Sense and Sensibility

Oh, good, another gaseous opportunity

I am watching television at the pump.

I want to watch television while I am pumping gas about as much as I want to drink the gas spewing from the pump, but I have been ensnared. My captor is Gas Station TV, which discharges 4/12 to 5 minutes of visual effluent to hapless drivers who have stopped into one of the 12,000 gas stations in the country that “broadcast” its infernal prattle.

Gas Station TV is one more moth hole in the increasingly permeable membrane that separates private citizens from the insidious advertising industry. It “transforms the gas station to a highly sought-after media destination to inform and influence consumers at a desirable Point-of-Purchase, when they are mobile and can be influenced to take action at a nearby retailer in proximity,” according to its publicists. In other words, you’ve been ambushed at the gas station by an advertiser masquerading as a weather report. The only obstacle between you and that bag of Cool Ranch Doritos is 8 baby steps and $1.89.

Nobody’s going to nominate Gas Station TV for an Emmy, but you have to admire the ingenuity of the idea. With technologies like TiVo, DVR and the felicitous mute button, advertisers have had to do a lot of ducking and weaving to be heard. (Note to advertisers: We’re here! We’re here!)

But anybody who has taken to the open road in pursuit of a little silence can easily feel a little ambushed. Screens [Dash] in the doctor’s office, at the bank, at the airport, in the convenience store, at the checkout corner and [Dash] lest we forget [Dash] in your home have become the wallpaper of contemporary living. But unlike the benevolently mum wallpaper, these screens are talking, moving, bleating and otherwise niggling at your increasingly shattered brain cells.

This Orwellian nightmare is called “place-based media space.” The idea is that nobody stays still anymore. And even when they do, they have the indecorous habit ot muzzling commercials, which has the effect of flushing advertising dollars down the sewer. So advertisers have to get you where you live —- in your cell phone, at the gas pump, at Wal-Mart and in all those parenthetical places where you used to be able to try to get your head together.

You are not alone if you feel besieged by these ubiquitous screens. The average American has three televisions, two DVD players, one desktop computer and two cell phones at home. We spend, on average 4.5 hours watching TV a day [Dash] that’s more than we spend on any other leisure activity. Children 8 to 18 years spend nearly four hours a day in front of a TV screen and almost 2 additional hours on the computer and playing video games, reports the Kaiser Family Foundation

You would think that would be enough when you consider what Americans are not doing while they are blinkered to the screen. Teenagers aged 15 to 19 read for an average of 10 minutes a weekend, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. They play video games at a rate six times that.

So what do you do when you have a nation full of brain-numbed video junkies? Jack them up with more junk.

I cannot imagine who on earth wants to be transfixed by a television screen while weighing their seedless California grapes at the grocery store? I can appreciate that a little aggravation can set in while you’re standing six-deep in the express check-out line but that’s what those cheesy tabloids are for.

Similarly, I am sure that the well-intentioned executives at the bank merely want their customers to be well informed, but it can make a person queasy cashing a check while watching a CNN report on GIs blown to smithereens in Afghanistan.

I suspect these irksome additions are supposed to take customers’ minds off of the fact that their waiting, which has become some sort of crime against humanity. But to me, nothing expands the frustrating of waiting than the flatulence of wall-to-wall TV. If all Hell is breaking loose in the universe, I’m sure I’ll get a big clue-in when I get home and can turn the television on —or off— at my leisure.