Having just moved to the country with the boxes barely unpacked, I’m confessing that I haven’t seen much media lately. So I’m sitting down to write the media column with not much inspiration.
The problem I’m finding is that unlike the zapsville of London Bridge where I used to live, there just isn’t so much in-your-face media here in rural Surrey, particularly in the realm of advertising. I sit in the garden and hear real, unmediated cows mooing in a nearby field. I drive around through tunnels of un-billboarded overgrowth. Horses trot by and the rain splashes down without a logo in sight. Not a snifter of persuasion from anywhere.
Adverts in your face
Of course, that isn’t strictly true. I can still read newspaper headlines as I drive past the lonely village Spar on the school run. I can listen to the radio. There are televisions out here too, I’ve discovered. But I think the difference is that those are all choices. I used to imbibe media messages without even choosing to do it. When I took the Central line to Oxford Street and walked up to Portland Place each day, I reckoned on having to say, ‘No, I don’t need that’ in my head at least 100 times before I’d even started work.