At several train stations there is now writing on billboards that is related to education. In principle there is nothing to say against this. “Read until the train comes” – only with commas; In the news, many of which have an “educational” theme, of course many have abandoned it, but not by Deutsche Bahn – that is the name of the campaign carried out by the advertising agency Ogilvy, based on the correct assumption that passengers standing with their feet on their stomachs on the platform still have plenty of time after reading the yellow departure schedule.
You can read novels, children’s books and their speeches or quotes; the delay is not so severe that you can watch the entirety of “Magic Mountain”, which is represented as “Metamorphosis”.
The essence of these works
When we talk about “quotes”, that is also not entirely true. Instead, the content is created with artificial intelligence, which “captures the essence of the work with the highest possible fidelity,” as the agency reports. The “SMS” are organized by length of delay: five, ten, twenty, and thirty minutes. The slightest delay, sadly not an everyday occurrence, is enough to convince you that Ogilvy is either a big eater or an easy one to please, perhaps both.
The 5-minute “Magic Mountain” begins like this: “Hans Castorp, a simple Hamburger, travels to Davos-Platz in the middle of summer. A bit bumpy, but basically nothing wrong. At best, you miss the original style.
Is it better when it comes to “transformation”? We still have five minutes: “When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself in his bed as a terrible vermin and dressed in hard armor. His legs twitched uselessly. The alarm clock had long sounded, the carriage had long been missed. Mother, father and sister knocked at the door, the chief clerk appeared. Gregor struggled with his new body, opened the door – then the people present backed away in horror.” It definitely reads better with Kafka.
This has nothing to do with literature
This has nothing to do with literature, although the campaign actually “combines education and technology in a unique way,” as DB marketing managers put it. The consideration of whether one does not trust literary texts to lure one out from behind the stove and, the real difficulty, keep one away from the smartphone, or whether one oneself perhaps does not know what to do with such texts, goes too far.
In the end you will say to yourself: the main thing is something with AI. Railroad companies should concentrate on their core business and stay away from things that they and certain advertising agencies don’t understand at all. We have to break up. The train is coming.
