University of Maryland study finds television causes unhappiness.
There is a posting in Tuesday's Canada.com entertainment section concerning a recent University of Maryland study on television. Commenting on how the study asserts that television makes viewers unhappy, Alex Strachan writes:
"The study's conclusion is that TV has addictive qualities, and that viewers addicted to TV share behavioral traits with those who are prone to substance abuse, "since addictive activities produce momentary please but long-term misery and regret. People most vulnerable to addiction tend to be socially or personally disadvantaged, with TV becoming an opiate."
The point Strachan misses is that the purpose of television is to make us unhappy and then to provide solutions to our discomforts through advertising. As former FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson pointed out nearly 40 years ago, the viewer is not the consumer of television, he is the product, offered to advertisers at a cost per thousand. (see his book, How To Talk Back to Your Television Set).
Without the bad news of "News", the end-of-the-world melodramas of "Dramas" or the embarrassment provoking unlikelihoods of "Comedies," advertisers would not have the properly conditioned audience to pitch their products to.
That is why Marshall McLuhan, also almost 40 years ago, called advertising television's "good news" or "gospel."
So Strachan's concern over which came first, the unhappy viewer or the television is misplaced. Sure unhappy people may naturally gravitate toward television, but why they do so has less to do with chickens and eggs and more to do with the underlying purpose of television broadcasters.
And as for the University of Maryland's study, as I haven't read it yet, I won't comment except to note Charles Schultz's take on the impact of television on children:
Charlie Brown: Do you think television is harmful to children?
Linus: I don't know. I've never had one fall on me.
Showing posts with label advertising. Show all posts
Showing posts with label advertising. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Friday, May 9, 2008
Meta Four Play Part 4 - McLuhan's Tetrad and Lévi-Strauss' Canonical Formula: Down the Rabbit Hole
My previous posts on this topic, which can be found here, here and here attempted to link the process of mythic analysis proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his Canonical Formula with Marshall McLuhan’s approach to the study of technology which he termed his “Laws of the Media.” McLuhan demonstrated his laws using his Tetradic division of that impact into enhancement, obsolescence, retrieval and reversal. This linkage is possible because visual media operate on a mythic basis. The difference between the myths of our era of secondary orality and those of primary orality is that there is now a stronger dependence on visual imagery to tell the story. McLuhan noted that
Every television commercial is a lesson in the ways of thought under secondary orality and, as advertising icons spread out to other venues, they act as constant reminders of the secondary orality way to process experience.
Theatrical television is based on literary conventions. Film school students can tell you how every movie is divided into three acts--just like a stage play. One hour theatrical tv programs extend the dramatic arc to four acts, each about 11 minutes long. The drama progresses via thought processes that are linear, based on literacy-based cause and effect logic. TV Ads teach us to think like pre-literate peoples, using the type of non-linear thought processes that Claude Lévi-Strauss divided into "empirical" and "transcendental" deduction.
Empirical deduction begins with some observation of reality. It then treats that observation as if it were an abstract concept. This type of mental process can occur using two different types of association. First, through the use of a metonymic association, some observed characteristic or habit of an animal is treated as if it stood for the entire animal. If this characteristic is found elsewhere in the environment, it too is associated with that animal. The metonymic association then becomes a metaphoric assertion. Lévi-Strauss’s term for such uses of metaphor is “imaginary association.”
The metonymic association (fangs of a snake) is used to make a metaphoric assertion (fang-shaped seeds cure snake bite). In classic television advertising we see this type of reasoning regularly. The air bubbles in Baggies sandwich bags make the bag look like an alligator’s skin, so an alligator is used as the product mascot. The Volkswagon “bug,” the Turtlewax turtle, and the old Exxon tiger are further examples of this type of association.
In current advertising, the associations are more subtle. For example, many ads feature automobiles that will never in real life leave a paved road "roughing" it through forests or deserts, avoiding natural obstacles and endowing the driver with the "freedom of the wilderness." The irony of these images is that the car or SUV, which often is given an animal name, is actually the embodiment of culture that provides the driver with protection against the storm. This is why Marshall McLuhan could refer to the automobile and driver as a knight in shining armor:
That's why, in our secondary orality culture, ads want to insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives: Not just as an accepted part of television and radio and magazines but also in movies and broadway theaters, in our schools and workplaces. Can our places of worship be far behind?
The type of thought manifest in television advertising represents the symbolic realization of the lesson of the medium itself. A medium of images and sounds, TV's biases toward the non-discursive are represented and reinforced in the narratives of advertising.
(1)McLuhan, M. (2005). "Notes on the Media as Art Forms" in Marshall McLuhan - Unbound, E. McLuhan and W. Terrence Gordon, eds. (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press), pp 8-9.
(2) Levi-Strauss, C. (1971). “The Deduction of the Crane,” in Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition, Maranda, P. and Maranda E.K., Eds. (p. 3). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
(3) Ibid. (p. 3)
(4) McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (p. 17). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
(5) Levi-Strauss, C. Op. Cit, (p. 3)
“…when the entire economy is on an artistic or magical basis, sparked by the magical appeals and promises of the ads (visual ads are in themselves magical in their habit of transforming ordinary objects and situations) is it not repugnant to the total pattern and promise of the new life to accept ‘natural’ effects even at the level of physical taste? The power of the machine to transform the character of work and living strongly invites us to transform every level of existence by art.Our current system of myths is not only presented verbally, but also via images, in print, and even in interplay of biases amongst all of our competing media. Since we may be relearning this manner of thinking as we move deeper into secondary orality, McLuhan and Lévi-Strauss each provide us with maps of where we may be headed. What hasn’t been apparent before is how their particular approaches are complementary and when used together, provide a stronger methodology to interpreting and understanding media effects.
Gilbert Seldes mentions how in the early days of TV crowds would stand by the hour watching a TV screen in a shop window when the only picture on the screen was of the traffic in the street in which they stood. Such is likewise the magical power of the press. Reportage takes up the ordinary events, the weather and the municipal events in which we all participate, and changes them simply by virtue of the medium of print and photography. Any communication link or channel necessarily possesses this myth dimension. Much more are the ineluctable modalities of sight and sound charge with powers of metamorphosis which have been magnified by technology into the size and posture of mighty djinns.”(1)
Every television commercial is a lesson in the ways of thought under secondary orality and, as advertising icons spread out to other venues, they act as constant reminders of the secondary orality way to process experience.
Theatrical television is based on literary conventions. Film school students can tell you how every movie is divided into three acts--just like a stage play. One hour theatrical tv programs extend the dramatic arc to four acts, each about 11 minutes long. The drama progresses via thought processes that are linear, based on literacy-based cause and effect logic. TV Ads teach us to think like pre-literate peoples, using the type of non-linear thought processes that Claude Lévi-Strauss divided into "empirical" and "transcendental" deduction.
"Empirical deduction occurs whenever a myth attributes a function value or symbolic meaning to a natural being because of an empirical judgment durably associating the being with the attribution. From a formal point of view the correctness of the empirical judgment is irrelevant." (2)
Empirical deduction begins with some observation of reality. It then treats that observation as if it were an abstract concept. This type of mental process can occur using two different types of association. First, through the use of a metonymic association, some observed characteristic or habit of an animal is treated as if it stood for the entire animal. If this characteristic is found elsewhere in the environment, it too is associated with that animal. The metonymic association then becomes a metaphoric assertion. Lévi-Strauss’s term for such uses of metaphor is “imaginary association.”
"An imaginary association…results in the attribution of curative powers against snake bite and tooth decay to seeds shaped like fangs." (3)
The metonymic association (fangs of a snake) is used to make a metaphoric assertion (fang-shaped seeds cure snake bite). In classic television advertising we see this type of reasoning regularly. The air bubbles in Baggies sandwich bags make the bag look like an alligator’s skin, so an alligator is used as the product mascot. The Volkswagon “bug,” the Turtlewax turtle, and the old Exxon tiger are further examples of this type of association.
In current advertising, the associations are more subtle. For example, many ads feature automobiles that will never in real life leave a paved road "roughing" it through forests or deserts, avoiding natural obstacles and endowing the driver with the "freedom of the wilderness." The irony of these images is that the car or SUV, which often is given an animal name, is actually the embodiment of culture that provides the driver with protection against the storm. This is why Marshall McLuhan could refer to the automobile and driver as a knight in shining armor:
"The car gave to the democratic cavalier his horse and armor and haughty insolence in one package, transmogrifying the knight into a misguided missile." (4)"Transcendental" deduction operates at another step removed from reality. The characteristic attributed to an animal or an object is removed from any grounding in empirical observation, and is determined by its relative position in the culture's symbolic structure as a whole. Lévi-Strauss states that:
"It does not necessarily rest on a true or false, a direct or indirect empirical base; rather, it stems from the awareness of a certain logical necessity, that of attributing certain properties to a given being because empirical deduction has previously connected this being with others on the basis of a set of correlative properties." (5)Lévi-Strauss has borrowed the notion of redundancy from communication theory to explain the rationale behind this procedure. Imagine that you are the story teller of a culture that relies on oral communication for the transmission of its body of knowledge. Let us assume for the sake of argument that you are fully aware of the hidden structural associations that your stories are portraying. How would you insure that the information contained in those tales would survive the erosion of time and the individual idiosyncrasies of future story tellers? One way would be to take the basic message or messages and repeat them over and over again using different formats and imagery. Though the stories would seem to be about different heroes, animals, events, and so on, the underlying structure would be more or less the same throughout. Furthermore, future story tellers would internalize these structures so that they would tend to reject any alterations which went against the general pattern.
That's why, in our secondary orality culture, ads want to insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives: Not just as an accepted part of television and radio and magazines but also in movies and broadway theaters, in our schools and workplaces. Can our places of worship be far behind?
The type of thought manifest in television advertising represents the symbolic realization of the lesson of the medium itself. A medium of images and sounds, TV's biases toward the non-discursive are represented and reinforced in the narratives of advertising.
(1)McLuhan, M. (2005). "Notes on the Media as Art Forms" in Marshall McLuhan - Unbound, E. McLuhan and W. Terrence Gordon, eds. (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press), pp 8-9.
(2) Levi-Strauss, C. (1971). “The Deduction of the Crane,” in Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition, Maranda, P. and Maranda E.K., Eds. (p. 3). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
(3) Ibid. (p. 3)
(4) McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (p. 17). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
(5) Levi-Strauss, C. Op. Cit, (p. 3)
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Education in the Age of Secondary Orality
The first humans lived under conditions of primary orality. Individual memory was the only way to transmit cultural heritage from one generation to the next. Learning was based on oral modes with parables, puns, poesy and music central tools of the "educational" system. For example, in oral cultures a person’s word was his bond. Without written records to provide proof, people had to depend on the spoken word to bind agreements.
During the manuscript and print eras, written documents replaced memory as the primary means of transmitting information over time and space. Copying texts became a means of acquiring knowledge, with remnants of memorization persisting. We learned our ABC's by song and memorized math tables and poetry while at the same time our teachers required written examinations of memorized material.
In the early years of electronic media, only a few had access to external memory devices to record and preserve our culture. An electronic broadcast would be sent to many, but then disappear into the "aether." Educators used video for distance learning and to perpetuate the lecture model of education of the manuscript age. Students experienced increasing alienation in the classroom as the culture's true pedagogy was conducted via mass media-based advertising organizations.
With video cell phones, cheap editing technology, internet access and so on, what once was available to few is now available to many. What was private has now become public. The World Wide Web has added a readily accessible "Memory Well" to enable total cultural recall and dissemination. Items dropped down the Memory Well no longer vanish forever. We now can retrieve video, audio, text and photos at will – without resorting to memorization or physical texts.
This ability easily to retrieve many if not all of our artifacts will bring about a shift in our culture's notion of what is important to know and how to educate our young. It has already generated a crisis in the copyright arena as students unwittingly cut and paste together their assignments from material available online.
Our political leaders and media personalities must now cope with the new power the Memory Well has given to data retrieval. This has profound implications for politics, education, social policy and the mass media themselves, including broadcast news organizations and the traditional press.
Our educators must anticipate the characteristics of this cultural shift and design an education system that prepares our students to live in the era of "secondary" orality. We must learn how to mentor the Millennial Generation.
During the manuscript and print eras, written documents replaced memory as the primary means of transmitting information over time and space. Copying texts became a means of acquiring knowledge, with remnants of memorization persisting. We learned our ABC's by song and memorized math tables and poetry while at the same time our teachers required written examinations of memorized material.
In the early years of electronic media, only a few had access to external memory devices to record and preserve our culture. An electronic broadcast would be sent to many, but then disappear into the "aether." Educators used video for distance learning and to perpetuate the lecture model of education of the manuscript age. Students experienced increasing alienation in the classroom as the culture's true pedagogy was conducted via mass media-based advertising organizations.
With video cell phones, cheap editing technology, internet access and so on, what once was available to few is now available to many. What was private has now become public. The World Wide Web has added a readily accessible "Memory Well" to enable total cultural recall and dissemination. Items dropped down the Memory Well no longer vanish forever. We now can retrieve video, audio, text and photos at will – without resorting to memorization or physical texts.
This ability easily to retrieve many if not all of our artifacts will bring about a shift in our culture's notion of what is important to know and how to educate our young. It has already generated a crisis in the copyright arena as students unwittingly cut and paste together their assignments from material available online.
Our political leaders and media personalities must now cope with the new power the Memory Well has given to data retrieval. This has profound implications for politics, education, social policy and the mass media themselves, including broadcast news organizations and the traditional press.
Our educators must anticipate the characteristics of this cultural shift and design an education system that prepares our students to live in the era of "secondary" orality. We must learn how to mentor the Millennial Generation.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Something Wiki This Way Comes.
The persisting paradigm of most current classroom education is a remnant of the medieval academies where the curriculum consisted of a monk at a lectern reading from a sacred text while everyone in the class copied word for word at their desks. Education then consisted of making a copy of all "great" books for your own library. The model has survived into the industrial age because, if you add a series of bells and a rotation schedule, you prepare students to "graduate" from the classroom to the factory.
In the Information Age the Monkish/Assembly line mode of teaching is revealed as an arbitrary and perhaps counterproductive way to impart knowledge. As the mass media usurped the educational prerogative from the old school system, a student’s true learning occurred outside the classroom. This transformation was predicted over 50 years ago by Marshall McLuhan who noted that advertising was providing the epistemological foundations of our culture, moving pedagogical control from the classroom the boardroom. As computer-based new media supplant the mass media, the paradigm is shifting once again.
The techniques of print, billboard and mass media advertising are not adequate to create the new curriculum of the internet community, although many are trying to fit this square peg in that round hole. Searching for new "business models" to rationalize the internet, corporate advertisers think they can bend the aesthetics of the internet to the requirements of consumerism. The problem here is that advertising itself is a deadend epistomology where the transcendental characteristics of consumer products have determined the logic of our cultural narrative. As "one to many" product factories give way to "many to many" production communities, the product becomes subservient to the process, and narrative control shifts from the producer to the consumer.
As represented in his videos, Dr. Wesch is clearly a product of the advertising paradigm. Creating the content for the New Media out of the aesthetics of the old media, Dr. Wesch's videos owe more to print, billboard and mass advertising than to the wiki inspired internet. In twenty years his student subjects will create their own critiques that draw from the paradigms of instant messaging, wikis and media multi-tasking. We mass media suckled, advertising educated old-timers may very possibly find these millenial narratives incomprehensible.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Makeup Your Mind: Reflections On Cosmetics And Sport Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue
A level playing field may apply in sports, but not in gender relations.
Sports Illustrated's annual paean to impossible feminine perfection celebrates an arbitrary nature/culture distinction between men and women that reflects a deep-seated cultural misogyny and perpetuates an uneven playing field in the battle of the sexes. Until our society matures to the point where women don't have to wear makeup to be considered equal to men, they will continued to be objectified and treated as less than human.
Commenting on the February swimsuit issue, the Huffington Post’s Verena Von Pfetten notes that "The SI Swimsuit Edition is like the Holy Grail of men's magazines: little to no articles, and pages upon pages of absurdly beautiful women in little to no clothing.”
While acknowledging that super model Marisa Miller looks older with all the makeup they pile on for her photo shoots, Von Pfetten doesn’t suggest that women abstain from makeup entirely: “And I know that we all have our limits. I, for one, cannot leave the house without mascara or blush. I've got flimsy mousy-colored lashes, and while tans may be tacky, my paleness always needs that little added flush. But all I'm asking is that we just lighten up. Pick your products, and use them wisely.”
That women still want to wear makeup reflects a failure of the feminist movement in particular and the immaturity of our culture in general. Makeup is a mask that allows women to tap into corporate power. I don't mean corporate as in business, but rather corporate as in the power of the group vs. the individual. Men achieve this power by actually belonging to corporations, whether they are lodge brothers or corporate raiders. Women counter by painting their faces. Hiding physical imperfections or accentuating certain features makes sense only if the result is more power for the individual, whether sexual, social or corporate.
But why makeup? The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once asked a native informant why his people tattooed their bodies. "Because we are not animals," was the reply. That women still use makeup is a reflection of their continuing status as not-quite-human, or to put it in a more Lévi-Straussian mode, women without makeup are still seen as "natural" while men without makeup are seen as "cultural." By acceding to cosmetic industry standards of beauty, women who wear makeup promote a status quo that says that women are not equal to men. Men can be "cultural" just by showing up. Women, to participate in the culture, must put on a corporate mask.
And while a woman who uses makeup is considered "cultural," a man who uses makeup is considered absurd. Mass media meditations on masculine makeup like “Some Like It Hot,” “Tootsie” and “Mrs. Doubtfire” are always comedies.
Madison Avenue-driven cosmetic companies have made some inroads into the use of body fragrance by men, but they have not yet found the right inducement for men to paint their faces, highlight their eyes and gloss their lips. My suggestion is that advertisers market tattoos as acceptable body paint for men. Invent a tattoo "makeup" that needs regular renewal but involves some pain to apply, and your fortune is made.
In sports, the play of the game depends on who makes up the rules. In gender relations, the play of game depends on who rules the makeup.
Sports Illustrated's annual paean to impossible feminine perfection celebrates an arbitrary nature/culture distinction between men and women that reflects a deep-seated cultural misogyny and perpetuates an uneven playing field in the battle of the sexes. Until our society matures to the point where women don't have to wear makeup to be considered equal to men, they will continued to be objectified and treated as less than human.
Commenting on the February swimsuit issue, the Huffington Post’s Verena Von Pfetten notes that "The SI Swimsuit Edition is like the Holy Grail of men's magazines: little to no articles, and pages upon pages of absurdly beautiful women in little to no clothing.”
While acknowledging that super model Marisa Miller looks older with all the makeup they pile on for her photo shoots, Von Pfetten doesn’t suggest that women abstain from makeup entirely: “And I know that we all have our limits. I, for one, cannot leave the house without mascara or blush. I've got flimsy mousy-colored lashes, and while tans may be tacky, my paleness always needs that little added flush. But all I'm asking is that we just lighten up. Pick your products, and use them wisely.”
That women still want to wear makeup reflects a failure of the feminist movement in particular and the immaturity of our culture in general. Makeup is a mask that allows women to tap into corporate power. I don't mean corporate as in business, but rather corporate as in the power of the group vs. the individual. Men achieve this power by actually belonging to corporations, whether they are lodge brothers or corporate raiders. Women counter by painting their faces. Hiding physical imperfections or accentuating certain features makes sense only if the result is more power for the individual, whether sexual, social or corporate.
But why makeup? The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once asked a native informant why his people tattooed their bodies. "Because we are not animals," was the reply. That women still use makeup is a reflection of their continuing status as not-quite-human, or to put it in a more Lévi-Straussian mode, women without makeup are still seen as "natural" while men without makeup are seen as "cultural." By acceding to cosmetic industry standards of beauty, women who wear makeup promote a status quo that says that women are not equal to men. Men can be "cultural" just by showing up. Women, to participate in the culture, must put on a corporate mask.
And while a woman who uses makeup is considered "cultural," a man who uses makeup is considered absurd. Mass media meditations on masculine makeup like “Some Like It Hot,” “Tootsie” and “Mrs. Doubtfire” are always comedies.
Madison Avenue-driven cosmetic companies have made some inroads into the use of body fragrance by men, but they have not yet found the right inducement for men to paint their faces, highlight their eyes and gloss their lips. My suggestion is that advertisers market tattoos as acceptable body paint for men. Invent a tattoo "makeup" that needs regular renewal but involves some pain to apply, and your fortune is made.
In sports, the play of the game depends on who makes up the rules. In gender relations, the play of game depends on who rules the makeup.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Performance Enhancing Drugs
In case you've been sleeping for the last 42 years, this Sunday the sports/media event known as the Super Bowl takes place. This penultimate football event, which might well be called "normal football on steroids," reminds us of all the media attention paid to the use of performance enhancing drugs in professional sports. Recent news reports of performance enhancing drug use have included sports ranging from track and field to cycling to major league baseball. These reports have focused on the transgressions of individual athletes rather than the significance of sports programming in our television culture and its influence on our attitudes concerning drug use.
From a Media Ecology perspective, it is possible to examine television content as a function of the television medium itself. As a "one to many" medium, American television acts to dictate and reinforce acceptable social norms and behavior. The content of television seems to have fallen by accident into three distinct categories : entertainment, news and advertising. In fact, these broad categories of programming each stake out a different level of social behavior to manage and control.
Advertising: TV ads deal with social versus antisocial behavior on a personal level. Television advertisements are full endorsements of performance enhancing drugs, from Pepto Bismol to Claritin to Viagra. Participation in social events and personal relationships is made possible for the individual by the use of the proper product. Sometimes the performance enhancing claim is subtle, as in ads for "smart" cereals, cold medications or vitamin supplements. Sometimes it is overt, as in ads for male and female fragrances, erectile dysfunction medications or body building shampoos.
Entertainment: Television entertainment shows are chiefly concerned with social versus anti-social behavior on an interpersonal level. The archetypal television program sets up one or more characters who exist at the borderline of social acceptance, whether they are juveniles learning the ropes, clown characters who are unaware or otherwise ignore social norms, or villains who attempt to subvert the existing social equilibrium and replace it with one of their own.
In all instances the depiction of rule breaking and resolution acts to reinforce those rules. In terms of drug usage as a breaking of social rules, Showtime's Weeds stands out in particular, though it tends to deal with the supposed social dynamics of the drug trade rather than the psychodynamics of the drug itself. Otherwise, most TV entertainment discussions of drug use and its consequences are relegated to occasional afternoon specials and to all episodes of House.
News: Television infotainment shows (otherwise known as "News Broadcasts") address this social/anti-social opposition at the public level. Public order is disturbed by rogue political activists, events of nature or common criminals. Though the particular infraction may not have been resolved by the time of the newscast, the very act of reporting frames the event in terms of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. In each case there are implicit or explicit rules which have been broken and then are reaffirmed. These programs are also full of reports about the drug or alcohol induced exploits of our celebrities, individuals whose very notariety hinges on reporting of their latest binges.
Sports: Where do sports broadcasts fit into to the structure of television content? Sports, as the WWF demonstrates each week, are mainly entertainment broadcasts. Sports participants are tightly bound by the rules of the particular sport. While any given standard entertainment program is about the breaking of rules, sports events are about abiding by rules. Each sport has a cadre of referees, line judges or umpires whose sole purpose is to make sure that the rules of the game are strictly adhered to.
In that sense, all sports are totally "made up." That is, the parties involved, no matter how adversarial they may seem, all agree to the set of rules of play. Rules determine what is allowed and what isn't, and ultimately who wins and who loses. What is acceptable or unacceptable behavior varies from sport to sport, but some set of rules always applies. At the same time, the outcome of the sporting event is not determined. The playing of a sport may be entertainment, but the result of that play is news.
This is the problem with sports programming. It is both news and entertainment. It crosses established boundaries of television content. It is a "made up" activity, but not in the same way that a comedy or drama is "made up."
So we have a basic opposition within the content structure presented by American television. On the one hand we have advertisements, where the performance enhancing drugs or products must be used, and on the opposite end we have sports where the performance enhancing drug must not be used. In between we have differing interations of this primary opposition, with entertainment and news content reflecting multiple variations of this use/don't use opposition.
The point is that we aren't concerned with the effect of drug use, or the unfair advantages performance enhancing drugs might give to advertising, entertainment or news personalities. We are concerned with the advantages performance enhancing drugs might give to professional atheletes. In their case, the use of any drug is itself a violation of the rules which state that, though any given athelete might already represent an outlier of norms concerning physical strength and ability, they shouldn't do anything "artificial" to enhance their already considerable talents.
It is not an accident that the way television content is differentiated conforms to Levi-Strauss's Canonical Formula regarding mythology:
fx(a):fy(b)::fx(b):f(a-1)(x)
In this case, the ultimate transformation promoted by corporate television (use our advertisers' products) begins with sports fx(a), the function of which is to avoid performance enhancing drugs, ie, to remain in a "natural" state. Proceeding through analogous functional areas where drug use is largely ignored fy(b) (entertainment) or is a tolerated aberration fx(b)(News), we arrive at the final iteration where the desired state is acceptance of performance enhancing drugs or products as the necessary state of being f(a-1)(x) (advertising).
The uproar created by sport-related drug use is a function of the relative position of sports in the structure of television programming, not the drug use itself.
From a Media Ecology perspective, it is possible to examine television content as a function of the television medium itself. As a "one to many" medium, American television acts to dictate and reinforce acceptable social norms and behavior. The content of television seems to have fallen by accident into three distinct categories : entertainment, news and advertising. In fact, these broad categories of programming each stake out a different level of social behavior to manage and control.
Advertising: TV ads deal with social versus antisocial behavior on a personal level. Television advertisements are full endorsements of performance enhancing drugs, from Pepto Bismol to Claritin to Viagra. Participation in social events and personal relationships is made possible for the individual by the use of the proper product. Sometimes the performance enhancing claim is subtle, as in ads for "smart" cereals, cold medications or vitamin supplements. Sometimes it is overt, as in ads for male and female fragrances, erectile dysfunction medications or body building shampoos.
Entertainment: Television entertainment shows are chiefly concerned with social versus anti-social behavior on an interpersonal level. The archetypal television program sets up one or more characters who exist at the borderline of social acceptance, whether they are juveniles learning the ropes, clown characters who are unaware or otherwise ignore social norms, or villains who attempt to subvert the existing social equilibrium and replace it with one of their own.
In all instances the depiction of rule breaking and resolution acts to reinforce those rules. In terms of drug usage as a breaking of social rules, Showtime's Weeds stands out in particular, though it tends to deal with the supposed social dynamics of the drug trade rather than the psychodynamics of the drug itself. Otherwise, most TV entertainment discussions of drug use and its consequences are relegated to occasional afternoon specials and to all episodes of House.
News: Television infotainment shows (otherwise known as "News Broadcasts") address this social/anti-social opposition at the public level. Public order is disturbed by rogue political activists, events of nature or common criminals. Though the particular infraction may not have been resolved by the time of the newscast, the very act of reporting frames the event in terms of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. In each case there are implicit or explicit rules which have been broken and then are reaffirmed. These programs are also full of reports about the drug or alcohol induced exploits of our celebrities, individuals whose very notariety hinges on reporting of their latest binges.
Sports: Where do sports broadcasts fit into to the structure of television content? Sports, as the WWF demonstrates each week, are mainly entertainment broadcasts. Sports participants are tightly bound by the rules of the particular sport. While any given standard entertainment program is about the breaking of rules, sports events are about abiding by rules. Each sport has a cadre of referees, line judges or umpires whose sole purpose is to make sure that the rules of the game are strictly adhered to.
In that sense, all sports are totally "made up." That is, the parties involved, no matter how adversarial they may seem, all agree to the set of rules of play. Rules determine what is allowed and what isn't, and ultimately who wins and who loses. What is acceptable or unacceptable behavior varies from sport to sport, but some set of rules always applies. At the same time, the outcome of the sporting event is not determined. The playing of a sport may be entertainment, but the result of that play is news.
This is the problem with sports programming. It is both news and entertainment. It crosses established boundaries of television content. It is a "made up" activity, but not in the same way that a comedy or drama is "made up."
So we have a basic opposition within the content structure presented by American television. On the one hand we have advertisements, where the performance enhancing drugs or products must be used, and on the opposite end we have sports where the performance enhancing drug must not be used. In between we have differing interations of this primary opposition, with entertainment and news content reflecting multiple variations of this use/don't use opposition.
The point is that we aren't concerned with the effect of drug use, or the unfair advantages performance enhancing drugs might give to advertising, entertainment or news personalities. We are concerned with the advantages performance enhancing drugs might give to professional atheletes. In their case, the use of any drug is itself a violation of the rules which state that, though any given athelete might already represent an outlier of norms concerning physical strength and ability, they shouldn't do anything "artificial" to enhance their already considerable talents.
It is not an accident that the way television content is differentiated conforms to Levi-Strauss's Canonical Formula regarding mythology:
fx(a):fy(b)::fx(b):f(a-1)(x)
In this case, the ultimate transformation promoted by corporate television (use our advertisers' products) begins with sports fx(a), the function of which is to avoid performance enhancing drugs, ie, to remain in a "natural" state. Proceeding through analogous functional areas where drug use is largely ignored fy(b) (entertainment) or is a tolerated aberration fx(b)(News), we arrive at the final iteration where the desired state is acceptance of performance enhancing drugs or products as the necessary state of being f(a-1)(x) (advertising).
The uproar created by sport-related drug use is a function of the relative position of sports in the structure of television programming, not the drug use itself.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
My Bad: My Other Blogging Milestone (Part 2)
(Updated below)
Well, according to my blog host's count, I haven't posted 68 entries to this blog, I've posted 89 (including the last post celebrating my 68th posting milestone.) This is an opportunity I've let slip by. Not having properly celebrated my 68th post, I am now at a loss about how best to celebrate this, my 90th entry.
I had some thoughts about the new Beatles homage movie "Across the Universe" and how the incorporation of song lyrics into our stories and our lives is symptomatic of a culture entering secondary orality, but that's a topic for another day.
I was going to comment on the how the recent excesses of the Republican noise machine regarding a 12-year-old beneficiary of SCHIP coverage illustrates McLuhan's tetrad. In other words, what has been a highly effective propaganda machine has been pushed past its limits until it has reversed into its opposite, that is, anti-propaganda. That also doesn't seem appropriate.
I know. I'll continue my rerun summary of previous posts!
Some of my posts have constituted blatant efforts to circulate new thought memes into the blogosphere in the hopes of coining the next cultural catch phrase and thereby achieve my 15 minutes of fame.
Thus, in my December 13, 2006 post I celebrated the inclusion of a comment I phoned into Air America Radio:
I didn't receive any callbacks after those commercials ran their course, nor did I receive any residuals.
On January 4, 2007 I reissued my 25-year-old claim that the content of television broadcasts conform to a classic structural dichotomy of culture vs. nature (or social vs. anti-social), and having settled that, implied that we move beyond content analysis and criticism to examine the medium itself:
Whoops. There's that Republican noise machine again. For the complete discussion of this, see my paper, "The Savage Mind on Madision Avenue," posted here.
Finally, at least for Part 2 of this series of reruns, there is my attempt to interpret blogging itself in terms of McLuhan's Laws of the Media:
Well, on to Part 3!
UPDATE: My Bad Again!
One of these days I'll figure this blogging stuff out. It seems that I have only published 68 (now 69) blogs, with 22 other drafts in the works. Many of these drafts may never seen the light of day. So in the immortal words of Emily Latella, "Never Mind!"
Well, according to my blog host's count, I haven't posted 68 entries to this blog, I've posted 89 (including the last post celebrating my 68th posting milestone.) This is an opportunity I've let slip by. Not having properly celebrated my 68th post, I am now at a loss about how best to celebrate this, my 90th entry.
I had some thoughts about the new Beatles homage movie "Across the Universe" and how the incorporation of song lyrics into our stories and our lives is symptomatic of a culture entering secondary orality, but that's a topic for another day.
I was going to comment on the how the recent excesses of the Republican noise machine regarding a 12-year-old beneficiary of SCHIP coverage illustrates McLuhan's tetrad. In other words, what has been a highly effective propaganda machine has been pushed past its limits until it has reversed into its opposite, that is, anti-propaganda. That also doesn't seem appropriate.
I know. I'll continue my rerun summary of previous posts!
Some of my posts have constituted blatant efforts to circulate new thought memes into the blogosphere in the hopes of coining the next cultural catch phrase and thereby achieve my 15 minutes of fame.
Thus, in my December 13, 2006 post I celebrated the inclusion of a comment I phoned into Air America Radio:
Announcer: The following is an actual call to Air America Radio.
I think we liberals tend to celebrate and then say "OK. We're done. Let's go back to our own private lives." I think we need to be wary of conservatives, or radical conservatives, or fascists. The structures are still there for them to come back. And next time they come back they'll be smarter and they'll have taken into account the mistakes they made this time.
I didn't receive any callbacks after those commercials ran their course, nor did I receive any residuals.
On January 4, 2007 I reissued my 25-year-old claim that the content of television broadcasts conform to a classic structural dichotomy of culture vs. nature (or social vs. anti-social), and having settled that, implied that we move beyond content analysis and criticism to examine the medium itself:
Within this schema, news broadcasts fall somewhere in between shows and ads in terms of entertainment value vs. propaganda, while shows and ads may have little or nothing to do with the objective world, dividing their productions in terms of their intention to entertain or propagandize. (This is not to say that no show ever has propagandistic intentions, or that no advertising executive ever wishes to entertain. But in general, each is more concerned with the demands of his own domain. Program producers must attract an audience, and advertisers must sell their products.)
It could be stated that if the hidden structure of advertising has to do with an opposition between culture and nature on a personal level, then within the other legs of the triad there are other hidden structures that determine how the particular material is developed and conveyed. I would tentatively suggest that television programming is concerned chiefly with "social versus antisocial behavior on an interpersonal level," while the news deals with this same general opposition at the "public" level. Within this perspective, the various legs of the triad always favor the status quo, since the definition of what constitutes antisocial behavior depends on who is defining social or acceptable behavior.
Part of the reason Fox News is so disturbing is that they continually violate the supposed boundaries between news, entertainment and advertising propaganda.This is why the current concentration of media ownership is so pernicious. As part of a major media conglomerate, Fox News can frame their news reports according to their own views of social vs. antisocial public behavior and so they slip down the television triangle both toward propaganda and toward entertainment. Just as foods which are fit for consumption even though "rotten" (alcoholic beverages for example) constitute a special exception to general culinary rules, news which has become propagandized, or created largely to entertain, constitutes a violation of the traditional definition of news and requires adjustments in how we consume reality.
Whoops. There's that Republican noise machine again. For the complete discussion of this, see my paper, "The Savage Mind on Madision Avenue," posted here.
Finally, at least for Part 2 of this series of reruns, there is my attempt to interpret blogging itself in terms of McLuhan's Laws of the Media:
Blogging enhances “many to many” communication. As a medium, blogging allows me to get my message out to many without the need of access to television, radio, print or film production facilities. Blogging also allows me to receive messages from many sources.I think this blogging tetrad holds up pretty well, especially the part about total narcissism.
Blogging obsolesces one to one or many to one communications. Telephone chats and television binges are replaced by blogging connections.
Blogging retrieves the habits of 18th letter correspondents or diarists. Though this varies widely, at the minimum blogging requires that we capture and express our thoughts via the keyboard. Some bloggers go much further than that.
When pushed to an extreme, blogging reverses into total narcissism. I write only to myself, for myself. I put myself into the blogosphere, and seeing my own image, become entranced.
Well, on to Part 3!
UPDATE: My Bad Again!
One of these days I'll figure this blogging stuff out. It seems that I have only published 68 (now 69) blogs, with 22 other drafts in the works. Many of these drafts may never seen the light of day. So in the immortal words of Emily Latella, "Never Mind!"
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
When News Becomes Infotainment
I have my own spin on the transition of the television news from "hard news" to "infotainment." What we call “news,” which originated in the print era, is converted to something different by the electronic media. As I noted in my paper, "The Savage Mind on Madison Avenue", it is necessary to consider the structure of all television content in order to understand what print news becomes on TV.
Using Claude Levi-Strauss's structural anthropology triad as a framework for understanding the structure of all television content, I wrote:
Neil Postman might have suggested that this blurring of boundaries, which was appropriated from the print media, was inevitable given the non-discursive biases of electronic media. The boundaries between shows, ads and news, which we are accustomed to take for granted, are shown to be arbitrary and merely differing iterations of the overall structural themes.
Using Claude Levi-Strauss's structural anthropology triad as a framework for understanding the structure of all television content, I wrote:
"...news broadcasts fall somewhere in between shows and ads in terms of entertainment value vs. propaganda, while shows and ads may have little or nothing to do with the objective world, dividing their productions in terms of their intention to entertain or propagandize. (This is not to say that no show ever has propagandistic intentions, or that no advertising executive ever wishes to entertain. But in general, each is more concerned with the demands of his own domain. Program producers must attract an audience, and advertisers must sell their products.) It could be stated that if the hidden structure of advertising has to do with an opposition between culture and nature, then within the other legs of the triad there are other hidden structures that determine how the particular material is developed and conveyed. If it could be stated that advertisements, by opposing culture against nature, deal with social versus antisocial behavior on a personal level, then I would tentatively suggest that the shows on television are chiefly concerned with social versus antisocial behavior on an interpersonal level, while the news deals with this same general opposition at the public level. Further research is necessary in order to determine the exact parameters of these oppositions."When I wrote this paper in 1980 it was clear that there was an accepted distinction between the appropriate "realms" of television: fiction, news and advertising. What we have witnessed over the last 25 years is a blurring of boundaries. Fictional programming is now "based on true events"; news content is now presented using the tools and conceits of storytelling; and advertising has now morphed into product placement within a television entertainment show. Regarding product placement, products currently are placed only in fictional settings. How long before advertisers realize that placement in entertainment programming may not have the immediacy of placement within a news broadcast?
Neil Postman might have suggested that this blurring of boundaries, which was appropriated from the print media, was inevitable given the non-discursive biases of electronic media. The boundaries between shows, ads and news, which we are accustomed to take for granted, are shown to be arbitrary and merely differing iterations of the overall structural themes.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Comments Re: The Problem of Myths
Some reactions to my recent post concerning the similarities between myth and advertising, with my response below:
Duane writes:
Thank you Duana and Ashtoreth for your comments. You both raise valid objections to my assertions and you point out a key problem with the type of analysis I am attempting.
I must admit that I am torn regarding the place of advertising in our culture. On one hand, I do believe that, with all the focus groups, psychological analyses and cultural “thefts” advertisers coopt to use as regular tools of their craft, they are armed with unique tools to penetrate human consciousness and to master the psychic processes that classical mythology has represented.
On the other hand, my personal reaction mirrors yours, Ashtoreth, in abhorrence of the apparent ends of advertising: to make us more pliant; to make us more materialistic; to render us more self-conscious, not about our moral strengths or shortcomings, but about body odor, physical conformity and social acceptance. This is one reason why, when I earned by MBA I chose not to use it to go into advertising.
However, I think you both may be missing a key point that I’m trying to make. Advertising as technique is separate from advertising as content. Classical myths don’t always teach us how to strive for our higher selves. One could imagine a militaristic, totalitarian society where the mythology promotes violence and genocide. Classical mythology can support the egocentric notion that elevates one society above all others and justifies all kinds of atrocities. Read The Iliad carefully and you will see both men and Gods behave in ways antithetical to our modern sensibilities.
My purpose in discussing advertising is not to critique its apparent ends, but to reveal the nature of its scope and power. I am an optimist, and I believe that while advertising on one level is despicable, on another level, in spite of themselves, advertisers are performing a necessary function in our culture. Beyond notions of physical afflictions, social inequities and personal conformity, advertising provides hope. Hope that there are solutions to our problems, hope that there is an underlying logic to the buzzing, blooming chaos of our mass culture, hope that human beings can prevail against inimical forces of nature. That these hopes are expressed in the form of deodorants, household cleansers and body paints is lamentable. That the purpose of advertisers in their own minds is to make us pliable, insecure and acquisitive is repulsive. But advertising wouldn’t be effective at all, wouldn’t sometimes be powerful and moving, wouldn’t strike so often a “responsive chord,” if it didn’t provide a necessary structure and narrative for our culture.
I have also used Joseph Campbell’s notion of the heroic cyclic to understand incidents in my life and put into context my own personal narrative. I am not disputing the brilliance of his analysis, or its usefulness in comprehending the stories we tell ourselves. I think that there is a deeper level to mythology, that for mythic tales to survive at all over time they must correlate to fundamental intellectual processes.
We can debate whether advertising is benign or malignant. What I am calling attention to is its deeper structure and offering a possible analysis for why it persists in our culture at all.
Duane writes:
and Ashtoreth writes:I was with you until you got to the part about advertising. I wouldn't necessarily disagree with the basic facts you present, just the sweeping conclusions. You seem to be elevating modern advertising to a level rivaling the oral storytelling culture of the past. I am much too cynical to buy that.
Advertisers are tasked with tapping the human subconscious at the lowest level. They do not provide us with heroic icons or examples of what is truly "good." They often attempt to exploit various emotional insecurities to make a buck. It is a deliberate attempt on their part to create a sense that we are, in one way or another, deficient, and that by shelling out our pay, our perceived deficiencies can be eliminated, or at least covered over.
Successful advertising appeals either to our vanity or to our proclivity for materialism. Images of happy, successful people are presented, which do indeed constitue a trivial form of mythology -- slim waistlines, wrinkle-free foreheads, sleek autos, perfectly functioning nuclear families, full heads of hair, six-pack abs, and so on. These ads speak to us at the most superficial level. By creating a myth of what is "good," we are left feeling inadequate, and break out the checkbook as a means to procure a fix to our insufficent lives. Cynical? Sure. So, while I might accept your central premise that modern advertising creates and conveys modern myths, it tends to direct itself primarily to the weaker aspects of human nature, unlike the ancient myths, which attempted to cover the entire spectrum of human psychology and behavior.
This was an interesting article - and an interesting comment following. I do not agree either that modern advertising constitutes myth, nor that the ancients were simple, nor that structure is more important than content.
Your assertion that advertising, this pseudo myth you name with no sustenance, enables us to live in 'culture not nature' makes me think of the folly of Aristotle and other philosophers who strove to separate man from nature and thus further from the philosophies that grounded truth in nature arguing that we are an intrinsic part and its cycles and mysteries.
Culture is relative and transparent. It can and is transformed, absorbed and washed away. Archetype is not. Myth helps us to deal with the chthonic, when we are dragged into the underworld. An awareness of myth gives us a guideline through the darkness, to embrace it and honor it as a rite of transformation.
It rather sickens me that you could imagine let alone postulate that advertising even touches that. When I faced brain surgery several years ago, I steadied and prepared myself by meditating on the myth of the Babylonian goddess Inanna descending into the underworld to gain the knowledge of life and death; her descent and her return. Do you think advertising had any part in this?
To even suggest this is to trivialize life and human existence. It is to suggest a wasteland, an existential nightmare which would be truly meaningless if it were true, but it is not.
Since the dawn of commerce, people have hawked their wares. That does not make it myth.
Advertising has more in common with brain washing than myth. And with the advent of viral marketing and fake advertising, it becomes even more insideous, deceitful and corrupt in its attempts to override our minds and control our impulses in the direction they want. That is like comparing poison with milk.
When I saw the picture of the first person to purchase an I-phone on the Internet, I knew it was a creation for viral transmission and reaction. The image played on the heroic, but was devoid of it. It hinted at achievement, but had nothing to do with it. It suggested reaching for the extraordinary and for a moment possessing it, but instead described the utmost banality.
The lad was set up to look like he was an Olympic runner clearing the finish line at a race, or perhaps the one carrying the torch representing a sacred flame. If it were not so perverse, it would have been funny. Instead, it represented a fellow making a mockery of all this to purchase an over-priced piece of consumer electronics he did not need that is already yesterday's news.
Perhaps people like yourself would seek to use the elements of myth and archetype to trigger reactions in people to make them hunger to spend money they do not have, digging themselves into servitude to billion dollar corporations who then turn around and tell them to dream smaller, want less, and go carbon-free while they fill up their private jets.
Myth opens the door to connection to that which makes us whole, to what is true and sacred, and which allows us to experience the mysteries of life, death and renewal with dignity and inner power.
Advertising does not do this. Advertising is not myth.
Thank you Duana and Ashtoreth for your comments. You both raise valid objections to my assertions and you point out a key problem with the type of analysis I am attempting.
I must admit that I am torn regarding the place of advertising in our culture. On one hand, I do believe that, with all the focus groups, psychological analyses and cultural “thefts” advertisers coopt to use as regular tools of their craft, they are armed with unique tools to penetrate human consciousness and to master the psychic processes that classical mythology has represented.
On the other hand, my personal reaction mirrors yours, Ashtoreth, in abhorrence of the apparent ends of advertising: to make us more pliant; to make us more materialistic; to render us more self-conscious, not about our moral strengths or shortcomings, but about body odor, physical conformity and social acceptance. This is one reason why, when I earned by MBA I chose not to use it to go into advertising.
However, I think you both may be missing a key point that I’m trying to make. Advertising as technique is separate from advertising as content. Classical myths don’t always teach us how to strive for our higher selves. One could imagine a militaristic, totalitarian society where the mythology promotes violence and genocide. Classical mythology can support the egocentric notion that elevates one society above all others and justifies all kinds of atrocities. Read The Iliad carefully and you will see both men and Gods behave in ways antithetical to our modern sensibilities.
My purpose in discussing advertising is not to critique its apparent ends, but to reveal the nature of its scope and power. I am an optimist, and I believe that while advertising on one level is despicable, on another level, in spite of themselves, advertisers are performing a necessary function in our culture. Beyond notions of physical afflictions, social inequities and personal conformity, advertising provides hope. Hope that there are solutions to our problems, hope that there is an underlying logic to the buzzing, blooming chaos of our mass culture, hope that human beings can prevail against inimical forces of nature. That these hopes are expressed in the form of deodorants, household cleansers and body paints is lamentable. That the purpose of advertisers in their own minds is to make us pliable, insecure and acquisitive is repulsive. But advertising wouldn’t be effective at all, wouldn’t sometimes be powerful and moving, wouldn’t strike so often a “responsive chord,” if it didn’t provide a necessary structure and narrative for our culture.
I have also used Joseph Campbell’s notion of the heroic cyclic to understand incidents in my life and put into context my own personal narrative. I am not disputing the brilliance of his analysis, or its usefulness in comprehending the stories we tell ourselves. I think that there is a deeper level to mythology, that for mythic tales to survive at all over time they must correlate to fundamental intellectual processes.
We can debate whether advertising is benign or malignant. What I am calling attention to is its deeper structure and offering a possible analysis for why it persists in our culture at all.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
The Problem With Myths
The problem that continually arises when trying to properly interpret a culture's mythology is the definition of the word "myth."
As used by Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Marie-Louise von Franz and others, a culture's myths are the stories that are told containing cultural archetypes, heroic figures, epic confrontations and/or magical occurrences. This approach to the study of myth assumes that the various aspects of mythology represent externalizations of internal, psychological processes in humans and by studying myths as archetypal examples we can better understand the stories of our own lives and the assumptions we make about ourselves and our interactions with other people.
The term "myth" for Claude Levi-Strauss has a different meaning. Myths are stories because, in an oral culture, storytelling is the means by which cultural information is transmitted from one person to another and across generations. The mythic heroes and monsters, magical activities and impossible events are memorable because they need to be to preserve the information being transmitted. With our modern sensibilities, we look at the absurdities and inconsistencies of fairy tales and myths and assume we have discovered evidence that "primitive" thought processes are illogical and immature when compared to modern thought.
In his series "Mythologiques", Levi-Strauss has suggested that myths are not important because they present archetypal images; myths are important because they demonstrate an externalization of human thought processes. Levi-Strauss assumes that since we are all members of the same species, that the thought processes of less technologically advanced peoples are the same as our own, just applied to different objects. By interpreting the logic of myths, we can understand how the mind works.
It is also assumed that individual myths that have been passed down to us may be incomplete. In order to understand the "message" we must contrast and compare multiple variants of the same tale. The true message of a myth is revealed when one is familiar with its place in the total cultural context that generated it. That's why saying that the Superman myth, for example, is the basis for all of our culture's archetypes is misleading. Superman(1948) is not Superman(1960) or even Superman(2007). If you doubt this, I direct your attention to the site http://www.superdickery.com/ for an alternative interpretation of the Superman myth.
The reason I focus in on advertising is because of the vast body of examples advertising supplies. Advertisements are constantly changing, constantly reflecting current cultural conditions, and self-validating through sales trends.
It may be possible to arrive at valid conclusions concerning our culture using just the five Harry Potter movies or the Superman series. However, the possibility for individual influence on the "message" is far greater with artistic control centralized in one person or a small group than in a much broader body of work.
Advertisements work over space the way myths work over time. Mythic stories survive over time because they resonate with the population. An individual advertisement may have a much shorter shelf life, but because it has to be distributed throughout a large population, it must also resonate to be effective.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Culture vs. Nature: Women and Advertising in the New Media
As the new media liberate traditional advertising, women may want to reevaluate their roles.
It may seem that economic factors and competition from new media are forcing advertisers to reevaluate how to get their messages across; to engage in product placement and other tricks to penetrate the clutter. In fact this is just the tail wagging the dog. It has always been inevitable that the "content" what we call "ads" would move from the confines of the 15 or 30 seconds spaces between the old content presented by traditional electronic media or the column inches of traditional print media to become involved in every aspect of our lives. Advertising in general wrestles with the same types of concerns that structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss discerned in the mythology of "primitive" South American Indians. That is, in a context relevant to our modern sensibilities, ads are really dealing with an opposition between nature and culture. In doing so, they provide structure to our lives, disseminate guidelines for how to look and feel, and mandate what rituals to perform to be fully human.
Think about how the average person in Homeric Greece related to The Iliad or The Odyssey. These performance/poems weren't just the "literature" of Greek culture, separate from the general experience. As Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan and others have pointed out, The Iliad and The Odyssey constituted cultural how-to manuals, presenting the proper ways for Greek men and women to conduct ceremonies, the proper relationship of Greeks toward their gods and the proper things to believe about just about everything in their world. Claude Lévi-Strauss added that such cultural encyclopedias reconcile or deny the inevitable contradictions within a culture. By doing so, they promote well-being and peace of mind of the members of the culture.
We still can't see that modern advertising, in all its manifestations, performs the same functions in our modern culture that The Iliad and The Odyssey performed in ancient Greece, or that the tales about frogs and honey bees and jaguars performed for native South Americans. In doing so, advertising explains and reconciles the contradictions that must inevitably exist in the lexicon of a complex culture, or deny that those contradictions exist. To help better grasp this concept, I’d like to ask the following question: Why do women in our culture wear makeup?
One response is that our culture still distinguishes men from women along a culture/nature opposition. The religious and scientific stories of our culture tell us that as human beings we are outside or above the constraints of the natural world. At the same time we come into this world through childbirth, we get sick, we age and die, we suffer from various bodily afflictions. How do we reconcile this contradiction?
Lévi-Strauss cites an instance where an anthropological field investigator asks his native informant why his people apply so many tattoos to their bodies. "Because we are not animals" is the reply. They complete the transition from nature to culture, they make themselves cultural beings rather than natural ones, via tattoos and the fact that they are not within nature makes them want to do so. The implication is that they distinguish themselves from the natural order by decorating their skin.
What I am suggesting is that when women apply makeup they are doing the same thing. They are making themselves into cultural beings. By applying a corporate (meaning collective) mask, women tap into a source of collective power. Men don't need to wear makeup because they are, by definition, already cultural. Of course, much advertising operates along this borderline, and because both men and women buy their products, advertisers pitch to both sexes. Ads say “If you have a problem with a bodily function (i.e. nature) we have a cultural product that can help.”
This also applies to sexual attraction. In order to attract a mate both men and women have to look sharp by applying proper grooming aids, and smell sharp by applying proper perfumes, but women must go much further. They must color and condition their hair. They must paint their eyes, their lips and their faces. They must remove hair from inappropriate places on their bodies. Ads never discuss (beyond the obvious sexual claims) why they must do this, only how.
What is an advertisement in a new media web site? Is it presenting a narrative, like television advertising, or is it evoking a response through a still image, like print advertising? The answer is probably both and neither. Banner ads on a web site try to be TV commercials or they try to be print ads and yet they aren’t really either. This is a prime illustration of Marshall McLuhan's assertion that we are numb to the true impact of our media. By shifting the communication paradigm, the new media allow advertising myths to burst out of the confines of the traditional media. While the new media sorts itself out, the advertising of the old media breaks out and becomes the content of our everyday lives. As the mythic avatars of our culture, advertising icons want to insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives, and we subconsciously want them to do so.
Our collective body of advertising defines what is cultural and what is natural, and offers concise advice on how we can best exist in culture rather than nature. This collective resource, acting as a sort of cultural encyclopedia, performs the same function in our age that the Homeric epics performed in classical Greece. The new media are taking our existing cultural encyclopedia and transforming it into a wikipedia. How this transformation affects our social institutions, our belief structures and our notions concerning gender remains to be seen.
It may seem that economic factors and competition from new media are forcing advertisers to reevaluate how to get their messages across; to engage in product placement and other tricks to penetrate the clutter. In fact this is just the tail wagging the dog. It has always been inevitable that the "content" what we call "ads" would move from the confines of the 15 or 30 seconds spaces between the old content presented by traditional electronic media or the column inches of traditional print media to become involved in every aspect of our lives. Advertising in general wrestles with the same types of concerns that structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss discerned in the mythology of "primitive" South American Indians. That is, in a context relevant to our modern sensibilities, ads are really dealing with an opposition between nature and culture. In doing so, they provide structure to our lives, disseminate guidelines for how to look and feel, and mandate what rituals to perform to be fully human.
Think about how the average person in Homeric Greece related to The Iliad or The Odyssey. These performance/poems weren't just the "literature" of Greek culture, separate from the general experience. As Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan and others have pointed out, The Iliad and The Odyssey constituted cultural how-to manuals, presenting the proper ways for Greek men and women to conduct ceremonies, the proper relationship of Greeks toward their gods and the proper things to believe about just about everything in their world. Claude Lévi-Strauss added that such cultural encyclopedias reconcile or deny the inevitable contradictions within a culture. By doing so, they promote well-being and peace of mind of the members of the culture.
We still can't see that modern advertising, in all its manifestations, performs the same functions in our modern culture that The Iliad and The Odyssey performed in ancient Greece, or that the tales about frogs and honey bees and jaguars performed for native South Americans. In doing so, advertising explains and reconciles the contradictions that must inevitably exist in the lexicon of a complex culture, or deny that those contradictions exist. To help better grasp this concept, I’d like to ask the following question: Why do women in our culture wear makeup?
One response is that our culture still distinguishes men from women along a culture/nature opposition. The religious and scientific stories of our culture tell us that as human beings we are outside or above the constraints of the natural world. At the same time we come into this world through childbirth, we get sick, we age and die, we suffer from various bodily afflictions. How do we reconcile this contradiction?
Lévi-Strauss cites an instance where an anthropological field investigator asks his native informant why his people apply so many tattoos to their bodies. "Because we are not animals" is the reply. They complete the transition from nature to culture, they make themselves cultural beings rather than natural ones, via tattoos and the fact that they are not within nature makes them want to do so. The implication is that they distinguish themselves from the natural order by decorating their skin.
What I am suggesting is that when women apply makeup they are doing the same thing. They are making themselves into cultural beings. By applying a corporate (meaning collective) mask, women tap into a source of collective power. Men don't need to wear makeup because they are, by definition, already cultural. Of course, much advertising operates along this borderline, and because both men and women buy their products, advertisers pitch to both sexes. Ads say “If you have a problem with a bodily function (i.e. nature) we have a cultural product that can help.”
This also applies to sexual attraction. In order to attract a mate both men and women have to look sharp by applying proper grooming aids, and smell sharp by applying proper perfumes, but women must go much further. They must color and condition their hair. They must paint their eyes, their lips and their faces. They must remove hair from inappropriate places on their bodies. Ads never discuss (beyond the obvious sexual claims) why they must do this, only how.
What is an advertisement in a new media web site? Is it presenting a narrative, like television advertising, or is it evoking a response through a still image, like print advertising? The answer is probably both and neither. Banner ads on a web site try to be TV commercials or they try to be print ads and yet they aren’t really either. This is a prime illustration of Marshall McLuhan's assertion that we are numb to the true impact of our media. By shifting the communication paradigm, the new media allow advertising myths to burst out of the confines of the traditional media. While the new media sorts itself out, the advertising of the old media breaks out and becomes the content of our everyday lives. As the mythic avatars of our culture, advertising icons want to insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives, and we subconsciously want them to do so.
Our collective body of advertising defines what is cultural and what is natural, and offers concise advice on how we can best exist in culture rather than nature. This collective resource, acting as a sort of cultural encyclopedia, performs the same function in our age that the Homeric epics performed in classical Greece. The new media are taking our existing cultural encyclopedia and transforming it into a wikipedia. How this transformation affects our social institutions, our belief structures and our notions concerning gender remains to be seen.
Friday, April 13, 2007
The 'Savage Mind' on Madison Avenue
My 1980 article, The 'Savage Mind' on Madison Avenue: A Structural Study of Television Advertising, is based on a series of live presentations I gave in the 1970's where visual aids were essential. It first appeared in print in the Spring, 1980 issue of ETC: A Review of General Semantics. I've created a separate blog for this article to which I added recordings of the original television commercials and a few extra graphics.
One of the problems faced by anyone working within a rich media environment is that many traditional academic outlets are still largely print oriented. Anyone who has had to convert audiovisual material to print will attest to the fact that something gets lost in the translation. As we move deeper into Walter J. Ong's era of secondary orality, this problem will only get worse.
I always felt the textual descriptions I created of the television ads I used in my study didn't do justice to the originals. In order to better capture my original intention I needed a venue where I could accompany my discussion with the actual recorded examples. After a thirty year delay, the rich media environment of the blogosphere (with some assistance from YouTube) has made this a reality.
One of the problems faced by anyone working within a rich media environment is that many traditional academic outlets are still largely print oriented. Anyone who has had to convert audiovisual material to print will attest to the fact that something gets lost in the translation. As we move deeper into Walter J. Ong's era of secondary orality, this problem will only get worse.
I always felt the textual descriptions I created of the television ads I used in my study didn't do justice to the originals. In order to better capture my original intention I needed a venue where I could accompany my discussion with the actual recorded examples. After a thirty year delay, the rich media environment of the blogosphere (with some assistance from YouTube) has made this a reality.
Monday, March 19, 2007
The Blogging Double Bind
(Updated Below -- Updated Again)
You may have noticed that I've added advertising to this blog. I have applied to become an Amazon Associate. Assuming I am approved, I will receive a small percentage for all sales that click through the ads posted on the left. Reading through the Amazon rules and regulations it appears that I can't game the system by clicking through for my own purchases. I must rely on you, my loyal readers, to click on the boxes to the left and purchase thousand or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise from Amazon.
My purpose is to earn enough revenue to retire and begin living the style of life to which I'd like to become accustomed. Unfortunately, I am caught in the blogging double bind. In order to generate traffic, I need to post new material on a frequent basis. If I retire, I can assume that traffic on this blog will decline and therefore ad revenue will fall off.
As a student of the effect of advertising on our culture, I should point out that by making a purchase through Amazon you are not just purchasing a book or DVD. You are purchasing a place for yourself as part of that corporate entity called "Amazon." Putting on the Amazon corporate mask connects you with the power and identity of something much larger than yourself, just like wearing the Nike "swoosh" or the Coca Cola "Coca Cola." When you show off your copy of Lance Strate's recent book, Echoes And Reflections: On Media Ecology As a Field of Study, you can say that it's not just any copy of the book. It is a copy you purchased on Amazon.
I can prominently feature any authors, books or DVDs I discuss in my postings and generate some sales. Let's see. For a $25 book I will earn about $1. So if 1000 readers click through and buy Paul Levinson's latest book, The Plot to Save Socrates (in hard cover of course), I will earn at least $758 (the percentage I earn rises with volume of sales in ways I don't quite understand).
UPDATE: I have been told that I shouldn't get my hopes up for generating substantial revenue, that the title of this post should really be "Sense and Non-Cents."
This is a shame. I was hoping to become one of those people who earn substantial income while working at home in my pajamas.
In light of this, I think that it make sense to mention in this blog only books that retail for $100 and above. That limits me pretty much to coffee table books and some textbooks, mainly medical.
UPDATE II: I'm in! I'm officially an Amazon Associate! You can start clicking away while you finish reading this update. I'll wait.
You may have noticed that I've added advertising to this blog. I have applied to become an Amazon Associate. Assuming I am approved, I will receive a small percentage for all sales that click through the ads posted on the left. Reading through the Amazon rules and regulations it appears that I can't game the system by clicking through for my own purchases. I must rely on you, my loyal readers, to click on the boxes to the left and purchase thousand or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise from Amazon.
My purpose is to earn enough revenue to retire and begin living the style of life to which I'd like to become accustomed. Unfortunately, I am caught in the blogging double bind. In order to generate traffic, I need to post new material on a frequent basis. If I retire, I can assume that traffic on this blog will decline and therefore ad revenue will fall off.
As a student of the effect of advertising on our culture, I should point out that by making a purchase through Amazon you are not just purchasing a book or DVD. You are purchasing a place for yourself as part of that corporate entity called "Amazon." Putting on the Amazon corporate mask connects you with the power and identity of something much larger than yourself, just like wearing the Nike "swoosh" or the Coca Cola "Coca Cola." When you show off your copy of Lance Strate's recent book, Echoes And Reflections: On Media Ecology As a Field of Study, you can say that it's not just any copy of the book. It is a copy you purchased on Amazon.
I can prominently feature any authors, books or DVDs I discuss in my postings and generate some sales. Let's see. For a $25 book I will earn about $1. So if 1000 readers click through and buy Paul Levinson's latest book, The Plot to Save Socrates (in hard cover of course), I will earn at least $758 (the percentage I earn rises with volume of sales in ways I don't quite understand).
UPDATE: I have been told that I shouldn't get my hopes up for generating substantial revenue, that the title of this post should really be "Sense and Non-Cents."
This is a shame. I was hoping to become one of those people who earn substantial income while working at home in my pajamas.
In light of this, I think that it make sense to mention in this blog only books that retail for $100 and above. That limits me pretty much to coffee table books and some textbooks, mainly medical.
UPDATE II: I'm in! I'm officially an Amazon Associate! You can start clicking away while you finish reading this update. I'll wait.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
The Structural Study of Television Advertising
Anonymous asks:
Empirical deduction begins with some observation of reality. It then treats that observation as if it were an abstract concept. This type of mental process can occur using two different types of association. First, through the use of a metonymic association, some observed characteristic or habit of an animal is treated as if it stood for the entire animal. If this characteristic is found elsewhere in the environment, it too is associated with that animal. The metonymic association then becomes a metaphoric assertion. Lévi-Strauss’s term for such uses of metaphor is “imaginary association.”
The metonymic association (fangs of a snake) is used to make a metaphoric assertion (fang-shaped seeds cure snake bite). In television advertising we see this type of reasoning regularly. The air bubbles in Baggies sandwich bags make the bag look like an alligator’s skin, so an alligator was used as the product mascot. The Volkswagon “bug,” the Turtlewax turtle, and the old Exxon tiger are further examples of this type of association.
Transcendental deduction operates at another step removed from reality. The characteristic attributed to an animal or an object is removed from any grounding in empirical observation, and is determined by its relative position in the structure as a whole. Lévi-Strauss states that
The functioning of transcendental can best be illustrated by using Levi-Strauss’s own example.
According to the Tupi Indians of South America, the tree frog and the bee are opposites. The frog is the master of water because it lives in water that collects in hollow trees, and seems able to find such habitats even during the dry season. However, the bee also lives in hollow trees, but in honey rather than water. Because honey is not water and water is not honey, the two creatures are seen as opposites. (This version of the argument has been simplified for the sake of brevity, and therefore leaves out other determining factors, such as high/low, etc.) The Tupi also see the jaguar as an opposite of the tree frog. While the frog is present master of water, the jaguar (for reasons excluded here) was the former master of fire, which it gave to mankind. These comparisons, which are based at least in part on some empirical observation, now lead to a third comparison which transcends the objective reality:
This line of reasoning explains why Tupi mythology makes the jaguars the first owners of the honey festival. The association “bee equals jaguar” is forced upon the Tupi by the empirical associations they have given the frog, bee and jaguar. Levi-Strauss says that this type of intellectual process is typical mythic thought. Much that appears illogical and contingent in a myth can ultimately be attributed to this combination of empirical (metonymic-metaphoric) deduction and transcendental deduction.
That this type of thinking is also present in the construction of television advertising has not yet been noted.
Generally, the process of structural analysis involves the comparing and contrasting of many variants of a tale in order to determine what is important and what is not. Levi-Strauss has borrowed the notion of redundancy from communication theory to explain the rationale behind this procedure, Imagine that you are the story teller of a tribe that relies on the oral transmission of its body of knowledge. Let us assume for the sake of argument that you are fully aware of the hidden structural associations that your stories are portraying. How would you insure that the information contained in those tales would survive the erosion of time and the individual idiosyncrasies of future story tellers? One way would be to take the basic message or messages and repeat them over and over again using different formats and imagery. Though the stories would seem to be about different heroes, animals, events, and so on, the underlying structure would be more or less the same throughout. Furthermore, future story tellers would internalize these structures so that they would tend to reject any alterations which went against the general pattern.
This point about the use of images in mythology is particularly pertinent to a discussion of television advertising. People in general perceive the television image, not as a referent, but as the object imaged. They do not take into account the fact that in the very act of reproducing the objective world on film or videotape, a transformation occurs. The images become symbols that can be charged with meanings above and beyond the concrete reality of the objects they mimic. One of the consequences of this process of symbolization is that the meanings given to each object are affected by the meaning given to all the other objects in the system.
The following arrangement compares three examples of television advertising in terms of their underlying structure:
This arrangement shows that although these three advertisements seem to be about entirely different types of products, with different characters and events, their underlying structures are the same. The interesting thing about this correspondence of structural elements is the equivalent function assigned to dirt, children, and arthritis (illness).
Finally if we generalize the structure of the Wisk, L’Eggs and Ben-Gay ads, we arrive at this arrangement.
With this sort of (albeit very brief) analysis it is possible to see that, at least in many television ads, there is a similar underlying structure. In addition, it is possible to discover the same sort of interest in the distinction between nature and culture that Levi-Strauss found in the mythology of primary orality cultures. As you can see, my concern isn't with the intention of the advertisement to sell a product or service. To me this is just McLuhan's juicy meat distracting the watchdogs of our minds while the real effect of television content takes hold. This effect involves a definition of what is "nature" and what is "culture" and what values we assign to each.
Also, if we look at television content writ large, we can, perhaps arbitrarily separate three broad categories: entertainment, news and advertising. Within the larger structure of television, advertising deals with defining social vs. antisocial (or cultural vs. natural) behavior on a personal level. Entertainment shows deal with the same dichotomy on an interpersonal level. News programs are the same opposition on the public level.
I do not understand why you want to relate advertising to mythology. Yes, I know that McLuhan refers in his subtitle to folklore, which he does not really explain, so far as I recall.
Apart from McLuhan, I would not have spontaneously thought to relate advertising to mythology. So what exactly prompts you to make this connection?
Because you are a graduate of the NYU Media Ecology program, perhaps you have been influenced by the thought of Neil Postman. Postman sees advertising as bringing irrational influences into decision making about buying things. He notes that the theory of capitalism is that capitalism is supposed to rely on rational decision making. But advertising influences us to make decisions based on non-rational influences.
So are you connecting advertising with mythology to suggest the non-rational influence that advertising can bring into decision making about buying things? Or does Levi-Strauss suggest a connection between advertising and mythology?
You say, "advertising operates in our culture the way mythology operates in primary oral culture." I'm sorry, but this claim is far from self-evident to me. How does mythology operate in primary oral cultures in your estimate (or in Levi-Strauss's estimate)?
MY RESPONSE:
Most attempts to assign meaning to the content of television programming operate under the same mistaken assumptions that plagued linguistics in its early years. The first linguists mistakenly assumed that meaning could be found in the particular sounds of a language, so that words having to do with water would always use the so-called liquid vowels and consonants, and so on. It wasn't until linguists realized that the sounds of a language have no meaning in and of themselves that they were able to arrive at a viable hypothesis concerning the structure and function of languages. Similarly, until scholars concerned with interpreting the mass media realize that the meanings of our popular culture are to be found in the structural configurations and not in the isolated images and symbols, attempts to discover those meanings will be stymied.
In my dissertation I showed how the seemingly random and isolated elements of television advertising conform to a general overall structure, and I suggested that this structure is similar to one that the French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, has identified in the myths of primary orality cultures. In order to better explain what I mean I will first give an example of the similarity between the type of logical processes evident in myths and in advertising, and then I will outline briefly what I believe is the general structure of television advertising.
Lévi-Strauss has determined that the logical processes that go into the creation of a myth can be divided into two categories, “empirical deduction,” and “transcendental deduction”:
"Empirical deduction occurs whenever a myth attributes a function value or symbolic meaning to a natural being because of an empirical judgment durably associating the being with the attribution. From a formal point of view the correctness of the empirical judgment is irrelevant."(Levi-Strauss, C. “The Deduction of the Crane,” in Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition, Pierre Maranda and Elli Kongas Maranda, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), p. 3.
Empirical deduction begins with some observation of reality. It then treats that observation as if it were an abstract concept. This type of mental process can occur using two different types of association. First, through the use of a metonymic association, some observed characteristic or habit of an animal is treated as if it stood for the entire animal. If this characteristic is found elsewhere in the environment, it too is associated with that animal. The metonymic association then becomes a metaphoric assertion. Lévi-Strauss’s term for such uses of metaphor is “imaginary association.”
"An imaginary association…results in the attribution of curative powers against snake bite and tooth decay to seeds shaped like fangs." (Ibid, p.3)
The metonymic association (fangs of a snake) is used to make a metaphoric assertion (fang-shaped seeds cure snake bite). In television advertising we see this type of reasoning regularly. The air bubbles in Baggies sandwich bags make the bag look like an alligator’s skin, so an alligator was used as the product mascot. The Volkswagon “bug,” the Turtlewax turtle, and the old Exxon tiger are further examples of this type of association.
Transcendental deduction operates at another step removed from reality. The characteristic attributed to an animal or an object is removed from any grounding in empirical observation, and is determined by its relative position in the structure as a whole. Lévi-Strauss states that
"It does not necessarily rest on a true or false, a direct or indirect empirical base; rather, it stems from the awareness of a certain logical necessity, that of attributing certain properties to a given being because empirical deduction has previously connected this being with others on the basis of a set of correlative properties." (Ibid, p. 4)
The functioning of transcendental can best be illustrated by using Levi-Strauss’s own example.
According to the Tupi Indians of South America, the tree frog and the bee are opposites. The frog is the master of water because it lives in water that collects in hollow trees, and seems able to find such habitats even during the dry season. However, the bee also lives in hollow trees, but in honey rather than water. Because honey is not water and water is not honey, the two creatures are seen as opposites. (This version of the argument has been simplified for the sake of brevity, and therefore leaves out other determining factors, such as high/low, etc.) The Tupi also see the jaguar as an opposite of the tree frog. While the frog is present master of water, the jaguar (for reasons excluded here) was the former master of fire, which it gave to mankind. These comparisons, which are based at least in part on some empirical observation, now lead to a third comparison which transcends the objective reality:
"If the frog is opposed to the bee, which has honey instead of water (while the frog itself has water instead of honey), we may now introduce transcendental deduction to conclude that the jaguar (opposed to the frog by empirical deduction) must be like the bee and therefore, possess honey in some fashion." (Ibid, p.6)
This line of reasoning explains why Tupi mythology makes the jaguars the first owners of the honey festival. The association “bee equals jaguar” is forced upon the Tupi by the empirical associations they have given the frog, bee and jaguar. Levi-Strauss says that this type of intellectual process is typical mythic thought. Much that appears illogical and contingent in a myth can ultimately be attributed to this combination of empirical (metonymic-metaphoric) deduction and transcendental deduction.
That this type of thinking is also present in the construction of television advertising has not yet been noted.
Generally, the process of structural analysis involves the comparing and contrasting of many variants of a tale in order to determine what is important and what is not. Levi-Strauss has borrowed the notion of redundancy from communication theory to explain the rationale behind this procedure, Imagine that you are the story teller of a tribe that relies on the oral transmission of its body of knowledge. Let us assume for the sake of argument that you are fully aware of the hidden structural associations that your stories are portraying. How would you insure that the information contained in those tales would survive the erosion of time and the individual idiosyncrasies of future story tellers? One way would be to take the basic message or messages and repeat them over and over again using different formats and imagery. Though the stories would seem to be about different heroes, animals, events, and so on, the underlying structure would be more or less the same throughout. Furthermore, future story tellers would internalize these structures so that they would tend to reject any alterations which went against the general pattern.
"…mythic thought transcends itself and, going beyond images retaining some relationship with concrete experience, operates in a world of concepts which have been released from any such obligation, and combine with each other in free association: by this I mean that they combine not with reference to any external reality but according to the affinities or incompatibilities existing between them in the architecture of the mind." (Levi-Strauss,C. From Honey to Ashes: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Vol. 2, translated by John and Doreen Wcightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 473.)
This point about the use of images in mythology is particularly pertinent to a discussion of television advertising. People in general perceive the television image, not as a referent, but as the object imaged. They do not take into account the fact that in the very act of reproducing the objective world on film or videotape, a transformation occurs. The images become symbols that can be charged with meanings above and beyond the concrete reality of the objects they mimic. One of the consequences of this process of symbolization is that the meanings given to each object are affected by the meaning given to all the other objects in the system.
The following arrangement compares three examples of television advertising in terms of their underlying structure:
This arrangement shows that although these three advertisements seem to be about entirely different types of products, with different characters and events, their underlying structures are the same. The interesting thing about this correspondence of structural elements is the equivalent function assigned to dirt, children, and arthritis (illness).
Finally if we generalize the structure of the Wisk, L’Eggs and Ben-Gay ads, we arrive at this arrangement.
With this sort of (albeit very brief) analysis it is possible to see that, at least in many television ads, there is a similar underlying structure. In addition, it is possible to discover the same sort of interest in the distinction between nature and culture that Levi-Strauss found in the mythology of primary orality cultures. As you can see, my concern isn't with the intention of the advertisement to sell a product or service. To me this is just McLuhan's juicy meat distracting the watchdogs of our minds while the real effect of television content takes hold. This effect involves a definition of what is "nature" and what is "culture" and what values we assign to each.
Also, if we look at television content writ large, we can, perhaps arbitrarily separate three broad categories: entertainment, news and advertising. Within the larger structure of television, advertising deals with defining social vs. antisocial (or cultural vs. natural) behavior on a personal level. Entertainment shows deal with the same dichotomy on an interpersonal level. News programs are the same opposition on the public level.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Why Advertising Is Becoming Ubiquitous
(Updated below)
The trend in advertising toward a ubiquitous presence in our lives, as documented in this New York Times article, is a natural outgrowth of the mythologic function of advertising. As advertising becomes truly ubiquitous, and therefore environmental, and before it becomes completely invisible to the average eye, it is a fitting focus for Media Ecology. The question one might asked is why the total penetration of advertising into all venues is considered an imposition. If advertising is our culture's mythology, as I have claimed, why is it perceived as an annoyance?
Reason #1: Due to a misunderstanding of its true nature and impact, to date advertising has been segregated in minutes between programming or spaces in magazines and newspapers. We find advertising annoying because it interrupts our stories, sporting events and news reports. That will change with product placement supplementing and then replacing separate commercial breaks (Think "The Truman Show").
Reason #2: The structure of current advertising is (sometimes) warped by a corporate agenda. Sometimes the conscious attempts by corporate advertisers to bend the message to fit their agenda works against the underlying mythology. This gets our attention, but is also disquieting. Some things just won't work in our current culture. Imagine an ad that tries to convince men to start wearing makeup. What aspects of our current conception of sexual roles would need to change for this to become a reality? Would Avon or Maybelline be willing to take this on to increase profits? What other factors would work against this? The point is that corporation advertising must operate within certain pre-determined structural boundaries to be successful. Sometimes corporations try to push that envelope and it doesn't work.
Reason #3: We haven't yet become numb to its influence. As advertising changes our culture, we adopt new "corporate" identities. We already proudly display corporate logos on our clothing and artifacts. We gain parts of our personal self-image and identity by assimilating corporate images and icons. (In Supersize Me there is a scene where children more readily identify Ronald McDonald than George Washington or Jesus Christ.) Identity change is an uncomfortable process, and as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, can lead to things like social uprisings and war.
UPDATE
In my paper “The Heart of the Matter” which will soon be published under “Proceedings of the 2005 Media Ecology Conference,” I examine the implications of the Greek concept of
which is transliterated as either “thumos” or “thymos” and translated as “mind,” encompassing memory and consciousness.
Classical Greeks believed that consciousness resided in the lungs and was expressed in speech, the dominant communication medium of the age. Thoughts were breaths that originated from a divine source, hence the origin of the word “inspiration.”
In Plato’s time, writing was beginning to supplant speech as the dominant mode of communication and the popular concept of the seat of consciousness and memory began to move from the lungs to the heart. We still speak of ‘learning by heart’ when we want to memorize something. “Reason”, as Plato defined it, was an indication of this shift from speech to writing. He could split reason (“logos”) from feeling (“thumos)” and sexuality (“eros”) as a result of this shift. This differentiation was something that wouldn’t occur to Homeric Greeks.
In our age we see the beginnings of an era of secondary orality. The exact parameters of are still working themselves out, but considering the celebrity and authority granted to our entertainers (that is our singers and actors) it may be that we will see a decline in logos considered as an aspect of consciousness.
The connotation of the term “Age of Advertising” is that we are somehow controlled and defined by beliefs and values dictated by corporations.
My claim is that the advertising of our age is a manifestation of the universal human tendency to apply categories to the elements of our environment and then reconcile the inevitable contradictions that arise. In other words, advertising operates in our culture the way mythology operates in primary orality cultures. I might also add that, compared to the subtlety and complexity of these early mythic systems, our advertising is truly primitive.
This may not involve the type of reason espoused by Plato and Aristotle, but may be a result of a type of intellectual activity of primary orality cultures which Claude Lévi-Strauss called a “science of the concrete.”
The trend in advertising toward a ubiquitous presence in our lives, as documented in this New York Times article, is a natural outgrowth of the mythologic function of advertising. As advertising becomes truly ubiquitous, and therefore environmental, and before it becomes completely invisible to the average eye, it is a fitting focus for Media Ecology. The question one might asked is why the total penetration of advertising into all venues is considered an imposition. If advertising is our culture's mythology, as I have claimed, why is it perceived as an annoyance?
Reason #1: Due to a misunderstanding of its true nature and impact, to date advertising has been segregated in minutes between programming or spaces in magazines and newspapers. We find advertising annoying because it interrupts our stories, sporting events and news reports. That will change with product placement supplementing and then replacing separate commercial breaks (Think "The Truman Show").
Reason #2: The structure of current advertising is (sometimes) warped by a corporate agenda. Sometimes the conscious attempts by corporate advertisers to bend the message to fit their agenda works against the underlying mythology. This gets our attention, but is also disquieting. Some things just won't work in our current culture. Imagine an ad that tries to convince men to start wearing makeup. What aspects of our current conception of sexual roles would need to change for this to become a reality? Would Avon or Maybelline be willing to take this on to increase profits? What other factors would work against this? The point is that corporation advertising must operate within certain pre-determined structural boundaries to be successful. Sometimes corporations try to push that envelope and it doesn't work.
Reason #3: We haven't yet become numb to its influence. As advertising changes our culture, we adopt new "corporate" identities. We already proudly display corporate logos on our clothing and artifacts. We gain parts of our personal self-image and identity by assimilating corporate images and icons. (In Supersize Me there is a scene where children more readily identify Ronald McDonald than George Washington or Jesus Christ.) Identity change is an uncomfortable process, and as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, can lead to things like social uprisings and war.
UPDATE
Anonymous asks:
Would it be fair to say that the ubiquity of advertising suggests that we are living in the Age of Advertising?
Would it be fair to say that the Age of Advertising does not vaunt reason (logos) alone as though it were everything?
Would it be fair to say that in this respect the Age of Advertising is seriously at odds with the Age of Reason?
Would it be fair to say that the Age of Advertising reminds us of the non-rational factors in life that Plato (thumos and eros) and Aristotle (ethos and pathos) mentioned?
In my paper “The Heart of the Matter” which will soon be published under “Proceedings of the 2005 Media Ecology Conference,” I examine the implications of the Greek concept of
which is transliterated as either “thumos” or “thymos” and translated as “mind,” encompassing memory and consciousness.Classical Greeks believed that consciousness resided in the lungs and was expressed in speech, the dominant communication medium of the age. Thoughts were breaths that originated from a divine source, hence the origin of the word “inspiration.”
In Plato’s time, writing was beginning to supplant speech as the dominant mode of communication and the popular concept of the seat of consciousness and memory began to move from the lungs to the heart. We still speak of ‘learning by heart’ when we want to memorize something. “Reason”, as Plato defined it, was an indication of this shift from speech to writing. He could split reason (“logos”) from feeling (“thumos)” and sexuality (“eros”) as a result of this shift. This differentiation was something that wouldn’t occur to Homeric Greeks.
In our age we see the beginnings of an era of secondary orality. The exact parameters of are still working themselves out, but considering the celebrity and authority granted to our entertainers (that is our singers and actors) it may be that we will see a decline in logos considered as an aspect of consciousness.
The connotation of the term “Age of Advertising” is that we are somehow controlled and defined by beliefs and values dictated by corporations.
My claim is that the advertising of our age is a manifestation of the universal human tendency to apply categories to the elements of our environment and then reconcile the inevitable contradictions that arise. In other words, advertising operates in our culture the way mythology operates in primary orality cultures. I might also add that, compared to the subtlety and complexity of these early mythic systems, our advertising is truly primitive.
This may not involve the type of reason espoused by Plato and Aristotle, but may be a result of a type of intellectual activity of primary orality cultures which Claude Lévi-Strauss called a “science of the concrete.”
Thursday, January 4, 2007
How Reality Cooks (or Rots) on TV
Question from Peg: What would be a Lévi-Straussian analysis of commentary on Fox News?
I have suggested that the similarity between television advertisements and mythology is more than just coincidental, and it could even be said that in a very real sense television advertising is our culture’s body of mythic narratives,.
If we look at advertising in terms of the advertiser’s intent, it could be said that, without going into the personal psyche of any particular advertising executive, they all produce their thirty and sixty second spots as propaganda for their clients. (Their degree of awareness of the mythic properties of their commercials is not important.) This sort of “hard” propaganda can be set into opposition with news broadcasts, whose producers (in theory, at least) strive to balance opposing viewpoints and to present the “news” as objectively as possible. The news reporters themselves are aware of another contrast within the structure of television content. They refer to their productions as “broadcasts” to differentiate them from “shows” which purport to have entertainment value.
In fact, these three very broad subcategories form a triad that shows how the “stuff’ of reality has been sub-divided for the sake of television. I have borrowed this technique from Claude Levi-Strauss who divided edible foodstuffs into three categories: raw, cooked and rotten:
Lévi-Strauss's Culinary Triangle
According to this schema, all food begins as "raw" but then quickly passes either to "cooked" or "rotten" depending on whether it is subject to a technical or natural transformation. Lévi-Strauss used of a triangle diagram to demonstrate the underlying structure of the process be analyzed, in this case the processing of what has been defined as "edible stuff" from its natural state to a state where either it is fit for consumption or it has spoiled and not fit to consume.
We can perform a similar analysis of how the"reality" that makes up television content undergoes a transformation depending on how it is processed by our mass media of communication.
Within this schema, news broadcasts fall somewhere in between shows and ads in terms of entertainment value vs. propaganda, while shows and ads may have little or nothing to do with the objective world, dividing their productions in terms of their intention to entertain or propagandize. (This is not to say that no show ever has propagandistic intentions, or that no advertising executive ever wishes to entertain. But in general, each is more concerned with the demands of his own domain. Program producers must attract an audience, and advertisers must sell their products.)
It could be stated that if the hidden structure of advertising has to do with an opposition between culture and nature, then within the other legs of the triad there are other hidden structures that determine how the particular material is developed and conveyed. I would tentatively suggest that television programming is concerned chiefly with "social versus antisocial behavior on a personal level," while the news deals with this same general opposition at the "public" level. Within this perspective, the various legs of the triad always favor the status quo, since the definition of what constitutes antisocial behavior depends on who is defining social or acceptable behavior.
Part of the reason Fox News is so disturbing is that they continually violate the supposed boundaries between news, entertainment and advertising propaganda.This is why the current concentration of media ownership is so pernicious. As part of a major media conglomerate, Fox News can frame their news reports according to their own views of social vs. antisocial public behavior and so they slip down the television triangle both toward propaganda and toward entertainment. Just as foods which are fit for consumption even though "rotten" (alcoholic beverages for example) constitute a special exception to general culinary rules, news which has become propagandized, or created largely to entertain, constitutes a violation of the traditional definition of news and requires adjustments in how we consume reality.
I have suggested that the similarity between television advertisements and mythology is more than just coincidental, and it could even be said that in a very real sense television advertising is our culture’s body of mythic narratives,.
If we look at advertising in terms of the advertiser’s intent, it could be said that, without going into the personal psyche of any particular advertising executive, they all produce their thirty and sixty second spots as propaganda for their clients. (Their degree of awareness of the mythic properties of their commercials is not important.) This sort of “hard” propaganda can be set into opposition with news broadcasts, whose producers (in theory, at least) strive to balance opposing viewpoints and to present the “news” as objectively as possible. The news reporters themselves are aware of another contrast within the structure of television content. They refer to their productions as “broadcasts” to differentiate them from “shows” which purport to have entertainment value.
In fact, these three very broad subcategories form a triad that shows how the “stuff’ of reality has been sub-divided for the sake of television. I have borrowed this technique from Claude Levi-Strauss who divided edible foodstuffs into three categories: raw, cooked and rotten:
Lévi-Strauss's Culinary Triangle
According to this schema, all food begins as "raw" but then quickly passes either to "cooked" or "rotten" depending on whether it is subject to a technical or natural transformation. Lévi-Strauss used of a triangle diagram to demonstrate the underlying structure of the process be analyzed, in this case the processing of what has been defined as "edible stuff" from its natural state to a state where either it is fit for consumption or it has spoiled and not fit to consume.We can perform a similar analysis of how the"reality" that makes up television content undergoes a transformation depending on how it is processed by our mass media of communication.
Within this schema, news broadcasts fall somewhere in between shows and ads in terms of entertainment value vs. propaganda, while shows and ads may have little or nothing to do with the objective world, dividing their productions in terms of their intention to entertain or propagandize. (This is not to say that no show ever has propagandistic intentions, or that no advertising executive ever wishes to entertain. But in general, each is more concerned with the demands of his own domain. Program producers must attract an audience, and advertisers must sell their products.)It could be stated that if the hidden structure of advertising has to do with an opposition between culture and nature, then within the other legs of the triad there are other hidden structures that determine how the particular material is developed and conveyed. I would tentatively suggest that television programming is concerned chiefly with "social versus antisocial behavior on a personal level," while the news deals with this same general opposition at the "public" level. Within this perspective, the various legs of the triad always favor the status quo, since the definition of what constitutes antisocial behavior depends on who is defining social or acceptable behavior.
Part of the reason Fox News is so disturbing is that they continually violate the supposed boundaries between news, entertainment and advertising propaganda.This is why the current concentration of media ownership is so pernicious. As part of a major media conglomerate, Fox News can frame their news reports according to their own views of social vs. antisocial public behavior and so they slip down the television triangle both toward propaganda and toward entertainment. Just as foods which are fit for consumption even though "rotten" (alcoholic beverages for example) constitute a special exception to general culinary rules, news which has become propagandized, or created largely to entertain, constitutes a violation of the traditional definition of news and requires adjustments in how we consume reality.
Monday, December 25, 2006
Television Advertising Teaches Us How to Think (in an Era of Secondary Orality)
Every television commercial is a lesson in the ways of thought under secondary orality and, as advertising icons spread out to other venues, they act as constant reminders of the secondary orality way to process experience.
Theatrical television is based on literary conventions. Film school students can tell you how every movie is divided into three acts--just like a stage play. One hour theatrical tv programs extend the dramatic arc to four acts, each about 11 minutes long. The drama progresses via thought processes that are linear, based on literacy-based cause and effect logic. TV Ads teach us to think like pre-literate peoples, using the type of non-linear thought processes that Claude Lévi-Strauss divided into "empirical" and "transcendental" deduction.
Empirical deduction occurs whenever a myth attributes a function value or symbolic meaning to a natural being because of an empirical judgment durably associating the being with the attribution. From a formal point of view the correctness of the empirical judgment is irrelevant. (1)
Empirical deduction begins with some observation of reality. It then treats that observation as if it were an abstract concept. This type of mental process can occur using two different types of association. First, through the use of a metonymic association, some observed characteristic or habit of an animal is treated as if it stood for the entire animal. If this characteristic is found elsewhere in the environment, it too is associated with that animal. The metonymic association then becomes a metaphoric assertion. Lévi-Strauss’s term for such uses of metaphor is “imaginary association.”
An imaginary association…results in the attribution of curative powers against snake bite and tooth decay to seeds shaped like fangs. (2)
The metonymic association (fangs of a snake) is used to make a metaphoric assertion (fang-shaped seeds cure snake bite). In classic television advertising we see this type of reasoning regularly. The air bubbles in Baggies sandwich bags make the bag look like an alligator’s skin, so an alligator is used as the product mascot. The Volkswagon “bug,” the Turtlewax turtle, and the old Exxon tiger are further examples of this type of association.
In current advertising, the associations are more subtle. For example, many ads feature automobiles that will never in real life leave a paved road "roughing" it through forests or deserts, avoiding natural obstacles and endowing the driver with the "freedom of the wilderness." The irony of these images is that the car or SUV, which often is given an animal name, is actually the embodiment of culture that provides the driver with protection against the storm. This is why Marshall McLuhan could refer to the automobile and driver as a knight in shining armor:
The car gave to the democratic cavalier his horse and armor and haughty insolence in one package, transmogrifying the knight into a misguided missle. (3)"Transcendental" deduction operates at another step removed from reality. The characteristic attributed to an animal or an object is removed from any grounding in empirical observation, and is determined by its relative position in the culture's symbolic structure as a whole. Lévi-Strauss states that:
It does not necessarily rest on a true or false, a direct or indirect empirical base; rather, it stems from the awareness of a certain logical necessity, that of attributing certain properties to a given being because empirical deduction has previously connected this being with others on the basis of a set of correlative properties (4)
Lévi-Strauss has borrowed the notion of redundancy from communication theory to explain the rationale behind this procedure. Imagine that you are the story teller of a culture that relies on oral communication for the transmission of its body of knowledge. Let us assume for the sake of argument that you are fully aware of the hidden structural associations that your stories are portraying. How would you insure that the information contained in those tales would survive the erosion of time and the individual idiosyncrasies of future story tellers? One way would be to take the basic message or messages and repeat them over and over again using different formats and imagery. Though the stories would seem to be about different heroes, animals, events, and so on, the underlying structure would be more or less the same throughout. Furthermore, future story tellers would internalize these structures so that they would tend to reject any alterations which went against the general pattern.
That's why, in our secondary orality culture, ads want to insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives: Not just as an accepted part of television and radio and magazines but also in movies and broadway theaters, in our schools and workplaces. Can our places of worship be far behind?
The type of thought manifest in television advertising represents the symbolic realization of the lesson of the medium itself. A medium of images and sounds, TV's biases toward the non-discursive are represented and reinforced in the narratives of advertising.
(1) Levi-Strauss, C. (1971). “The Deduction of the Crane,” in Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition, Maranda, P. and Maranda E.K., Eds. (p. 3). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
(2) Ibid. (p. 3)
(3) McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (p. 17). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
(4) Levi-Strauss, C. Op. Cit, (p. 3)
Monday, December 18, 2006
The Rise of Product Placement
Why has product placement become an attractive alternative to the standard commercial messages which interrupted televised narrations but did not enter the narrations themselves? It has been argued that economic factors and competition from new media are forcing advertisers to reevaluate how to get their messages across. In fact this is just the tail wagging the dog. It has always been inevitable that the "content" what we call "ads" would move from the confines of the 15 or 30 seconds spaces between the old content presented by our traditional media to become involved in all forms of entertainment, from movies to television, to the theater, to news reports, to our literature.
As the mythic avatars of our culture, advertising icons want to insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives, and we subconsciously want them to do so. As Nicholas Johnson noted, television programs are not the "products" of American television. We, the viewers, are the product and we are sold to advertisers at a cost per thousand by the television and cable networks. Advertisers spend a great deal of money testing and researching which symbols or narratives will strike what Tony Schwartz calls a "responsive chord" with the public. Through their psychological research, advertisers have become very sophisticated in their understanding of what motivates our purchasing behavior.
Think about how the average person in Homeric Greece related to the Iliad or the Odyssey. These performance/poems weren't just the "literature" of Greek culture, separate from their general experience. Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan and others have pointed out that the Iliad and Odyssey constituted cultural "how-to manuals" or "mythic encyclopedias," preserving for a culture without writing the proper ways to conduct ceremonies, the proper relationship of Greeks toward their gods and the proper things to believe about just about everything in their world.
French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss noted that such mythic encyclopedias reconcile or deny the inevitable contradictions within a culture's system of beliefs. My research on television advertising suggests that many television ads deal with nature/culture issues, wrestling with the same types of concerns that Lévi-Strauss discerned in the mythology of South American cultures. Ads are part of a system that explains the contradictions of our culture, or denies that those contradictions exist. The iconic imagery presented by ads is not "art", out there to be appreciated only by an educated few. They are part of all our daily lives and as such they constitute our culture's mythic encyclopedia. By doing so, they promote well-being and peace of mind of members of the culture.
Commercials portray people suffering from the assaults of dirt and disease, using the sponsor's product to mediate and restore order. Foods of all types, raw and cooked, fresh and "aged' or "cultured" are touted, not just as basic nutrition, but as enablers for social occasions. Personal care products promise to help overcome individual shortcomings and enhance sexual attractiveness.
To help them better grasp this concept, I like to ask students in my classes the following question: Why do women in our culture wear makeup? The acceptance of this cultural norm is so deep that this question is seldom asked. We see all sorts of ads in all our media showing women wearing the public mask that the use of makeup represents. A woman's need to wear makeup is constantly promoted and reinforced by all of our media, but seldom are the particulars of purchasing, applying and wearing makeup examined in such minute detail as they are in our advertisements. Why do women need to do this? Why, before going out in public do they engage in rituals associated with eyes, skin and mouth? Perhaps, it is argued, that applying makeup minimizes individual variances from the beauty norm and thereby enhances one’s sexual attractiveness. Then why don't men need to wear makeup? What allows them to forgo the rituals? Certainly in other times and other cultures the use of makeup by men was perfectly acceptable.
I would argue that there is a structural opposition within our culture that, in opposing men and women, dictates that one needs makeup while the other doesn't. In her opus, Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia explores at length some of the root causes of this opposition. Paglia discusses in great detail how the great works of art of our culture have reflected these oppositions and in other writings she traces how modern advertising pays homage to these artistic precedents. I would add that one of the ways the characteristics of this structure is disseminated and maintained is through the structure of the entire body of advertising in our media. Not just the images, but the narratives of advertising perpetuate this male/female opposition.
We still can't see that modern advertising, in all its manifestations, performs the same functions in our culture that the Iliad and the Odyssey performed in ancient Greece, or that tales about frogs and honey bees and jaguars perform for native South Americans. To me, this is a prime example of McLuhan's assertion that we are numb to our technology's impact.
As the mythic avatars of our culture, advertising icons want to insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives, and we subconsciously want them to do so. As Nicholas Johnson noted, television programs are not the "products" of American television. We, the viewers, are the product and we are sold to advertisers at a cost per thousand by the television and cable networks. Advertisers spend a great deal of money testing and researching which symbols or narratives will strike what Tony Schwartz calls a "responsive chord" with the public. Through their psychological research, advertisers have become very sophisticated in their understanding of what motivates our purchasing behavior.
Think about how the average person in Homeric Greece related to the Iliad or the Odyssey. These performance/poems weren't just the "literature" of Greek culture, separate from their general experience. Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan and others have pointed out that the Iliad and Odyssey constituted cultural "how-to manuals" or "mythic encyclopedias," preserving for a culture without writing the proper ways to conduct ceremonies, the proper relationship of Greeks toward their gods and the proper things to believe about just about everything in their world.
French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss noted that such mythic encyclopedias reconcile or deny the inevitable contradictions within a culture's system of beliefs. My research on television advertising suggests that many television ads deal with nature/culture issues, wrestling with the same types of concerns that Lévi-Strauss discerned in the mythology of South American cultures. Ads are part of a system that explains the contradictions of our culture, or denies that those contradictions exist. The iconic imagery presented by ads is not "art", out there to be appreciated only by an educated few. They are part of all our daily lives and as such they constitute our culture's mythic encyclopedia. By doing so, they promote well-being and peace of mind of members of the culture.
Commercials portray people suffering from the assaults of dirt and disease, using the sponsor's product to mediate and restore order. Foods of all types, raw and cooked, fresh and "aged' or "cultured" are touted, not just as basic nutrition, but as enablers for social occasions. Personal care products promise to help overcome individual shortcomings and enhance sexual attractiveness.
To help them better grasp this concept, I like to ask students in my classes the following question: Why do women in our culture wear makeup? The acceptance of this cultural norm is so deep that this question is seldom asked. We see all sorts of ads in all our media showing women wearing the public mask that the use of makeup represents. A woman's need to wear makeup is constantly promoted and reinforced by all of our media, but seldom are the particulars of purchasing, applying and wearing makeup examined in such minute detail as they are in our advertisements. Why do women need to do this? Why, before going out in public do they engage in rituals associated with eyes, skin and mouth? Perhaps, it is argued, that applying makeup minimizes individual variances from the beauty norm and thereby enhances one’s sexual attractiveness. Then why don't men need to wear makeup? What allows them to forgo the rituals? Certainly in other times and other cultures the use of makeup by men was perfectly acceptable.
I would argue that there is a structural opposition within our culture that, in opposing men and women, dictates that one needs makeup while the other doesn't. In her opus, Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia explores at length some of the root causes of this opposition. Paglia discusses in great detail how the great works of art of our culture have reflected these oppositions and in other writings she traces how modern advertising pays homage to these artistic precedents. I would add that one of the ways the characteristics of this structure is disseminated and maintained is through the structure of the entire body of advertising in our media. Not just the images, but the narratives of advertising perpetuate this male/female opposition.
We still can't see that modern advertising, in all its manifestations, performs the same functions in our culture that the Iliad and the Odyssey performed in ancient Greece, or that tales about frogs and honey bees and jaguars perform for native South Americans. To me, this is a prime example of McLuhan's assertion that we are numb to our technology's impact.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
On My Dissertation Title: "Myth as Advertising"
I chose my dissertation title, Myth as Advertising, quite carefully after considering many alternatives, including Advertising as Myth. I understood Myth as Advertising to mean that we should considering modern advertising as the form within which the traditional functions of myth could be expressed. The title "Advertising as Myth" implied that modern advertising is composed of pleasantries at best or untruths at worst, and that to consider advertising as myth would allow us to somehow unmask its falsehood by comparing it to all those pleasant but obviously fantastic fairy tales of cultures more primitive than our own.
It is not fruitful to compare the content of modern advertising to classic or primitive myths. The meaning of a image or symbol might be the same, or we might be mislead by labeling. The Keebler elf is not an elf in the classic fairy tale sense of the term, nor is the Jolly Green Giant a fairy tale giant. Just calling them those names doesn't make them so. We can be mislead by being too literal. If we are, we commit the same error as early linguists who thought that meaning could be discovered in the sound of a word, "liquid" vowels having to do with water, etc.
Myth in primary orality cultures served a purpose other than to put children to bed. Without writing, these cultures used stories as ways to think about things. A frog that was master of water to the South American Tupi Indians was more than just a frog. (see Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked). It was also an intellectual peg on which to hang a memorable thought. Sometimes this led to incorrect correlations, forced upon the culture by the overall structure of their stories. But the end result was to allow the consideration of all the elements of that culture's reality as one seamless, uncontradicted whole, to identify the individual's place and purpose in that reality and to justify the mode of existence required by the particular physical environment.
We have trouble understanding the workings of our own culture because we are immersed in it. Take any television commercial and break it down into its underlying structure. Many commercials are merely declamatory and they assume we have internalized our culture's doctrines. Others are didactic, and demonstrate how a product will help us solve a problem. That we weren't aware that we had the problem is irrelevant. My research has shown that more often than not, that problem has to do with the forces of nature or disorder impinging upon a cultural event or ordered activity.
The 60 second commercials from the 1960's and 1970's were more obvious, as I documented in my dissertation. A couple is preparing for a dinner party. The husband discovers that he has "ring around the collar" which threatens the evening's activity. Using Wisk the wife banishes the ring around the collar and the social event proceeds as planned. There are countless other examples.
A convenient dichotomy of nature vs. culture, disorder vs. order, "raw" vs. "cooked" is used in advertising to reinforce cultural assumptions and expectations through the apparently mundane operations of a laundry detergent, a medicine, a perfume or cosmetic, a properly prepared food. Again, intellectual pegs in a secondary orality culture upon which to hang memorable thoughts.
This is what I mean by Myth as Advertising. Advertising is a means by which our culture manipulates and massages its many images and symbols. Ads come and go quickly and are far more efficient for this purpose than longer books or movies. Just as bacteria go through many generations per day in their continuous adaptation to a changing environment, advertisements mutate quickly to encompass the continuous change of our media environment.
It is not fruitful to compare the content of modern advertising to classic or primitive myths. The meaning of a image or symbol might be the same, or we might be mislead by labeling. The Keebler elf is not an elf in the classic fairy tale sense of the term, nor is the Jolly Green Giant a fairy tale giant. Just calling them those names doesn't make them so. We can be mislead by being too literal. If we are, we commit the same error as early linguists who thought that meaning could be discovered in the sound of a word, "liquid" vowels having to do with water, etc.
Myth in primary orality cultures served a purpose other than to put children to bed. Without writing, these cultures used stories as ways to think about things. A frog that was master of water to the South American Tupi Indians was more than just a frog. (see Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked). It was also an intellectual peg on which to hang a memorable thought. Sometimes this led to incorrect correlations, forced upon the culture by the overall structure of their stories. But the end result was to allow the consideration of all the elements of that culture's reality as one seamless, uncontradicted whole, to identify the individual's place and purpose in that reality and to justify the mode of existence required by the particular physical environment.
We have trouble understanding the workings of our own culture because we are immersed in it. Take any television commercial and break it down into its underlying structure. Many commercials are merely declamatory and they assume we have internalized our culture's doctrines. Others are didactic, and demonstrate how a product will help us solve a problem. That we weren't aware that we had the problem is irrelevant. My research has shown that more often than not, that problem has to do with the forces of nature or disorder impinging upon a cultural event or ordered activity.
The 60 second commercials from the 1960's and 1970's were more obvious, as I documented in my dissertation. A couple is preparing for a dinner party. The husband discovers that he has "ring around the collar" which threatens the evening's activity. Using Wisk the wife banishes the ring around the collar and the social event proceeds as planned. There are countless other examples.
A convenient dichotomy of nature vs. culture, disorder vs. order, "raw" vs. "cooked" is used in advertising to reinforce cultural assumptions and expectations through the apparently mundane operations of a laundry detergent, a medicine, a perfume or cosmetic, a properly prepared food. Again, intellectual pegs in a secondary orality culture upon which to hang memorable thoughts.
This is what I mean by Myth as Advertising. Advertising is a means by which our culture manipulates and massages its many images and symbols. Ads come and go quickly and are far more efficient for this purpose than longer books or movies. Just as bacteria go through many generations per day in their continuous adaptation to a changing environment, advertisements mutate quickly to encompass the continuous change of our media environment.
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