Quote:
Originally Posted by GlassCity
I may have used the wrong words. Of course music is a great indicator and example of culture than billboard ads are. But hearing La Vie en Rose in a restaurant doesn't keep you from being a full participant of a city, whereas seeing a flashy bus stop ad in only Chinese does.
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Of course it does prevent you from being a full participant in the city. It doesn't allow you to fully understand the cultural significance of the song. If you are sitting in a French restaurant and only hearing French songs, the person beside you who understands French is being a fuller participant at that dinner as they are not only enjoying their meal, they fully understand the cultural connection with the music, as opposed to you, who is just enjoying some unintelligible harmonies.
The argument works for basically anything. If you aren't trained in Latin dance, you aren't a full participant of your city either, because you can't partake in the many Latin dance clubs, and even if you do go there, you won't be speaking the same dancing language. The cultural connection isn't there and you aren't "fully participating".
Nothing is stopping you from learning the lyrics to French songs, learning Latin dance, or learning Mandarin, and each one, whether they advertise or not, are preventing you from being a "full participant" in your city.
The line you draw is arbitrary, whether you want to admit it or not. It might not look arbitrary from where you stand, but from my view it sure looks arbitrary to me. If we needed the government to come in and sort out all these arbitrary "slights" that people feel at not being included in the full "culture" of their city (which now includes advertisements of all things, which I contest is still a ridiculous argument) - our governments wouldn't be worth a damn and neither would our cities.
Like it or not, Canadian cities are full of immigrants and each of them bring something to the table. If you want to be a "full participant", you would need to learn every language of every immigrant in your city, and you are kidding yourself if you think it's good enough to speak English to everyone and you getting a "full experience" just because you are surrounded by English advertisements. I have honestly never heard something more absurd.