Foster the Pedestrian

              Culture Jammers, those who usually begin revolutions, have the first responsibility of taking action, by using social media or spreading a new fad by using a creative, perhaps radical message to gain attention. Adbusters, a magazine with an online blog, is one way for these culture jammers to point out the specific aspects in our society and as it says on its website, “change the way information flows,” as it did when “Occupy” became the official title for a worldwide political and social movement. Using a creative approach to make bike riding, walking, using public transit, and community building cool again might just be one of the quickest methods in our globalized world in which younger people have an advantage.  Also, open blogs such as thisbigcity are convenient to view projects around the world regarding architecture, culture, planning, transport, biking, and technology and design and borrow them from and implement them in different places. These websites help spread the world on sustainable community building . Social media and blogging can replace actual city life within cyberspace, in that ideas are spread. Then, they can help urbanism, in places where it is lacking, become real again.

 Oil companies and automobile companies like BP, Exxon, and GM have used advertising and social media to spread the idea that biking and walking are "uncool," and that gas-guzzling automobiles are convenient commodities. It is also surprising to know that this trend occurred decades ago when the SUV became known as a luxury product (funny right?).Viewed by so many generations as a truck capable of hauling supplies and fishing rods, now the Cadillac Escalade sporting rims, to name one example, is the must-have vehicle for an American family. Just this year, GM posted its own advertisement with a “Reality Sucks” campaign (see under "Culture Jamming with Advertising"), in which bike riders were splashed with mud by oncoming automobiles, all over college newspapers. This, as expected, created quite a backlash throughout the biker community. GM now, and hopefully plenty of other companies to come, in 2011-2012 finally declared climate change to be an ecological reality, and now that it realizes that reality actually does “suck” partly because its automobiles and anti-pedestrian advertisements contributed to global warming, GM may be on a path to producing more environmentally-friendly vehicles with a better fuel economy. Fortunately, environmentalists, urbanites, and young people (see The Street Plans Collaborative) who prefer sustainable changes can use more positive campaign techniques to show how attractive biking and pedestrian activity can be (simply portraying the modeling pedestrian as a healthy, laid-back, and comfortable person could pull the average American away from the screen and push him or her to commute in this fashion).