(Political Ideas Less than 100% Baked)

There was a really lively discussion on slashdot this weekend about how television might work without traditional advertising as a primary revenue source. I missed out, but there were a couple of ideas that got my mind cooking.

My work with The Quick Fix has more or less convinced me that advertising is a cancer on the mind. Advertising basically functions by creating feelings of inadequacy, doubt or longing in the viewer, and then offering a product as the gateway to resolving these feelings. The terrible thing is, the feelings are often successsfully created over time, but the action of purchasing very rarely resolves them.

Automobile ads almost all feature the themes of freedom and power ("Lexus: stronger than the gods!") and yet what do you do with most of your time in a car? Sit in traffic. The desire to be free is replaced by the realities of monthly payments and crowded streets: no wonder so many people have road rage. Even more sickening are the ads aimed at adolescents' sense of self esteem and parents' sense of devotion to their children. Advertising picks on people's weak spots without mercy.

Most people will tell you they pay little attention to advertising. This is precisely what allows it to function so well. Try watching television for an hour and giving each advert your full and undivided attention. It will likely be a highly irritating exercise. However, if you merely allow the images and ideas to filter in half-noticed, they will over time affect the way you feel and think. To believe otherwise -- to believe that you are immune to the power of repeated imagery and above the basic human desires to be accepted, to reproduce, to care for your offspring -- is an extreme conceit. Advertising does not function to convey information about products. It is not logical. Most advertising exists to manipulate people emotionally by playing on basic desires, influencing their decition making process on a pre-cognative or sub-conscious level. That's why I think the impulse behind it is evil.

The sum total effect of living in an environment saturated by that kind of media is plain to see: rampant cynicism among the intelligent, and blind consumerism among the less congnizant. Almost every negative trend we see in society today is assisted and increased by advertising, from the breakdown of community to the objectification of women to the decay of public education.