in that decision affects our rights to appeal for curbs at the legislative, council, and commission levels of government, not to mention in the court of public opinion.
It’s in this spirit of appealing to the court of public opinion that Algora Publishing, a literary house in New York City, has just released our book Noise Wars: Compulsory Media and Our Loss of Autonomy.
The book looks at the growth of captive-audience media, the different forms it takes, why its poised to grow so much in the near future, and what the ranks of unhappy captives are doing about it. It ends with a look at ways to create environments in which both willing and unwilling audiences of captive-audience media can happily co-exist.
Ultimately it’s a positive book because it shows that many people are not sitting by idly while media companies blanket our common spaces with media that people can’t get away from. If you are a critic of captive-audience media, I hope you’ll support Algora Publishing and the effort to put captive-audience media in its place by buying the book. As the author, I would appreciate it too.
Take our survey
Is TV in public places good or bad? Let us know your thoughts in this Media by Choice survey on the good and the bad of TV in public places such as elevators, taxi cabs, subways, trains, buses, airport gates, doctor’s offices, office and hotel lobbies, and so on. Click here to take survey.
Force-fed media leave us naked in the surf
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on July 8th, 2009
Thomas Friedman in a New York Times column several weeks ago bemoans the sorry state of American education by referring to a Warren Buffet quip that only when the tide goes out do you find out who is not wearing a bathing suit.
In Friedman’s take, the tide has gone out and the United States is now exposed as naked economically because of the poor job we’ve done raising our educational standards. After leading the world in the quality of education in the 1950s through the 1970s (and charting our biggest economic gains at the same time through real, rather than paper, growth), we’ve fallen further behind the rest of the developed world. The only thing that’s maintained the illusion of continued American strength are bubbles.
He quotes a McKinsey assessment that the U.S. economy would have grown larger by up to $2.3 trillion in 2008 had the country closed the education gap between itself and high-achieving countries like Finland and South Korea.
To be sure, there are plenty of thoughtful people who insist the United States doesn’t need to generate top-class academic achievers to compete globally because of other factors working in our favor: business-favorable laws, a still-strong university system, a well-developed system for allocating capital, and our entrepreneurial culture, among other things.
It’s hard not to agree that the U.S. continues to have a lot working in its favor, but Friedman’s point is that we’re living on borrowed time; we capitalized on our advantages so well after World War II that we put ourselves into an unassailable economic position and we’ve been coasting on that legacy ever since. But now the tide is going out and we have no more bubbles to cover up our nakedness. The rest of the world is catching up and is indeed poised to surpass us because while our kids are playing video games, watching YouTube, and listening to their iPods, the kids in other developed countries are succeeding in schools that actually challenge them.
Clearly, kids are kids the world over, and a 19-year-old in South Korea is just as likely to spend his downtime watching YouTube and listening to his iPod as an American kid. But there’s no contesting the fact that, at least for a large chunk of the student population in the U.S., mastery of math and the other basics has taken a backseat to electronic distractions. It’s hard to concentrate on math problems or text on a static sheet of paper when you’ve grown up having devices constantly buzzing, ringing, and flashing light at you. Is it any wonder that a 14-year-old today finds school irrelevant? The world has been completely transformed in the last 20 years thanks to the Internet and other innovations in communications technology, yet schools remain organized the same as they were 100 years ago. They still teach as if the classroom remains the principal door to knowledge for children.
The move toward captive-audience media in this country makes the educational challenge that much more difficult to meet because it reinforces the message that schools, with its legacy of text-based learning, is irrelevant. How can a teacher press her students to concentrate on a static sheet of text or math problems when everything in the world outside the classroom is moving in the direction of not just audio-visual communication but force-fed audio-visual communication?
With force-fed communication, the message comes to the audience, whether the audience wants it or not. If I’m sitting on a bus, the TV playing overhead forces its content onto me, and my only option is to try to block it out. If we multiply these types of captive-audience environments to include the many places we conduct the business of our lives–trains, airports, elevators, street corners, gas stations, restaurants, gyms–we become conditioned to having information pressed on us.
That’s very different than having to get the information ourselves. With print-based media, it’s up to the reader to extract the information out of a text. A page of text can’t be forced onto me like a minute’s worth of video content. With video, I can sit back passively and let the content come to me. With print, I have to go to the content and extract meaning from it.
When you consider the information environment in which our kids today have grown up, it’s no mystery why schools are struggling in their educational mission. Even the best teachers are challenged to make reading and math exciting when your students have grown up in a world expecting information to come to them.
There’s much to support Friedman’s contention that education in this country is in a hole, and business leaders should be concerned about that if they’re not already. But the next time you hear business leaders bemoaning the substandard reading and math skills of new graduates who apply for jobs with their companies, you might first want to see if their business model is contributing to the problem. If their business supports or profits by captive-audience media — i.e., they advertise on captive-audience media platforms or they’re in the business of delivering information to people in captive-audience settings — then they are signaling to children that it’s okay to sit back and wait for information to come to them. Indeed, everything about audience captivity reinforces passivity in people.
It’s fair to say, then, that we have seen the enemy and it is us.
Boom cars and ATVs: cut from the same cloth
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on June 19th, 2009
ATVs, boom cars, and captive-audience media have a lot in common
A piece several weeks ago in the Washington Post talks about a big rise in the number and intensity of dust storms in the western part of the United States. What’s the cause? Some scientists chalk it up in part to the growing popularity of recreational off-road vehicle use. These ATVs (all-terrain vehicles) make a lot of noise and kick up a lot of dust, but the real problem they cause is the long-term damage to the land. By tearing up the land, they disturb soil, disrupt growing seasons, and hasten erosion.
ATV use isn’t the only cause under investigation, but it’s a big suspect because recreational ATV use jumped 19 percent between 2004 and 2008, and that rise parallels the rise in serious dust storms.
The dust storms are just the latest apparent side-effect of increased ATV use. Ever since ATVs became a popular form of outdoor recreation, the number and scale of conflicts between ATV riders and other users of public land have escalated. According to a few pieces published in the Washington Post and New York Times in the last year or so, these conflicts can be nasty, with ATV riders intimidating hikers and others who are trying to use the trails for their own peaceful enjoyment. Sometimes the conflicts turn violent. In virtually every case it’s the ATV rider who acts with violence against the others, and the argument is always the same: these are public lands, and I’m doing what I’m entitled to do on them, so you can just bug off.
But the two types of users–the ATV rider and the hiker–are not equal. The ATV rider is a user of the land–he kicks up dust, rips up the ground, and belches out ear-piercing noise–while the hiker, at least ideally, is a steward of the land. The hiker’s use does nothing to impede the ATV rider’s ability to enjoy the land, but the ATV rider’s use very much impedes the hiker’s ability to enjoy the land. Not only does the noise and dust of ATV riding ruin the quality of the outdoor experience for the hiker, but by ripping up the land the ATV rider degrades the environment for everyone, including our future generations.
The conflict between ATV riders and hikers is a lot like the conflict between boom car owners and pedestrians. If you’re not familiar with boom cars in name you’re probably familiar with them in practice. These are the cars with souped-up stereos that pump out earth-shaking music, particularly in the low bass registers. Newspapers are full of stories of conflicts turning violent when pedestrians confront boom car owners.
Like ATV riders, boom car owners are using the space we share with one another for their own private end, commandeering it, in fact. They make it hard for others to enjoy their time outside. They impose their noise on others. Theirs is a one-sided used of our resources.
Captive-audience media is cut from the same cloth as ATVs and boom cars, except that it comes with a commercial or institutional imprimatur. Although captive-audience media doesn’t make earth-rattling noise like an ATV or a boom car, it imposes itself on our shared space and forces anyone within that space to consume its content. Not everyone is equally successful at tuning out unwanted TV or other intrusive media.
Clearly, resource depleting ATVs are very different from a TV on a commuter bus or at a bus stop. But we shouldn’t let their different natures obscure what’s identical between them: they both impose themselves on their environment in a one-sided way that sucks the oxygen out of alternative types of uses for that environment.
