A Stray Shopping Cart Safari
Now and then, for creative purposes, I need to stray a little ways away from the stated theme of Banapana: “Our Minds on Media.” I also find that some of the subjects I write about, like advertising, and putting microchips in our brains gives me agita. I need a break if I’m going to keep consistently writing. And I’m not entirely sure that Marshall McLuhan would not argue that shopping carts are a medium. He made the argument that the wheel was a technological extension of the foot and therefore a medium. Does this not make the shopping cart an extension then of the foot and back. If human history had taken some different development track in which we never developed a consumer culture—a really difficult hypothetical for me to imagine—would the shopping cart even exist? It’s an artifact of us, but also our economy.
And what happens to these artifacts of economy in nature? To answer that question, it is best to turn to “The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America” by Julian Montague.
