Times Square - Center For New Media

Yesterday I had the privelage of walking around Times Square with my family. I had my digital camera with me for the first time in a while, so I was able to take some pictures and feel like a real tourist. I got some shots of the glitzzy lights and billboards and even of my little brother with the Charmin Bear. It was fun and exciting.

This morning back at Yeshiva, I noticed on the front page of the NY Times an article that jumped right out at me. I felt like I was living in a Tocquvillian world, receiving a detailed report of information I had just pondered hours before. I don't often go down to Times Square, yet, here it was, right before my eyes, the following headline: Times Square Ads Spread Via Tourists' Cameras. The article even goes so far as to describe someones experience that sounded quite familiar, "One blog post last week, “Der New York Trip Part II”, written in German, shows a young couple posing with the Charmin bear."

I am not posting about the coincidence of it all, I would rather like to look at the article and its thesis, that advertisers in Times Square are using the New Media to reach potential consumers. "As a result of the growing popularity of consumer-generated pictures, videos and e-mail messages on Internet sites like YouTube and Myspace, advertisers are getting consumers to essentially do their jobs for them (article)." We discussed in class a while back that the original reason (and funding) for the newspaper industry was for advertising. Local companies and businesses would submit their ads to the publishing company and thereby retrive local consumers. Consequently, one would assume, as the corporate industry "goes global", so should the advertising. And that is exactly what has happened. "On sites like YouTube, Flickr and MySpace, an army of tourists and residents are spreading advertisers’ messages well beyond Manhattan, using their cell phones and video cameras as they walk through the marketing crossroads of the world (article)." Just last night, I wanted to take a picture of the shimmering lights from where the ball is to drop New Years' Night. I didn't get the lights, but I did get a blazing blue ad for Prudential! (inset) The article relates the following ploy designed by GE: "In April, General Electric rented nine digital billboards in Times Square and displayed photos of people passing by. People on the street photographed themselves standing below the billboards when their images appeared. Soon, those images were circulating online." GE now has instant advertising literally the world over, on the New Media, of course.

Louise Story, the reporter of this article, I believe is acting in Leighley's "Objective Fact" model of media. "The mass media are merely a conduit for information, tools used by citizens and government officials to expand their scope of vision or communication, not active participants in the communication process (pg. 9)." They are merely stating what is out there on the street, literally.

The retort to Leighley from the New Media is glaring. "We are the channel of communication, we are the newspapers and we are the advertisers - come to us, the wave of the future."