thoughts on capitalism (ongoing)

[novapsyche]

Capitalism was theorized and implemented before the advent of modern advertising. Advertising, which dawned around 1910 (at least in the US), demonstrated (as was proven years later) that ads circumvent higher cognitive functions--that is, brands are interpreted by the brain at a nonrational level. Thus, capitalism unthreads itself, because it is founded upon the assumption that consumers are rational actors.

Advertising, in my view, removes agency: it replaces all options with what appears to be all options. It presents a small, visible market as the market that is available to the consumer. The latter is actually full of vendors that do not have access to advertising as well as those who do. Those who have access to advertising--those who already have the capital to create ads that reach the wide consuming public--alter reality by substituting a market that is artificial, a market that exists only in the reach of popular media.

Comments

[riverrealm.livejournal.com]

brands are interpreted by the brain at a nonrational level
I've been thinking about this lately... how to protect myself from the influence of color, sound, and form in advertising and logos, but still be open and sensitive to it in desirable contexts.

[jdoggiedogg.livejournal.com]

If this were MySpace, I'd give you 2 kudos.

[vrax.livejournal.com]

It's a nice post but I feel a distinction is necessary. When you're talking about only goods, I agree. But when discussing Service as a commodity it has be viewed as necessarily irrational, because service, etiquette etc. are matters of personal taste.

Surely there are guidelines and various basic constants (I prefer no spit in my food!) but when it comes to nuanced service the model was never intended to have a rational or consistent audience. For example massage - each person's body is different, it has different needs and therefore various types of massage are appealing to various types of people.

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

Which highlights why we need better controls for deceptive advertising. Drug company ads are the worst.

I'm proud to say I rarely see TV commercials, having eliminated commerical TV from my viewing diet. Print ads aren't quite as insidious, easier to see the hidden messages.

[dr-pipe.livejournal.com]

Everyone I usuall agree with really seems to hate advertising. I just can't get myself worked up about it. Perhaps I have too much faith in my decision making process, but basically, if a commercial succeeds in convincing me that I want something, then I feel that I really want it. Maybe without the commercial I wouldn't have wanted it, but now I do. They earned my business, if they successfully convinced me. Considering that about 99% of commercials do not make me want whatever it is they're selling, I feel pretty confident that I'm not being brainwashed or anything.

I do suppose that the real problem, if there is one, lies with averages and net effects across millions of people. If everyone has a different level of susceptability, then I guess maybe some people are high enough on that scale that a commercial's influence could be considered, not coercive, but perhaps influential to an undesirable degree. This is especially relevant with children who don't have their rational facilities trained yet.

[dr-pipe.livejournal.com]

Although I guess I'm talking about individual resistance to the influence of individual commercials, and maybe you're more concerned about scope issues - people are only aware of what's being advertised, and ignore stuff that doesn't advertise effectively...

Still doesn't seem that problematic to me; the solution would be more advertising, so that all options are making themselves known. Less advertising would just enlarge the pool of options that no one knows about.

No, I think that for advertising to be a serious problem, it would have to be the case that it is exerting some kind of forceful control over people. I can believe that your scope issue does influence people for sure, but as I said, the answer to that seems to be to increase the advertising of the underexposed choices. But do I believe that advertising is overriding people's decision making process in a harmful way? Causing coercion or overwhelming influence on any given individual? I have a hard time believing that, except perhaps on a statistical average kind of scale, and influence at that scale just means, to me, that there were enough people out there predisposed to want whatever the product is that when the commercial came out, all those predisposed people then became aware of the product (or got reminded of it) and then went and bought it...