2005-02-25 16:16
by Vasil KolevI’ve finished reading “No logo”, here’s the promised review.
The book is divided in four parts – “No space”, “No choice”, “No job”, and “No logo”. The first part is about the overloading of the all possible spaces in our view and lives with advertisements, the methods and the consequences of it, the second – the disappearance of the choice in almost all areas, because of mergers and different tactics and strategies of the big corporations, the third – of the influence of the brands and the corporations on the job market, with attention paid to some exploitative factories in China, the Philippines, Vietnam, etc., and to the so-called mcjobs (jobs that are low paid and are advertised as temporary, but aren’t), and the fourth part is about what’s being done about all this. The book has a good deal of a emotional charge (which doesn’t have any negative impact on the logic of the presentations, and doesn’t annoy), I had a hard time not starting to read directly the fourth part (which, to be blunt, disappointed me. There is more that can be done).
For me the book contained a lot of new information, and some that I already had, but hadn’t connected in my head that well. It describes greatly the global phenomenon to pay a lot more attention to the sale of the product than to the product itself, to go after quantity instead of quality, and the lack of all kinds of moral and ethical standards (and even of the simple long-term thinking) when the goal are bigger profits. There’s something really annoying in a world that works exactly the opposite of your own principles of work…
(And because, as everyone knows, if I hadn’t done such a job of containing my ego, it wouldn’t fit in Sofia (someone could say, that I didn’t do that well, too), I prefer to change the world than to change myself, at least about this)
And it’s a bit weird to read a book, that reminds you of 1984, but is about the real life.