Thursday, June 21, 2007

Boo This Man!




You may have never seen this man before. But he sucks and you may be a victim of his marketing. His name is Bernard Weber. A Swiss national, he is the 'brains' behind the 'New 7 Wonders' campaign. If you have received any SMSes / e-mails asking you to vote for the Taj Mahal, you would know what I am talking about. More on that, and the newspaper article which exposes this farce after the link.

This campaign is an atrocious attempt to make 'American Idol' style voting bullshit out of the world's cultural heritage. The main idea is that the Weber and his New Open World Corporation have taken it upon themselves to create a new list of The 7 Wonders of the World. How do they do this? They have signed up with multiple telecom companies throughout the world to establish a system whereby you can vote for your favourite monument via SMS, phone or the internet. This of course generates revenue for them as well as the telecom companies, though they claim on their website that this is only to "fund the project." This way their corporation feeds off the patriotic sentiments of gullible people throughout the world, to make some money, and to have a swell party in Lisbon in July to announce the 'winners.'

Unfortunately a lot of people fall for this bullshit, and fail to even address the basic question of who gave Bernard Weber or his corporation the authority (or even the appropriate credibility) to engage in this 'campaign'? The '7 Wonders' can be traced back to ancient times (a few hundred years B.C.) and although there is a lot of debate but no consensus on what comes under the list and what doesn't, I for one find it wholly inappropriate for a corporation to use it commercially in this manner. The tragedy is that patriotism is a sentiment that can make idiots out of people as I recently experienced.

Surprisingly, (at least with reference to my recent criticism of the media) I highly recommend reading a very good article written on this farcical enterprise by Girish Sharma in The Pioneer.

Edit: In case the link for the Pioneer article doesn't work, go to The Pioneer's homepage | Scroll down to "Archives" | Select 15 June, 2007 and click "Go!" | Scroll down to the Article titled " 'New list' of wonders a money-making ploy."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Also they get the e-mails, making a big list to send SPAM.

I don't know why it is so easy to fool people.