Future Visual Technology
"Static ads. These are going extinct. Ads that don't move will eventually seem as old-fashioned as ads in black and white. "Any flat surface has the potential to be a screen," Watson says. "There are restaurants in Tokyo where the menus are in the table and you order by touch screen."
- Richard Watson, Future Files: The Five Trends That Will Shape the Next 50 Years (2008)
Along with these predictions, Watson predicts short animations on cereal boxes soon. Future Advertising will certainly not be dull if Watson is right. It is not hard to imagine a world where screens are flashing all around like an image from Time Square in New York. There are no doors in the front of stores but rather holograms of advertising that you walk through to enter. Digital images adorn the back of peoples' jackets because they are getting paid to wear the flexible screens. All this may sound fantastical but the links from this page show technology that is already being developed to make this image a reality. David LaGesse in his article, Can't Go an Hour Without TV? No Problem (2008), talks about the emergence of screens in our daily lives, "Bigger screens, meanwhile, are popping up (or down from ceilings) in cars with video from satellites. Live TV extends the DVD watching that's become standard for anyone traveling with kids." It is already becoming a true 24/7 advertising world.
Throughout our history humans have never had to deal with a constant bombardment of advertising. There has always been some other type of worldly escape. More precisely, we have had to rely on our own minds and imagination throughout the day. Only within the last few decades have we been exposed to the ever present commercials on TV. Once advertising expands beyond the previous enclosure of the household television, how will we have time for ourselves? While it is exciting to think about letting your imagination float off into a colorful world of surrounding screens and images, I am timid to so freely abandon my own intuitions to the marketing strategies of corporations. How could one possibly fight the constant exposure day in and day out?