Reclusland

Giving people the choice to see or not to see advertising might seem reasonable, even democratic, but it works against the principle at the heart of the outdoor advertising industry, which is that effective advertising is advertising that cannot be turned off, cannot be fast-forwarded, cannot be avoided by turning the page or getting up and walking out of the room. In a heavily fractured media environment a captive audience has great value, which is the reason that this recession has seen spending on outdoor advertising fall much less precipitously than spending on other media. (via Trying To Follow)

Money is spent on advertising because it works, plain and simple.  If it didn’t work, no one would spend any money on it, particularly not corporations to whom money is pretty much the end-all-be-all of everything.  Most people do subconsciously buy into advertising on some level, and the more of it there is, the less likely we are to realize that we’ve got any alternative.  In a sense, advertising is doing exactly what Adam did in the garden of Eden: naming things.  Except that there aren’t that many things that need names any more, so advertising is trying to rename things instead.  Things like “joy” get renamed “Pepsi” (or was that “Coke“?), things like “I am attractive to attractive people” get named “Budweiser” (she likes it in the can, man!).  And as it is explained in Douglas Rushkoff’s masterful documentary “The Persuaders” (watch the whole thing online, for free, here), all these renamed things quickly end up cluttering our mental landscape, clutter that then must be “broken through” by advertisers in order to reach through to the consumer.  Advertising is something that we build up immunities to, like roaches.  “You spray them and spray them, and after a while it doesn’t work any more” (thank you, Naomi Klein, for that wonderful metaphor).

It seems at first that this means we have to constantly be on our guard, to keep our emotional/intellectual immune system healthy, or else admit that we are unable to do so and therefore must allow advertising to make it’s will our own.  Definitely a sad, tiring state of affairs, but could there maybe be a different way to look at it?  At it’s heart, advertising is effective because, on some level, we are allowing someone else to define our reality for us.  That’s something we should probably begin to stop doing at the age of seven (when according to the Catholic Church, we reach a high enough level of intelligence to sin and exercise our rights as individuals).  Now the actual age doesn’t matter, but the fact is that, at a pretty early age, we do begin to understand that we have some personal voluntary control over our own actions and decisions, and it’s supposed to grow from there.  Be it at 7, 9, or 12, it doesn’t matter too much.  But 25,  30,  50? It’s not so easy to excuse at that point.

The point being that the core of advertising’s effectiveness is a simple human foible: the need to look to someone else, over and above our own sense of reality, to make decisions about what our reality means to us.  It’s a largely subconscious need, at least until we start looking into our daily experience.  But once we do start looking, we can begin to become aware of our subconscious programming, watching it unfold as if it were someone else acting through us (which, in this context, it pretty much is), and slowly but surely trimming off parts of it like Hercules and the Hydra.  This is in no means easy to do, nor do I mean to imply that this is anything I have done myself, that’s for sure.

But if we are to do anything other than slowly sink into a quicksand of conflicting messages and implanted desires, we’re going to have to develop an immunity to the very act of allowing someone else to define our reality for us.  We are and (almost) always have been the prime mover of our reality.  This is a fact that doesn’t change, no matter how much we might want it to.  It’s time we starting living up to that responsibility.  As soon as we stop looking to other people for direction before looking within, advertising will fade like a bad dream.  It simply won’t be worth the resources any more.

Humans, as we so often like to remind ourselves, are pretty much at the top of the food chain.  That means no natural predators.  We don’t really have any other top-of-foodchain groups to look at, to see how this kind of thing plays out, but my two-cent-bet is that we may have just become our own predator.  That would explain a lot of human history, wouldn’t it?  Why we feel alone in the universe, why we look for some divine parental figure to punish us for our sins.  We’ve had nothing real to fight against for a long time, and we’re still haven’t come to terms with that.  In the past, we could always look for other communities of humans to make into the “other”, to have something to fight against.  But now that’s not really an option, no matter how much our political “leaders” may tell us otherwise.  We’re also fighting nature itself, at this point, which is pretty much the worse case of “biting the hand the feeds you” that I can think of.  Cause this is the hand the feeds everybody.

It’s long been time for us to turn around and face the predator within, and to a certain extent, we’re doing it.  We are forcing ourselves to evolve, but we have to turn and push that self-destructive urge right up and out of us, because otherwise we’re pushing it inwards to become stagnant and twisted.  It’s time to make peace with the “other” and to realize that we don’t have any need for an “other” to fight anymore.

Satan is a evilous man,
But him can’t chocks it on I-man
So when I check him my lassing hand
And if him slip, I gaan with him hand

I’m gonna put on a iron shirt, and chase satan out of earth
I’m gonna put on a iron shirt, and chase the devil out of earth
I’m gonna send him to outa space, to find another race
I’m gonna send him to outa space, to find another race

Or, if you prefer your wisdom to be a little more by The Book:

“There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him;
but the things that proceed from a man are they that defile a man.”