The internet, and the blogosphere in particular, is a great way to get a message out to a large audience. We have more distinct voices and independent, grassroots news sources clamoring for attention than ever before. What with all of the consolidation of mainstream print, radio, and television news outlets, it’s a damned good thing too.
Before there was internet, people had to think up unique creative channels to disseminate their messages. Freeway Blogger is a throw-back to that time. Although the self-proclaimed “guerilla artists” do have a blog that features current projects, in spite of the the group’s name, their main media are much more low-tech.
Here’s their explanation of Freeway Blogging, and they encourage others to follow suit and make us of their freedom of expression:
Here’s what you do:
1) Put paint on cardboard
2) Put cardboard on freeway
3) Repeat
For the grand total of about $1 and maybe an hour of your time, you can reach hundreds of thousands of freeway commuters.
The group’s messages are decidedly anti-Iraq war and anti-Bush – we just cherry-picked some examples that relate to gasoline and driving cars. As some of the Freeway Blogger’s signs and stickers indicate, our car-centric culture is inextricably linked to the United States’ need to be fighting in the Middle East.
As Freeway Blogger “Scarlet P.” told Something Cool News:
It’s one thing to have a website, quite another to draw traffic towards it. The "work" of freeway blogging is really a pleasure, and utilizes all sorts of various arts and sciences: rhetoric, painting, demographics, engineering, fence-climbing (sometimes) stealth (always)… all sorts of things… A simple "The War is a Lie." blog takes me about seven minutes to trace and paint, six seconds to hang. It can be seen by ten thousand motorists in an hour, and depending on how effectively it’s placed, it can stay up for days. Another thing is the demographics: you can put all sorts of things on a website, but the political Internet is divided into ghettos of the left and the right: lefties go to lefty sites and righties to the right. When you put something on the freeway, you get everybody.
Whether or not the Freeway Bloggers’ actions are legal is a point of contention. Their site discusses the conflicting legislation as it applies to this type of public speech, but ends with these words of wisdom:
It is our contention that the town square of colonial times has now become the interstate: for better or for worse, that’s where all the people are. With this in mind, we feel it is our God-given and constitutionally-granted right to post our messages on the interstates, freeways, or wherever-the-hell-else-we-think-people-will-read-them and we’re willing to fight for this right all the way to the Supreme Court.
But you’ll have to catch us first.
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