In New York City (can’t speak for the other metro systems across this great land), every subway car is a rolling library, every ride an opportunity to spy on the reading tastes of fellow passengers and make snap judgments that probably wouldn’t hold up in court. Single women in their 30s and 40s gripping a teenage-vampire tale or a Harry Potter-they seem to be hanging out a surrender flag. Those parading the latest Oprah selection might as well honk like geese. Then there are those who defy stereotype. A tall, straw-thin model glides into seated position and extracts a copy of concentration-camp survivor Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning from her bag, instantly making an onlooker (me) feel rebuked for assuming she was vacuous and self-centered based on her baby-ostrich stare. In the same car is another, older woman-do men not read anymore? (Seinfeld’s Jerry, defensively: “I read.” Elaine: “Books, Jerry”)-holding up a Kindle at an angle to catch the light. Unless you were an elf camped on her shoulder, what she was reading was hoarded from view, an anonymous block of pixels on a screen, making it impossible to identify its content and to surmise the state of her inner being, erotic proclivities, and intellectual caliber. She might be reading Alice Munro, patron saint of short-story writers, or some James Patterson sack of chicken feed-how dare she disguise her download from our prying eyes! And reading an e-book on an iPhone, that’s truly unsporting. It goes the other way as well. How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it’s a digital slate I’m carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?

So, I like gum.I don’t love it.But I like it.Chewing it too much can tighten jaw muscles and increase over all neck and head tension. I don’t chomp the stuff very often.

And I like cognac too.I prefer bourbon or scotch, but I’ll sip some cognac if the occasion warrants.

What I haven’t liked in a very long time is advertising.I don’t appreciate being treated like a piece of meat for corporate America to ogle, as though my level of humanity is less than or equal to the bottom line of my money market. Which, given last quarter’s precipitous declines, might slide me into homo heidelbergensis territory.

Most days I’m not required to deal with these three preferences at all, let alone all three at once. But twice last week – TWICE – I was confronted by gum, cognac, and advertising on the subway.

There is no more captive audience than the one found sitting/standing/leaning on the New York City subway.There is no way to avoid be advertised at, no way to avoid ad schemes that overtly attempt to convince me that my life has little meaning unless I obtain <insert item here>. Then, and only then, will I be the ideal version of me, and until that moment I will be a sad shadow of a person; in fact, sadder, since I now know what I am missing by continuing to live my pathetically insignificant and dreary life without the presence of <insert item here>.

This exchange between rider and advert is unique since riders are trapped in a noisy, tin box until they alight at their destination.Imagine driving on the highway, but instead of a stationary billboard, the ads were on fantastical Rube Goldberg machines that propel themselves alongside you for twenty or thirty minutes, two or three times a day.

Those hours of deprecation take a toll on a person after while, and you start to wonder, “Am I loser? I don’t have <insert item here>. Maybe I need that <insert item here>.”

I can count on one finger the current ad campaigns that are suggesting, in earnest, that we could be living a better life.Not because of the product, but because of our actions, which the product can and often does accompany. In contrast, I’ve lost count of the ads that sell me something with less than vague sexual imagery of all the orgies I’d be in if I were hip to their product.

Enter Dentyne andRémy Martin cognac.

Make Face Time, reads Dentyne’s newest ad campaign.Each poster portrays one of the most fundamentally important aspects of existence: human interaction – the deep and meaningful interaction between friends, family, and true lovers that make us feel more human.

The campaign revolves around our growing alienation from each other resulting from the increase of online “friends” and decrease of real ones. It reminds us that we’ve swapped the kiss for a Facebook “poke.” It tells us to “close browser” and “open arms.”

A visit to www.makefacetime.com greets with a message informing the visitor that in three minutes the browser tab will shut down and force you to go explore the “worldwide something else.” Here’s a major American corporation not only encouraging you to leave their site after a few minutes, but actually forcing you to do so.Marketing trick, maybe, but I love it. Reminds me of the rock group Switchfoot whose song told us “if we are adding to the noise, turn off this song.”There’s an awareness that some things in people’s lives are more important than a product, whether pop music or gum.

I respect an ad campaign that knows this, and in this case, I can’t get enough of it. As the train pulls into a station I’ll find myself scanning the interior of each car as they shuttle past hoping I’ll step onto the car with ads like this one, photographed on the D train.

the original instant message.
power down. pucker up.
make face time.
 

It’s an odd thing to be sitting on the subway, often a terribly dehumanizing place, and feel rehumanized – feel like I was meant to live for something more. How strange it is to see an advertisement and feel . . . happy. Actually happy.

Sadly, there are not enough campaigns out there treating people as humans. On that same train I turned around caught a sight all too familiar to straphangers: two half-dressed supermodels erotically tugging at a pearl necklace and the tagline “things are getting interesting.” Which could not be further from the truth. This cheap, dime-a-dozen campaign is anything but interesting. And, once again we find innuendo crammed into our faces to push, of all things, alcohol; not just any liquor, fine French cognac by Rémy Martin.

I’ll admit that I’m skeptical I’ll be part of this sexy, chain-necklaced nightlife by purchasing a bottle of expensive booze. I’ve been buying Woodford Reserve Distiller’s Select Kentucky Straight Small Batch Bourbon Whiskey for years and I still haven’t been to the Kentucky Derby, or sat on the porch of a southern, colonial mansion, cigar in hand, watching the sun set over green plantations.

(And in fact, it looks far less like things are getting interesting, and far more like things are getting extremely dangerous. It appears that blondie is laughing with either excitement or hysteria at what looks like her impeding Nubian slavery. I’m not sure what’s actually going on in this scene, but I’m definitely sure I don’t want to end up where they are going, and also pretty sure that they won’t be serving cognac in the dungeon. Chloroform perhaps, or some other James Bondian truth serum, yes; fine French liquor, no.)

Yet we find countless ad campaigns selling us the same tired, sex-driven ideas about the kind of life their product would ensure we live. Pathetic.

Dentyne, at least, has offered us something else: a picture of what your life could be like if you invested in real and meaningful relationships – and then suggested that since you’ll now be so close to your loved ones so much more often, have good breath.(I think that’s fair.)

I might be naive to think that there is anything more here than a major corporate entity working every angle to strengthen its brand and sell its product. And yet, the presence of something undeniably true in their ads compels me to stop writing, grab some gum, and smooch my wife.

Earlier this year, on my way to work, I opened the latest issue of the New Yorker and was drawn into an article entitled “Friend Game”, which covers the MySpace-related suicide of thirteen-year-old Megan Meier. You can read the full article here.

You probably read the story and were as outraged as everyone else; Megan was first wooed, then harassed by a fake sixteen-year-old boy whose MySpace profile was set up and maintained by neighbors, parents of a friend with whom she’d had a quarrel. The situation eventually came to a head, and Megan hung herself from a closet rod with a cloth belt. Months passed before the reprehensible details came out, and the community – and worldwide – reaction has been loud and clear, but the adults responsible for the harassment haven’t legally committed any crime and can’t really be prosecuted.

According to the article, Megan’s parents were very involved in her MySpace world. They approved friend requests and made sure they were in the room when she was on MySpace. The family lives in a “close-knit” neighborhood, but that closeness unfortunately devolved into cattiness. Two good things (parental involvement and community) that couldn’t prevent the sad occurrence.

There were two things brought up in the article, somewhat unrelated, that nevertheless made me think.

Firstly – the article characterizes MySpace in this way:

MySpace, with its cluttered layout, can suggest an online incarnation of the broken-windows theory-surface disorder begetting actual chaos. It works like this: a person signs up (all he needs is an e-mail address) and then constructs a profile by choosing text, songs, graphics, wallpaper, and video clips. Often, when you open a page, the music’s already thumping, as if you’d stumbled into a party in someone’s basement.

When I was reading this article, my husband was reading Malcolm Gladwell‘s book The Tipping Point, which mentions the broken-window theory in reference to the (successful) efforts to clean up New York City in the last couple decades. As I understand it, the broken-window theory posits that if a window is broken in a neighborhood, and it isn’t fixed, it will invite more broken windows. In other words, disorder breeds disorder. (Though the theory has occasionally been attacked by social scientists as incomplete, it holds up as a way to fight entropy, disorder, and chaos.)

One way this manifested in New York City was graffiti in subway cars. As the story goes, subway cars were covered in graffiti, sometimes elaborately drawn murals that would be worked on for days. I’m all for public art in moderation, but someone had a hunch that the graffiti, and the general feeling it engendered that one could do whatever one wanted on the subway, was contributing to subway violence.

So their solution was to paint entire cars every time they reached the end of the line. If the car wasn’t painted in time, it didn’t go back on the track until it was cleaned. Over time, this helped to contribute to the feeling that someone was actually in control in the subway cars; you could spend hours doing your mural, but it would be gone once it went into the last station. Someone was watching, and somebody cared.

Now, obviously, painting over graffiti didn’t solve all the problems in the New York subways. There were other contributing factors. But some old-timers will tell you that this was the first step toward subway safety. And today, when I read stories about subway violence (or see the trailer for that dismal Jodie Foster flick The Brave One), I can hardly believe it. The New York subways aren’t models of cleanliness, but the graffiti has mostly been reduced to scattered “scratchiti” on the windows, and the idea of a shooting or stabbing on the subway is downright shocking. I suspect you’re more likely to be injured or killed driving your car on a suburban highway than in the New York City subways.

This isn’t rocket science, but like many viable ideas, it stemmed from good, common sense. And so I wonder – if MySpace cleaned up its act more (and the New Yorker article goes on to elaborate a bit), would the general feeling around the place improve? Maybe this doesn’t translate to online venues, but consider for a moment the disparity between a standard MySpace layout and a standard Facebook page. Facebook exerts a bit more control over what you see – for instance, you can’t install customized stylesheets, and though individual “applications” may be flashy and ugly, they’re forced onto a profile tab, where a visitor would never have to see them. And as a result, you see more adults on Facebook; in theory, that may contribute to keeping it “safe”. I don’t have facts to back this up, but it seems reasonable to me.

I’m not sure what all to make of these ideas, but I have a hunch that the aesthetics of online space may contribute more to the friendliness and maturity level of a place than we suspect.

The other thing that caught my attention in the article was this statement:

“Pokin’s story threw first Dardenne Prairie and then everyone else-guidance counsellors, techies, First Amendment advocates, parents, bloggers, parenting bloggers-into paroxysms of recrimination. They were all certain that something sick, and distinctly modern, had happened, but no one could agree about whether its source was a culture that encouraged teen-agers to act too grownup or one that permitted grownups to behave like teen-agers.”

The more time I spend online, the more disgusted and/or saddened I am by the way people “act” online. I’m not convinced it’s the anonymity factor – after all, many people are comfortable revealing their name, occupation, educational details, and location, at least to a subset of their friends/readers. I’m fine with you having the information about me that you do.

But sometimes, especially now that political tensions are flying high, I wonder why we’re comfortable being sarcastic, angry, or just plain mean in our online dealings. Has the internet turned us this way (as some have suggested), or have we always been this way, but our sense of shame/propriety/social stigma has kept us from spreading it as far and wide as the Internet?

While we react to this story with a sense of outrage, what can we do to spread compassion, kindness, and just plain good manners around the internet? How might we “rehumanize” the internet by showing love, thoughtfulness, and civility, rather than snarkiness, arrogance, or hatred for those who are different from us?

I don’t know the answer, but I’m thinking about the question.

An earlier version of this article first appeared as a blog entry.