Visual pollution is better than auditory pollution because you can, at least, close your eyes. When the medium is sound, there's no escape.
It seems to me that this issue has clear mental health dimensions.
My concern is the increasingly common attitude on the part of advertisers that it is acceptable to gain and maintain, and manipulate, the attention of the public by using techniques that amount to the infliction of pain. In both radio commercials and one (that I am aware of) current television commercial, listeners are subjected to material not only that no sane person could be expected to find other than objectionable, but that the advertisers quite blatantly expect them to find objectionable, and are counting on that reaction as part of their psychological method.
Examples:
1. A spoken sales pitch is delivered simultaneously to the sound of someone tap dancing, or the sound of someone whistling tunelessly, or other sounds that no one in his or her right mind would enjoy hearing. The listener is forced to focus on the sales pitch as the only means (short of tuning to another station or turning off the radio) available by which to escape the torture of listening to the objectionable noise.
2. A man......... speaks......... like this, with long........... pauses in places where............ they would not naturally occur. He is describing the unpleasant aspect of having a slow Internet connection, in the hope of persuading you to sign up with a company that ostensibly offers a better one. This is like going up to a complete stranger, poking him in the eye with a stick, and saying, "That hurt, didn't it? Want to buy some goggles?"
3. The most recent manifestation of the "Pay attention to your pension" radio commercial. These were bearable when the phrase was repeated occasionally throughout the course of a sales pitch delivered in an otherwise more or less normal mode of speech. Then, and very quietly, you hear: "Pay attention." Then there is a long pause, and he says it again, more loudly and more urgently. Then there is another long pause, and he says it yet again, still more loudly and with still more outrageously presumptuous urgency. For anyone to undertake such an approach in person would be to endanger his life in terms of the reaction it would be likely to provoke.
But that is the point, isn't it? He is getting our attention. The problem is that he is doing it in a way that is utterly unacceptable.
These commercials actually depend for their impact on the fact that no one likes them.
And that means they are quite literally using "torture" (as per The Concise Oxford Dictionary; severe pain) to try and sell us things.
There are lots of commercials that lots of people find obnoxious for all kinds of reasons, but their annoying aspect is, as it were, a byproduct of the advertiser's attempt to be something else: usually, entertaining.
As such, they are completely different from what I am talking about, which seems to be a case of advertisers abandoning any hope of being creative, and deciding to be destructive instead. Anyone who isn't alarmed by that should be.
