onfocus

A few years ago I put together a list of books about media that have helped me understand different pieces of our culture. I'm currently reading a book that I'm officially adding to my Guerilla Media Literacy List. The Consumer Trap by Michael Dawson sounds at first like a personal finance book, and I suppose it might affect readers' buying habits in some ways. But the book is really an examination of the business systems that influence and direct our off-the-job lives.

Before reading this book I was very aware of standard marketing terms such as branding, differentiation, distribution channels, and targeting. I was even aware of psychological advertising methods that were pioneered by Edward Bernays, explored by folks like Vance Packard, and are in heavy use today. (Check out the excellent documentary The Century of the Self for a crash course in psychological advertising.) So I considered myself fairly familiar with the Marketing Machine. But reading Dawson's book brought together these familiar concepts and many more new marketing tools into a complete, coherent picture.

The book starts with a history of both marketing and marketing criticism. Dawson introduced me to Frederick Winslow Taylor, who used methods from science to organize business, and Thorstein Veblen, an economist and early critic of corporate business practices. In one example of scientific observation, Taylor attached lights to workers, filmed them as they worked, and found ways to make their movements more efficient. Taylor's ideas about engineering work environments, objects, and people's actions lead to companies taking a similar, scientific approach to people's off-the-job, product-related activities as well. Veblen, on the other hand, coined the term conspicuous consumption and found that corporate marketers were using "force and fraud" to engineer people's activities in a form of absentee ownership that has existed throughout history. These two figures set up the tension that exists throughout the book.

At times I couldn't tell if I was reading a critique of marketing or a how-to manual. But I think a big part of being a literate media consumer is understanding how the system works. Dawson shows that marketing is about much more than advertising, and that it's marketing that decides which products are produced. He describes marketing strategies such as differentiation between equal products, planned obsolescence that increases the chances someone will buy a new product before an old one is used up, and elaborate packaging that extends the brand.

I don't think we can be completely free from the forces of marketing, and we probably wouldn't want to be. But a greater awareness of the carrots and sticks that are out there can help us make informed decisions. If you're interested in how your media environment influences you on a daily basis, you are the target market for The Consumer Trap.

Try a search for the word "vows" at any news aggregator: Google, Yahoo. Everyone is vowing to do stuff across all news categories from entertainment to politics to technology to sports. I like a good vow as much as anyone else, but I vow not to use the term in my own post titles. Except this post, which is alternately titled: PB Breaks Vow on Headlinese.

Update: Jason noticed a lot of urging going on as well. And you can't help but notice the eyeing everyone is apparently doing.

Update 2: PB Eyes Wiki Headlinese, Urges 'Vows' Addition.

One of my favorite programs on NPR is On the Media. I always seem to miss it on the radio because it's on at an odd time for me. So I've messed around with FM tuners on my PC, and TiVo-like programs trying to catch them. I could never find the right combination of hardward and software. They recently started podcasting their shows—On the Media podcasts—and I haven't missed one since. New episodes just show up in iTunes and I can listen to them whenever I have time. I didn't quite understand the appeal of the subscription component of podcasting before, but now I see that if there's a program I always want to catch, podcasting is very handy.

Last November 3rd I mentioned that, "...it's time to eliminate the [television] from my daily life as much as possible." If you're following along at home, you might want to hear how it's going. I'm down to an average of one hour a day. I get almost all of my news online, so I don't feel any less informed. Now I'm not even watching "good" progams I used to love like News Hour, Frontline, and Nova. (My one hour/day is mostly The Daily Show, South Park, and some McLaughlin Group on the weekend.) sk and I recently removed the television from our bedroom—which was tough because we were both used to falling asleep with some background noise. But that has drastically cut down the remaining daily TV time.

I may be compensating in other ways, though, because I picked up a nasty PlayStation 2 habit in the last couple of months. ;) Ahh well, at least the experiment in cutting out television programming has been a smashing success. It may even be time to go completely off the tv grid and cut the cable cord. At least that idea doesn't seem impossible now.

I've been thinking about this New Science article on weblogs—The 'blog' revolution sweeps across China—and differing approaches to censorship. (Spotted on Joho the Blog: Bo ke.) This part about blogs being good at finding euphamisms is great:

But the net police found it much harder to purge discussion of Yitahutu's closure in the blogosphere. Bloggers are quick to find euphemisms so that they can continue conversation despite keyword filtering.

Keyword filtering and banning seems like a quaint way to control language. If Lakoff, Luntz, and Orwell have taught us anything it's that the power is in redefining words. I think about this whenever I hear the phrase activist judges. If you want to take power away from the judicial branch of the government, one way to do it is to make the word judge itself into a slur. (It worked with the word liberal.) And hey, why not take down the word activist while you're at it? That's so much more effective than trying to stop the use of the words judge or activist. People have to use these words to communicate, and by attaching negative meanings to them you force people to think negatively about the concepts these words represent. Philip K. Dick also nailed this idea:

The basic tool for manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

Chinese bloggers are practicing the new style of word-manipulation to route around an old style of control.

I took a break from my TV-fast to watch Frontline tonight. It was another excellent program about the media by Douglas Rushkoff called The Persuaders. It reminded me of this quote by Marshall McLuhan:

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commerical interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.

I think McLuhan's point is that anytime we consume electronic media, it's giving control of our senses over to a third-party temporarily. Right now you've entrusted me—some random guy in Oregon you probably don't know—with your eyes and attention. Your nervous system is processing this post and evaluating these words. Once *every* message entering our consciousness is paid-for by a commercial interest, we've given away our ability to have an authentic culture. What's hopeful about this view of media is that the choice is ultimately ours; we have some power over how much control over our nervous system we give out.