poll time
Art imitates life
~or~
Life imitates art?
(more specifically)
Is Society a reflection of Television or Television a reflection of Society?
I have some responses to post in the coming week. This is an interesting question.
posted by Erica @ 3:29 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
James Musselman
01/27/04
Paper 1: Cultural Observation
Dr. Jay Gordon
The Pop-Culture Feedback Loop Avenues of entertainment and advertising: celebrity magazines, MTV, catalogues, shopping malls, pop-up ads. All are visual and auditory explosions of what to cut, copy, paste, rinse and repeat. These sources teach us how to talk, act, dress, even think, and in turn, they get information from us in terms of what we want, what we talk about, even what we dream of. The information is then rewound, fast forwarded, paused and sold back to us. Pop culture and those of us that are part of it are running endlessly in a circle, a loop; like a drumbeat in a computer everything is- sample, cut, position, increase tempo, add distortion, increase rhythm, volume, repeat. The pop culture feedback loop: we live in it, we add to it, but we never think about it, or question if it is freeze framing our culture in a consumer driven nightmare.
Pop culture in a society such as ours can be dangerous because of the power that advertising has over us. We tend to think of advertising in the form of short commercials cut in between breaks of our favorite situation comedies or news broadcasts. In reality, advertising is much wider reaching and deeply penetrating than that. In the past, commercials and magazine ads were clear cut, boxed in and folded neatly so we could recognize them from regular programming. They simply said what a product was, what it did, and how well it performed to get the message accross. However, cynicism has become a growing trend with most consumers, and companies can no longer just make claims of how great their products are without sounding like 21st century snake oil salesmen [ie infomercials]. The solution is to sell a product based on the lifestyle a company has associated with it. To create images, pictures, and stories to show how a product can change one’s life.
On of the most glaring examples of this is medication advertisements by major drug companies. Paxil, Viagra, Prozac, Lipitor, Allegra, Prilosec: Every drug you can think of has a commercial that barely touches on what the pharmaceutical actually does, but rather, the ways in which your lifestyle will benefit from using it. Therefore, a pain reliever does not simply relieve pain any longer. Instead it helps one spend time with kids, drive import cars, ride horses, dance in expensive dresses and enjoy an elegant dinner with a finely aged wine. Drug companies are essentially selling us a product based on the results it can provide in terms of how well our lives will benefit jamming pills in our faces.
Buying into a way of life is what these advtisements are boiling down to. So what does that mean for the advancement of creative ideas and thinking? Are we to be stuck as a carbon copy of what drug companies or music videos want us to be? On a more philosophical level, what does such a way of living say about our ideals of free thought and individualism? Our western point of view stresses that being free to think how we want is one of our most basic human rights. A society such as ours, though, seems to be doing quite the opposite. Media outlets are subconsciously violating our freedom to decide for ourselves with product placement, brand association and corporate sponsorship. With a barrage of neon signs, flashing banners, loud music, spokespeople, and underwritten radio broadcasts they signal to us. “Buy khakis from the GAP!”, “Hit Starbucks for a quick latte!”, “Drive German engineered sports cars!” We are receiving transmission, but how do we respond?
Undoubtedly to complete the loop, we must add ourselves into it’s abyss like center. We can show how the media can effect us, but how do we in turn effect the media itself? Remember that we are the trial audiences, market research groups, and beta testers of all the products that companies sell us. They come to us to find ideas about what they can sell and what we will buy. Unfortunately, there is a bit of a snag with this process, because our desire for a certain lifestyle or material good has most likely been programmed into us by cable television, hip-hop videos, and glitzy award shows. So we return feedback and information to these conglomerates that they have already programmed into us. It is a living, breathing cycle of marketing, wanting, buying, researching, and we lay at the heart of it all.
So where does that leave us in the grand scheme of things? Are we to continue this pop-culture feedback loop, forever stuck in the world advertisers and media outlets have created for us? Ultimately this is an unanswerable question, but that doesn’t mean we are hopeless. At the very least society needs to recognize that it is part of a cycle and that it does have a certain amount of control over the loop. Our thoughts, views, and individuality can be our own and do not have to be uploaded, transmitted, and projected into us. It is time to press pause, unplug, hit the brakes, open our eyes, breathe deep and blow a bit of the thick smoke of consumerism out of our collective system.
Authors Note: I don't totally agree with all of this now, but it's still an "ok" observation on consumer culture. In retrospect I think it's a really intensly pissed off look at marketing and advertising. Which is no suprise because it's after I left the WCBA to persue my English major. Kind of a "fuck you" to the corporate tools of Amerika, heavily inspired by Fight Club
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