Response to Chapters 11, 12, & 13

On Chapter 11:

From page 345 of Media & Culture: "By some research estimates, the average American comes into contact with two thousand forms of advertising each day." I find this statistic pretty disturbing. In class we so frequently discuss the high volume of imagery, text and audio that invades our everyday routines that you would think I'd be unfazed by this kind of statistic; but despite being reasonably aware of it, I found the number to be pretty eye-opening. 2000 in a day? That's...a lot. If you sleep an average of eight hours, that's 125 ads for every hour you're awake. And 2000 is only the average -- I can only imagine that New Yorkers fall at the higher-density end of the spectrum. Of course, you have to be wary that this statistic is brought to us by "some research"...are "Some Researchers" in the room down the hall from "They" and "Some People"? But 2000 ads per day sounds believable at the very least, albeit depressingly so.

Further along in the chapter, I found the section on different advertising approaches to be interesting. The first five strategies (famous-person testimonial, plain-folks pitch, snob-appeal approach, bandwagon effect, and hidden-fear appeal) I was fairly familiar with, and was able to recognize by description and connect to actual advertisements I've seen; the last one (irritation advertising), however, I had never realized was a genuine, intentional form of advertising. I had always assumed that obnoxious, annoying, repetitive ads were the fault of incompetent advertisers who tried to make convincing advertisements and failed. Personally I'm not sure how effective irritation advertising can really be; I would expect any company spending a portion of their budget on advertising to prefer one of the first five more reliable advertising strategies. But apparently there are companies out there willing to try it. I was a bit surprised that our very pop-culture-saavy textbook didn't mention the "Head-On" ads from a year or two ago, since they actually gathered a fair amount of press; but perhaps the ad was a bit too recent to get into the 7th edition. I did, however, find this fun clip of Brian Williams covering the Head-On phenomenon:



One has to wonder if the ad was not supplemented in large part by the many online parodies made of it; without the internet community to bolster its presence by complaining and joking about it, the Head-On ad probably would not have garnered nearly as much attention as it did. But that's only my personal hypothesis.

On Chapter 12:

Looking at Chapter 12 as a whole, what I gleaned from this chapter was that public relations play a role in the media that is as large and influential as the role played by advertising, if not more so. But the role played by public relations is infinitely more discreet than that of advertising, to the point of being invisible. I think most people (at least, most reasonably educated people) are aware of the constant barrage of advertisements, and this awareness prevents them from being taken in by every ad they see. PR, on the other hand, is something that affects nearly all the media we receive; yet we remain painfully unaware of it. Most unsettling (I find a lot of things in these three chapters to be unsettling) was the idea of PR people "reinterpreting the facts" -- the task of transmitting the truth from its origin to the public via the media already so closely resembles a game of "telephone" that the idea of a biased party intentionally tampering with the facts seems catastrophic at the very least. And yet I realize this is happening, moreover happening constantly, and, indeed, has been happening since the days of Rockefeller and Ivy Lee.

The section on Edward Bernays, the second major 'public relations counselor' after Ivy Lee, reminded me of the Chomsky film; Bernays' quote, "The duty of the higher strata of society -- the cultivated, the learned, the expert, the intellectual -- is therefore clear. They must inject moral and spiritual motives into public opinion," seems to refer to the elitist "twenty percent" that Chomsky refers to; and, indeed, Bernays' term "engineering consent" is so synonymous with "manufacturing consent" that I would be interested to know if Chomsky based his theories on Bernays'. (I realize, of course, that Chomsky and Bernays would be on 'opposite sides', as it were; but the language used is so similar that it seems unlikely to be entirely coincidental.)

On Chapter 13:

First, a statistic that totally grossed me out: "Over [the past 30 years], according to Fortune magazine, the average real annual compensation of the top 100 CEOs went from $1.3 million -- 39 times the pay of an average worker -- to $37.5 million, more than 1,000 times the pay of ordinary workers." (pg. 418) Okay, statistics are statistics but if that's even remotely close to the truth, that level of financial inequality is just disgusting.

The statistic on CEO vs. average worker income ties into a section of the chapter that got my attention: "The Fallout from a Free Market." (pg. 428) Throughout our country's history, the definitions of capitalism and democracy have become tightly (perhaps even irreversibly) interwoven with one another, and the textbook explains this well. Already the driving force behind so much of the last century's global politics, fear of communism is clearly still playing a major role in our society and media today. If so much emphasis had not been placed on the "threat of communism" throughout the 20th century, it may have been possible for the American public to maintain a clear understanding of the division between capitalism and democracy. And in that case, maybe more of us would be capable of recognizing and blowing the whistle on the unjust and monopolistic system being run in this country today. I especially appreciated the explanation of the difference between "consumer control" and "consumer choice"; I think most Americans see a wide range of consumer choice offered to them and mistake this as a sign of a thriving democracy, when in reality they are unaware that the level of control they possess as a consumer is severely limited. I also felt that the image the textbook painted of capitalism as a vertical model and democracy as a horizontal model was very effective in showing the differences between the two. I think it could be beneficial to use this clear, concise explanation when teaching the forms of government to younger students; at the very least, I feel that I would have benefited from it in high school or even earlier.