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Leave our kids alone – the case for banning ads targeted at children
Yesterday morning, a campaign was launched aimed at banning advertising directed at children. Why do the remarkable range of signatories we got for this letter believe I that such a ban should be brought in? Simple: Kids of 4 or 5 years old have no defence against adverts. It’s hard for parents to shield children from all the advertising directed in the home and virtually impossible elsewhere, so we need to be responsible enough to ban the ads in the first place. That’s the point that is undeniable about our campaign: that it just cannot be right to let advertisers effectively brainwash tiny children. The most common argument against our…
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Are we a consumerist society – or a 'producerist' society?
We are thoroughly used now to thinking of our society as a ‘consumerist’ society, and of ourselves as, above all, ‘consumers’. This seems to many of us now quite simply an obvious truth, and in some ways a good truth: think of ‘consumer protection’ and ‘consumer rights’ organisations, from Ralph Nader to Which? Think of ‘ethical consumerism’. But: what if this self-image were in fact both misleading and disastrous? The term ‘consumer’ summons up images of endlessly-open mouths, waiting to be filled with more and more stuff. It evokes ideas of us consuming the resources of the Earth. It figures us as the problem. But what if thinking of ourselves…
