Ignore This Sign…

I wouldn’t necessarily say we’ve become stupider, but rather more linear. Because of clocks, business, mobility, etc., we’ve become less observant in the “now” and increasingly centered around the future, so ordinary signs with less-than-ordinary messages are unnoticed and irrevelent to our daily, often chaotic, lifestyles.

um well its ironic and funny….its good…..

makes one open eyes and remember not to be insensative to others

What I find interesting is that such humour isn’t the product of the late 20th / early 21st century, it’s not at all new. It has been around for decades in absurd art, I can see the connections. (And I would risk saying it has always existed!)

So the question is: are we really becoming increasingly stupid? Is there really a tendency? How stupid can we get, if (e.g.) playwrights in the 1950s have already been making attempts to point out the phenomenon of being stupid?
Maybe we have never been clever, maybe humans have always been so stupid (while thinking they were smart), maybe we are only able to find new ways for being stupid, and art (or at least some of it) has always tried to underline this basic characteristic. (I wouldn’t call my opinion pessimistic, it’s rather realistic.)

Thus we can admire the artists’ creativity, how they adapt to contemporary life, but we should not think that the message is something essentially new. (As there isn’t much new under the sun.)

Don’t get me wrong, I like the ideas, it does add something new to the old discourse, and it does speak about contemporary society, culture, etc. But we shouldn’t forget it’s predecessors.

The reason that people don’t notice signs like these is not necessarily stupidity. The complexity of our world makes systematic processing, or careful notice of every stimuli, absolutely impossible in daily activity. It would be mentally exhausting to digest each detail as if it were completely fresh. These signs are very similar to things that we see every day, and therefore manipulate heuristic processing, the half-minded processing of information that people use in daily activities that allows them to only take note of jarringly unusual stimuli, filling in details like the writing on the sign with information from past experiences and, by doing so, streamlining their efficiency so they can complete everyday tasks more quickly. If there is a trend to blame in our society for the frequency with which anomalies like these signs go unnoticed, it is the increased complexity and hurriedness of our daily lives. Technology has allowed us to access everything faster and accomplish more per day, but at the cost of being, at times, unable to slow down and absorb the little things around us.