Does constant exposure to advertising screw up our heads and lives?
I think so. The rampant commercialization of the U.S. becomes powerfully evident whenever I return from an extended trip to a country where people don’t wallow in materialism (on this exact point, see this post by Mindy Carney). Americans are professional buyers and horders of things they don’t need. I believe that the trojan horse of ubiquitious advertising is largely to blame. Before I go further, here are a couple of quotes to ponder.
Don’t tell my mother I work in an advertising agency - she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse. ~Jacques Seguela
He who buys what he does not need steals from himself. ~Author Unknown
Many people would argue that we can freely ignore advertisements. Therefore, it’s OK to make the all-American deal: allow as many ads as necessary to pay for news and entertainment.
I disagree. Yes, we can ignore particular commercials or even dozens of commercials. But the average person is exposed to two million television commercials by age 65. In The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (2005), Barry Schwartz writes that “The average American sees three thousands ads a day.” As advertising professor James Twitchell puts it, “Ads are what we know about the world around us.” Just listen to Americans! They have become the commercials they have been exposed to. They just can’t stop craving the things they see advertised. They recite skits they hear on commercials just like people often used to sing the melodies they heard on cigarette commercials from the 1960’s. It is naive to assume that we can subject ourselves to this onslaught without ill effect.
Is this massive exposure to commercials harmful to us? I believe so. In my opinion, we shouldn’t assume that the ubiquitous commercialization of our world is harmless. In light of accumulating evidence, it would be more prudent to assume that rampant commercialization causes widespread societal dysfunction. Television is not just the programs. Rather, television promotes a lifestyle, largely through its commercials and through the programs that those sponsors choose to promote. I’m not limiting my criticism of advertising to television advertising. All forms of advertising lead us to ignore things that we claim to be important to us and to reallocate our energy and money toward things that we all admit are not important.
Consider, also, the narcotic effect of TV, which is mostly related to the way in which the content is presented, not the content itself.
As reported by American Dream, 79% of Americans think there should be more limits on advertising directed at children. 92% of people believe that TV commercials make children too materialistic. A super-majority of Americans (87%) think that our current consumer culture makes it harder to instill positive values in our children.
What is the cumulative effect of our constant exposure to images of happy people buying things they don’t need, images strongly suggesting that we must do likewise? I believe that we are seeing the result—massive societal Attention Deficit Disorder and the wasting of minds. Minds that turn passive and all consumptive, caused by the extinguishing of their sense of curiosity. We are too distracted to take the time to think critically. We try to fill our resulting intellectual emptiness by buying things we don’t need. It’s a perverse form of sublimation akin to eating too much because we fail to sleep enough.
Although television is a huge source of this advertising in the U.S., it is not the only source. Advertising also permeates our minds through print ads (newspapers, magazines, flyers, posters), public displays (billboards, bus stops, train stations, signs of all sizes and colors), movie theater ads (pre-movie commercials and product placements), vending machine facades, radio commercials, ads burned onto our clothing (t-shirts, shoes, hats), displays pasted on prominent buildings and sports arenas, and even an occasional blimp. Don’t forget all those banners and pop-ups marching across your computer screen, many of them blinking and singing.
No one is safe from a constant barrage of ads. Corporations are persistent predators at our schools. See The Center for Commercial-Free Public Education and ASU’s Commercialism in Education Research Unit.
Even the “good” news is not all that good: children saw fewer paid television ads in 2004 — 17,506, or a 12.5 percent drop from 1977 when they saw 20,000. Doing the math, this still amounts to about 50 paid television ads per day.
To quantify one example, take billboards (please, take them). As reported by Freepress.net: 500,000 billboards “decorate” U.S. federal highways. That total is increasing by thousands each year. It is getting to be an unusual pleasure to drive down a highway where billboards have been outlawed, where you can actually appreciate trees and sunsets.
Much of what passes as “information” is actually graffiti, corporate graffiti created and maintained on behalf of the economic elites. If this sounds harsh, just look for it the next time you drive down through any city.
Ads are carefully designed to continue living in our heads. Vicious memes that they are, they reproduce themselves and burst out of our own mouths to infect others. Listen how often people speak about their newly purchased products to fill dull conversation. We use our ownership of products to try to make ourselves interesting. We drive them around, wear them and display them to raise our social status. We talk about our new purchases incessantly and mindlessly. “I just got a new glow-in-the-dark dog leash, Fred.” “Gee, Carol, that looks real cool. I’ll have to get Michelle one of those for Christmas.”
Commercials quietly drive us into herds. They cause us to start thinking that we need something because those smiley people on the television screen have that thing too.
Again, what harm can such advertising do? Lots, according to some writers. We are afflicted with “affluenza,” an all-consuming epidemic, according authors of the 2005 book of that title. The authors quote T.S. Eliot’s “We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men.” What exactly is affluenza? “A painful, contagious, socially-transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.”
In Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (2004) Juliet Schor, considers the adverse effects advertising, especially on children. According to Schor, the average 10-year-old has memorized 400 brand names and the average kindergartner can identify 300 logos. Kids as young as two are “bonded to brands.” The well-known plan of marketers is to get them while they’re young. According to one study reported in Affluenza, “while the average Americans can identify fewer than ten types of plants, he or she recognizes hundreds of corporate logos.”
The effects of ubiquitous marketing are palpable, but hard to quantify. Located in a prime part of the St. Louis Metropolitan area one can find a large shopping center called “The Galleria,” where you will find almost nothing essential. Instead, you’ll find overpriced toys, nick knacks, jewelry and gadgets. I sometimes imagine walking up to the mall’s information desk to mischievously ask for something practical like a hammer, a toothbrush or a bag of rice.
I also wonder what it would be like to have a poor third-world family follow each of us around while we spend our money on those custom-made toys, fancy jewelry, carved ashtrays and monogrammed key chains that we just “have to have” or when we plop down $50/lb for chocolate. I imagine trying to explain to these poor people why we need to buy so many things. “Yes, we already have clothes, but our old clothes (those from last year) are old, out of fashion or not as good as those worn by our neighbors, peers and co-workers. We need that new car because the old one doesn’t have a handy drink holder or a motorized moon roof.”
But what is the cause and effect relationship between the ubiquitous commercialization and the ubiquitous materialism? Namely, does our exposure to widespread advertising cause our widespread materialistic cravings? I believe so, though, this topic not seriously covered by media. Gee, why not? Perhaps television and radio too much depend on advertising dollars for their livelihood. I’m certainly not the first to notice this disturbing trend. Can you imagine a radio show hosting a guest who implored listeners that they should quit buying the things advertised on the station and to, instead, donate their money to people who really needed it?
Most of us buy lots of stuff we don’t need. This is a sickness, by definition. We’ve been so sick for so long that we can’t even see our sickness anymore. My wife developed this handy rule of thumb regarding impulse purchases: people get 95% of the pleasure of buying many things before they ever leave the store. It’s the anticipation and the purchase of useless things that gives us most of the excitement. Therefore, enjoy looking at it in the store, then leave empty-handed.
Many of us are drowning in stuff we don’t need. Industries and self-help groups have sprung up do help us with that excessive stuff that clogs our homes much like cholesterol clogs our arteries. Here’s a line from one of those sites (http://www.flylady.net/): “Many of you are searching for the magic pill that is going to change your life and your home. I know you are tired of living in clutter and chaos.” All of us have seen many garages so full of stuff that cars no longer fit, for example. But so many of us still feel like we always need more more more.
How much stuff is it OK to own? Imagine that floodwaters will submerge your house in only three hours and you’ve got one small car to fill. Imagine going through you house, room by room and imagine whether it would really “ruin” your life to lose the stuff that wouldn’t fit in your van. That’s one benchmark of how much it is OK to own. The most common quote from people whose homes have been flooded: “The stuff we lost can be replaced.” I.e., it wasn’t necessary to have any of the destroyed stuff.
Note Jason Rayl’s post, Consumptious Conspicuosity and the comments thereto. As Grumpypilgrim wrote, “just how ubiquitous is the (death) grip of conspicuous consumption.” When we buy things we don’t need, it encourages us to go into debt, thereby keeping us from allocating our resources toward things we genuinely consider essential.
Merchants defend advertisements, claiming that they provide useful information that assists consumers. They also resist the claim that advertising doesn’t cause us to buy things we don’t need. But consider all the garages and basements bursting with stuff we didn’t even remember we bought. And consider the many holidays and occasions celebrated with stuff we didn’t want purchased by people who were put out to purchase the stuff in the first place. Ceramic cherub collections, shelves of Star Trek figurines, leaf blowers for people with postage stamp sized yards. Such trinkets, of course, are nothing compared to the unnecessary big-ticket items that we buy: houses that are bigger than necessary and cars that are so often newer and fancier than we need.
Buying so much unnecessary stuff keeps many of us working multiple jobs or extended hours away from our friends and families. Thinking about buying this stuff keeps us from being in the moment with the people and tasks that are truly important to us. And the damage isn’t completely repaired after you finally pay for stuff you don’t need. Those many useless things we own constitute a huge drag on our lives; we need to store our stuff and guard it and insure it. Craving, buying and holding our unnecessary stuff is one of the reasons we buy residences that are larger than we really need. Having all that stuff requires us to keep track of the stuff we own and maintain it and finally, to dispose of it.
You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy. ~Eric Hoffer
Another Concern: Commercialization and commodification have become the quintessential American experience, causing our society has become increasingly atomized and politically impoverished. See, for example, this article at Freepress.net. It concludes that “advertising doesn’t exist because people want it; it exists because media policies made it viable and profitable.”
I once asked a friend how it was that our government could be so corrupt and unresponsive to the citizens, yet I don’t see any mobs with pitchforks and torches in the streets. He said that the people will never revolt as long as they have their television. Sitcoms, sports and glamorous cops solving murders as opiate of the people.
Our obsessions with advertised goods distracts us and makes us complacent as citizens. It’s OK to let politicians take huge (mostly legal) bribes from corporations that then get huge amounts of public money. Just walk up to someone on the street. Compare how much they know about their own government with how much they know about commonly advertised products. Commercial media favors the manipulation of glitzy images over critical thought. Who cares about our soldiers dying or about the integrity of our voting system as long as we can watch clever commercials.
Watching commercials warps our priorities. It’s OK to buy big SUVs even while we face a serious intractable oil shortage. It’s OK that children’s birthday parties have become intense showers of plastic toys made in Asia. Actually, it’s now expected that all children attending the party of the birthday child will ALL come away with bags full of gifts. As far as Christmas, don’t get me started!
Commercialization infests our news.
The advertising and news departments are totally independent of each other, right? Welcome to the real world, where the financial interests of advertisers means that many things simply don’t get covered.
A few months ago, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin ordered a probe of dozens of television stations after a report found they aired advertisements as if they were news reports. The existing media system is not designed to produce quality journalism. It is designed to benefit the stockholders and owners of media publications and institutions. Local newspapers and local television new provide almost no meaningful content. These “news” shows are actually designed to keep viewers happy. At bottom, we don’t want to put viewers in a mood where they don’t want to buy things.
Those things that are advertised occupy our minds to the exclusion of other, more important, things:
People who fill their intellectual horizons with nothing beyond sports statistics and exquisite attention to their personal appearance, who know nothing of real matters such as growing food, repairing things and asserting their independence from mass culture are in for a rough future. A quiet disaster of seemingly unconnected changes will overwhelm their expectations, hopes and transient security.
Oh, and here’s one of my pet peeves: store sponsored holidays, such as Mother’s Day. Let’s see . . . Do the merchants really have the audacity to tell me when and how to honor my mother (or boss or grandparent)? And what about those merchants who try to convince us that we need to buy greeting cards because personal written expression is obviously so far beyond the mere writing of a personal note to those we care about? Maybe if we stopped buying so much unnecessary stuff, we’d have more time to practice writing notes to people we care about.
Conclusions
What can we do about all of the advertising?
Here’s what I suggest. Let’s start assuming that rampant advertising is not good for us. Let’s assume that constant exposure to commercials is something we can’t simply ignore. Let’s assume that Americans have become obsessed (more obsessed than ever before) with having needless and useless things as a result of advertising. Let’s assume that many of us have become convinced that we need useless expensive things that we don’t actually need. It’s not a pretty picture. If there is a fair God who judges us, our failures to control our materialist cravings won’t play well on judgment day.
If my anti-consumerist rant is not enough for you, see these additional quotes regarding consumerism.
I was raised by immigrant parents who came to the U.S. with essentially nothing. I’m the son of a college teacher who intentionally didn’t bring a T.V. into the house until I was six years old. They watched with me, and somehow instilled this belief:
If something has to be advertised, then it probably can’t stand on its own merits.
I still feel that if I see an ad for something, there must be something wrong with the product.
I do appreciate a clever commercial, though. They are often more entertaining than the filler between them, the “programming”.
Propaganda is arguably the most potent weapon of mass destruction that has ever been invented. Hitler, and his propaganda minister Goebbels, were the first to recognize its power. Ever since their “pioneering” discovery, people and corporations of every stripe have sought to benefit from its use. It is the reason America invaded Iraq, the reason Americans elected Republicans in ‘04 and the reason Americans dumped Republicans in ‘06. It is the reason many people devote their lives to their jobs: so they can buy things they don’t have time to use, because their jobs consume all their time.
Unfortunately, most Americans don’t appreciate how insidious propaganda (both political and commercial) has become, until they travel outside America and see it from an external perspective…and many don’t even see it then.
According to Advertising Age, in 2005 the automobile industry and related companies spent $18.3 thousand-millions (”billions” only in American English) on advertising.
One of the primary purposes of that advertising is to convince people that owning and operating an automobile is something other than tedious manual labor. This in turn is why automobile advertising has such a profound aversion to portraying real-world use of cars.
The question then becomes, does this sort of massive yearly expenditure on advertising affect people’s views towards transportation policy? Especially since any countervailing viewpoints are not fractionally funded?
To grumpypilgrim: Actually one of the first modern figures to recognize the power of propaganda was Edward Bernays (American). According to Wikipedia Goebbels used one of his books for his social engineering.
You’re absolutely right. Advertising has turned many of us into a shallow shoppers, upon consumerism. But never forget, the reason it’s there is because it works.
I once worked at the largest direct marketing agency in the country. I was ceaselessly amazed at the depth of the science of grabbing maximum response ratios . This size envelope out-pulls that.. A stamp rather than a printed indicia gets envelopes opened up to 40 percent more often. A letter package with a brochure, a lift note, and a letter with a PS covers your bases and outperforms them all. This is a cynical science, but if the goal is maximum RRI, and it always is, this is a medium that’ done its homeowrk.
The flip side of this is that without a public voice, how do you grow your business? Jobs and economics are tangentially tied to our constant stream of messages. What separates the wheat from the chaff is a company’s willingness to be entirely authentic, losing the corporate bromides.
There are products and services that deserve attention. How does one get that message out? Advertising is ubiquitous, and it’s given too many a sense of entitlement beyond the reach of our budgets. That said, the foolishness is less on the advertising and more on the hapless buyer. I resist superfluous purchases, despite the thousands of promotional messages saturating our consciousness. It’s my grown-up responsibility to do so.
Unfortunate fact, that most Americans will have seen around 2 million commercials by age 65. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the forms of advertisements in all forms of popular media (radio, TV, internet, print) combined actually exceeds that number. Unfortunate, but anyone working in the retail or marketing industry knows that more than ever, there is simply no business without advertising.
Riley writes: “One of the primary purposes of that advertising is to convince people that owning and operating an automobile is something other than tedious manual labor. This in turn is why automobile advertising has such a profound aversion to portraying real-world use of cars.”
Indeed, it is virtually impossible to watch more than ten minutes of television in America, on any channel, at any time of day, without seeing a car ad. Perhaps this is why new cars drop 10% in value the minute they are driven off the lot: all that advertising perhaps represents 10% of what the buyer pays for when buying a new car.
Indeed, too, most car ads are selling something other than transportation. They are usually selling a Walter Mitty fantasy: buy this car and you will be a racecar driver, a jungle adventurer, a magnet for people of the opposite sex, etc. I chuckle every time I see a Porsche or giant 4wd SUV idling in rush-hour traffic, as if the road will suddenly become a racetrack or mountain trail. People who buy cars that go 180 mph in a country with a 75-mph speed limit are a testament to the power of advertising. Indeed, when Nissan first introduced its Infiniti brand of luxury cars, their ads didn’t even show the car; the ads were entirely about image.
Another great example of the power of advertising is the De Beers diamond ring industry. Diamonds are a relatively common gemstone, but advertising has created a widespread and utterly false image about them as a rare and special stone. Did you ever notice how every single ad you have ever seen about diamond rings depicts that “surprise” moment when a man presents a ring to his girlfriend or wife? That’s because that is the cornerstone of the De Beers marketing plan. No doubt, every ad you will ever see about diamond rings will continue to have this same theme, because that is what De Beers believes will perpetuate their industry. Obviously, no woman needs a rock on her finger, but, every year, millions of men shell out billions of dollars to make it happen, and De Beers laughs all the way to the bank.
For yet another example of the power of advertising, take a walk sometime at your local college campus. When you see students who are all sprouting the same electronic gadgets, and wearing remarkably similar styles of clothing, you can thank Madison Avenue for the homogenizing effect it has on American culture.
Further to Matt’s comment, the following is a quote from one of Edward Bernays’ books:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. … We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. … In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
Readers interested in what Goebbels knew about propaganda should read his Principles of Propaganda; see http://www.psywarrior.com/Goebbels.html. Even a casual reading of these principles will bring to mind many tactics used by the Bush Administration and congressional Republicans during the past six years; for example, “Propaganda must label events and people with distinctive phrases or slogans” “Propaganda to the home front must create an optimum anxiety level,” “Propaganda must reinforce anxiety concerning the consequences of defeat,” and “Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.” Sound familiar?
Grade: D–
“all that advertising perhaps represents 10% of what the buyer pays for when buying a new car.”
That’s a strange and illogical leap. If auto dealers didn’t advertise the free market would start pricing a used car with low low low miles on it the same as a new car?
““One of the primary purposes of that advertising is to convince people that owning and operating an automobile is something other than tedious manual labor.”
What type of new car involves tedious manual labor.
The hand crank starter went out of fashion awhile back.
“Most of us buy lots of stuff we don’t need.”
The only thing we NEED is food, water and shelter. Capitalism allows the man on the street to make their own decision about the relative importance of ‘need’ for everything else. Starving people do not blow their last $$$ Nikes.
“We talk about our new purchases incessantly and mindlessly. ”
Family/group/friend activities, sport events, movies, tv shows, politic fiascos, etc are more likely to be discussed around the water cooler at work or between friends. Purchases are very rarely topics of discussion for US adults.
“Many of us are drowning in stuff we don’t need. ”
Unsupportable opinion.
There have been no reported deaths of drowning in extra stuff. Perhaps it’s a media black out?
““The stuff we lost can be replaced.” I.e., it wasn’t necessary to have any of the destroyed stuff.”
Unsupportable jump between two unrelated ideas: ‘replaceability’ and ‘necessity’. Food, water and shelter can be replaced, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t necessary.
“Can you imagine a radio show hosting a guest who implored listeners that they should quit buying the things advertised on the station and to, instead, donate their money to people who really needed it?”
Yes, it’s called college radio, and national public radio (NPR). There’s just not much of a story here so there’s nothing for them to run with.
And why associate money with guilt? Why give it away? Lots of people would rather have the respect of a job than your charity.
Billboards: I’ve driven in most of the 50 states. There is no billboard blight problem.
There is a billboard traffic issue in some areas (animated/high billboards slowing traffic, increasing pollution, etc).
“I also wonder what it would be like to have a poor third-world family follow each of us around… I imagine trying to explain to these poor people why we need to buy so many things.”
Poor third world people come to the US. Their heads don’t explode. They can create better lives for themselves and family (here and back at home) but selling goods + services to these foolish Americans.
I said: “all that advertising perhaps represents 10% of what the buyer pays for when buying a new car.”
Jason replied: “That’s a strange and illogical leap. If auto dealers didn’t advertise the free market would start pricing a used car with low low low miles on it the same as a new car?”
I answer: The money that car makers spend on advertising is paid for from the revenue they receive from new car sales; therefore, some percentage of the price of a new car is, in fact, providing the money for that advertising. That money adds nothing to the value of the car; therefore, it must be a source of depreciation for that car.
Also, consider this: car brands that spend little money on advertising — Porsche, Mercedes, Ferrari, Corvette, etc. — don’t depreciate anywhere near as quickly as the car brands that spend a lot of money on advertising, further suggesting that advertising is a source of depreciation. If advertising were not a source of depreciation, we would expect depreciation rates to be independent of advertising expense, and that isn’t what happens.
Those most influenced by advertising are the ones least sure of themselves, because they are not used to thinking critically about anything. This is because they have been conditioned from birth (usually by their parents) to passively conform to the norm. If parents really love and respect their children, they will be give them sufficient immunity against the parasitic effects of any type of predatory propaganda - whether it be commercial advertising or religion - which (snake oil) will always be around! And , by the way, children are natural conformists, but if they are expoxed to a variety of other things in their formative years to amuse themselves with - such as cooking, painting, drawing, reading etc etc - and not just TV, then they will have a wide variety of alternatives to choose from, to amuse AND educate themselves with, which is what makes for healthy active adults!
Insecurity is a normal human response to an environment with arbitrary and generally unpredictable changes (see any textbook on behavioral development of any species). As we’ve become comfortable with amazingly predictable mealtimes, shelter, weather and so forth, artificial instabilities had to be created to keep the populace off-balance, insecure, malleable.
Enter fashion! Just create communication channels dedicated to explaining how the perfectly serviceable house, clothing and appliances you are familiar with are really inadequate, obsolete, or uncool. Then briefly flash up what “everyone else” has. Encourage covetousness, and offer as an alternative to theft, mimicry. Promise that each new style will be the ultimate one, until the populace accept perpetual change as the norm, and has to consume to maintain this “normal” state.
Enter religion: If you don’t want bad changes like {list of threats to morals or afterlife}, then embrace a never-changing philosophy. (For practical purposes, never-changing is a perception of change that is slow across a couple of generations, as is the rate of change of interpretations of the never-changing texts of holy writ.)
One solution certainly would be to not watch TV. There are TV programs that I love — a few, that is — and I usually wait and catch them on DVD. If I didn’t have the money to buy them, Netflix is pretty cheap.
I prefer movies and books, anyway.
If you’re a TV watcher, try going without it for a while. Trust me, you’re not missing anything.
I totally agree with the writer of this post about American materialism. Americans want more, more, more. They value THINGS over TIME.
It is better to work little or not at all, and not buy much, than to work a lot to buy things you don’t really need. That’s one of the main philosophies I have lived my life by for the last 12 years or so.
We’ve even turned adverts into news. Just last night, watching one of the standard broadcast news reports, I got to hear how KFC has a new logo. The newsreader spent at least 2 minutes showing me the new logo, one of which was about 100′ square painted on earth, and exactly how the colonel has changed his manner of dress. And this morning, I got to see how McDonald’s (or McDoo-doo’s as my young son called it) has opened new cafes with special pastries and lattes on another channel’s news reports. I can’t even watch the news without getting ads.
I wonder if people know that these ‘news spots’ are actually created by the marketing departments of the various companies and then submitted to the television stations where they simply plug and play. Lots cheaper to use canned reports than actually do any reporting. It’s exacerabated by the real lack of competition amongst our ‘news.’ There have been previous posts on this blog about how few corporations are actually involved in all our media, whether radio, newpaper, or tv. Those posts are worth reviewing.
To Deb’s point, indeed, even the government has been making propaganda…er, I mean “news” pieces…that some news stations have aired without disclosing that they are products of the government. One notorious one I recall was a piece by the Bush Administration that praised Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program, even though the program has been widely criticized by educators.
As regards KFC, I haven’t seen their new logo yet, but I do know that the reason they changed their name from “Kentucky Fried Chicken” to “KFC” was to get the word “Fried” out of their name, along with its artery-clogging connotations.
“Starving people do not blow their last $$$ Nikes.”
Sorry, Jason, you’re wrong here.
I grew up in rural Pennsylvania. Most of the workers in the area were industrial laborers. Anyone who was skilled or smart enough to do anything else left the area to pursue education and career (assuming they had the funding). The majority of families, including many of my friends were lower middle class. All too often I saw run down trailors filled with children in filthy clothing wearing shoes held together with duct tape. The gas hadn’t been turned on for God knows how long, and the plumbing and wiring was rigged in such a way, it would violate dozens of building safety codes. However, in this same home you could find a wide screen Sony HD TV, complete with Direct TV and massaging Lay-Z-Boy, a brand new Harley Fatboy in the driveway, a stereo system that Aerosmith could use for playing an arena, and a near limitless supply of Pepsi, Doritos, Budwiser, and Marlboros all bought with (or traded for) food stamps.
I am thankful every day that my mother had sense when it came to money. She was a single mom raising two teenagers, and making no more money than the example above (and yes, that was an actual discription of my friend’s home). Even though I like to buy something shiney every now and then, it is difficult for me to spend more than $10 without asking myself: How much do I want this? How long will it last? Is there anything I need more? Are all of the bills taken care of?
Many impoverished families are where they are because of bad decision making. Now, don’t get me wrong, I did mention that my family was below the poverty line and I understand that it’s hard to get out of that position. But needless purchases will not get you out of debt or put your children through college. Whether or not it is caused by the pollution of advertisement in our minds, I’ll leave it up to you, but we must admit that there is something wrong with the american people when we buy TV’s and SUV’s over food and shelter, and lead uncomfortably comfortable lives.
“Consider, also, the narcotic effect of TV, which is mostly related to the way in which the content is presented, not the content itself.”
And proof of this would be my eighty-six year old great grandmother, who spends 99.9% of her time watching infomercials and being goaded into ordering products she does not need. She’s got enough Perfect Pancakes and Magic Bullets and Conair products to open up her own “As Seen on TV” store. I suppose it’s because she’s got nothing better to do with her time, but really, it’s not just her. When my brother was three years old, he mistakenly thought that Subway restaurants were called “Eat Fresh” because he’d seen their commercial so many times. Honestly, advertising companies: must we poison the minds of our elders and children with all of those unnecessary products and commercials?
I really enjoyed this. It made me think. It made me want to change my life. It made me want to change alot of things. Hopefully you find happiness that your work has helped motivate someone.
Thank you for organizing and researching something I’ve felt to be true for a while now. Advertising, the commercial media, and “stuff” all act to subdue the people and keep their minds locked into petty fantasy. Thank the deity of your choice for teachers who promote critical thinking, parents who care enough to turn the TV off once in a while (or throw it out altogether) and organisations that work to bring the real issues to attention through the fog of Desperate Housewives and CSI.
I should have added this link about less-than-honest milk advertisements to this post. I’ll add it here: http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=427