hoi.polloi 4 Apr 21 2010, 09:56 AM wrote:
(Any UK train riders able to confirm? Are the signs in the trains? In the station lobbies?)
Designer Barry Gray says in the BBC article idyschmd posted:
Evidence suggests that people switch off when there is information overload. What if someone tunes out after seeing three signs that are irrelevant...
Today I took a kind of straw poll for No Smoking signs in my town and was astonished at how ubiquitous they have become without me noticing them at all. (I had “tuned them out”)
Almost every shop and restaurant displays the “twin towers” cigarette design on the door:
(This is the standard one which businesses are encouraged to download from the Department of Health’s smoke-free England website -
http://www.smokefreeengland.co.uk/resou ... gnage.html
The saturation is such that not only every single shop, cafe, taxi and church has these signs, also pedestrian underpasses:
And the inside of phone-boxes:
Since July 2007 it has been the law to display these signs at the entrance to public places.
I estimate that 7/10 premises in my town display the “twin-towers” design. There are a few variations with more realistic-looking cigarettes such as in the phone box.
Re: the station
Although Barry Gray is now retired from Railtrack, I was still interested to check the no smoking signs at the station.
The entrance had three types:
So much for
standardisation Barry! :P
(Only one of the 3 types had the twin towers-type symbol.)
But my town was generally saturated with this horizontal “twin towers” design.
(this one outside southern electric)
If I were a conspiracy theorist I might suggest that our senses are deliberately flooded by no smoking signs, so that they can become a channel for messages that we will not register consciously.
e.g. reminders about terrorism.
So could this lead to concrete evidence for those behind terror hoaxes?
I anticipate so.
Background to the smoking ban (UK perspective):
1941- first modern smoking ban, in Nazi Germany.
article about this from the British Medical Journal:
http://www.bmj.com/archive/7070nd2.htm
1998- “Smoking Kills” published .
Government White Paper and the “first ever public health strategy” in UK
http://www.archive.official-documents.c ... 7/4177.htm
This is the strategy that culminated in the 2007 smoking ban.
2010 (February) ? “Smokefree Future” published
A comprehensive tobacco control strategy for England published by HM Government
http://www.dh.gov.uk/prod_consum_dh/gro ... 111789.pdf
Astoundingly they are not satisfied with what has already been enacted:
“it is too soon to claim victory”
“we cannot afford to rest on our laurels”
“Our vision is of a ‘smokefree future”
-Details are coming on the precise history of the No Smoking pictogram-
This post does not go further to identifying any perps, (Hoi having already looked at Barry Gray).
But as idyshmyd suggested I think there must be quite an overlap between the terror people and the No Smoking people. Both domains have enormous potential for control.
I am wary of posting subjective David Ickeish stuff
But undoubtedly these politicians and campaigners are using forms of
meta-communication.
While they talk about tobacco, they are perhaps admitting to other things?
But this Reality Shack and not Mental Shack, so I’ll save analysis of that for when more concrete stuff turns up to back it up.
A decade after the publication of Smoking Kills, the ambition of the tobacco control community is undimmed.
Success has bred determination not complacency. For all the achievements of the last ten years, the scale
of the harm inflicted by tobacco on society, especially on children and young people, demands a long-term
commitment to action.
The tobacco control community looks forward to working with government to shape a new era in tobacco
control such that, in another ten years time, the achievements of Smoking Kills will be viewed as the
foundations of a radical and ambitious approach to tackling the harm of tobacco, still the leading cause of
preventable premature death in England
2008 “Beyond Smoking Kills” ?
http://www.ash.org.uk/beyondsmokingkills published by ASH
