Continued from the introduction.
In the last few years I've organized Ad and/or Spot Bowl, I've seen dramatic changes in the way we consume media not just on Super Bowl Sunday, but every day. The Super Bowl is a preview of what tone advertising will take for the year, be it the giggly, exuberant dot-com phase of the late 90's, the somber, patriotic streak of 2002, or the fragile optimism that appeared in 2003. We can divine much more than how ugly the new Cadillacs are on this day, and it's time to harness that.
For Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004, I'd like to try spreading out the media critique a bit. This year, I'll be preparing a set of tools to get Spot Bowl parties started around the world to talk about what pushes us and others to buy these products, and how this event and others affect our lives as individual consumers – or as a society. I believe tools for effective media critique and education are waiting to be created, and that we are increasingly led collectively to large media events that deserve a back channel we can provide. We need an online living room for discussing events like this, or more important ones (live events like the President's State of the Union address or breaking news spring to mind); without analyzing the media that we consume, we are destined to be driven by it.