In
"Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture" by Sut Jhally,
the author looks at how advertising has changed over the years and its role in
our daily lives. Jhally tells us that our society is currently a consumer
society, but it wasn't always like this. Only about 150 years ago, our society
was agrarian based and family, community, ethnicity, religion, and other
factors were dominant in creating cultural forms and what was deemed
"popular" in society. During the 1880's-1920's, marketing and
advertising starting to form. During this time those familial and community
factors that were one useful in deciding what was useful to society were no
more; we stopped listening to family and community and instead started
listening to the "reason-why" ads telling us why we should spend our
hard earned money on theis product. Word of mouth wasn't enough to get you to
buy a product anymore.
By
the 1920's, advertising changed again. The dilemma now was that the marketplace
had a surplus of goods from its recent industrialization and now the market had
to devise a way to get people buying these "nonessential"
commodities. To do this, they relied heavily on printing and color advertising,
like ads in the local paper. This visual imagery is an incredibly useful tool
in the world of advertising, but the everyday people didn't quite understand
how to decipher this new technology. So
the advertisers and their agencies, they had to learn how to sell products and teach consumers how to read their
modern ads.
Jhally's
description of the history of advertising shows us how we got to where we are today. Our
current society is a consumer society, heavily influenced by the marketplace
and our emphasis on buying commodities. This is where we get the idea "the
more stuff you have, the happier you are." To reaffirm this notion of buy
buy buy and buying makes you happy, advertising is everywhere you look and
almost impossible to escape. Jhally describes a study where people said what
they searched for in life and the overwhelming answers were: personal autonomy,
control over one's life, self-esteem, a happy family life, loving relations, a
relaxed tension-free leisure time, and good friendships. These findings are important
in advertisement creation, and these findings often make advertising more
difficult as none of those wants are from commodities, but are more-so social
factors instead. This leads advertisers to focus on telling us how the
commodities they're selling improve our lives and social life, I mean, who
wouldn't want a product that made everyone like you and you could lead a
relaxed tension free life? Advertising promotes the idea of the "good
life," where everything is perfect; they heavily rely on this principle to
sell you relatively useless commodities.
Jhally
describes and important theme that arises through media advertising, and that
is partipulation. Partipulation is essentially where the viewer/buyer is
partaking in their own manipulation. In the terms of advertising, what is being
advertised is heavily reliant on social needs and wants, which is created by
the viewer/buyer, which then creates an endless loop. This loop leads us into a
"joyless economy," as Jhally says, where our happiness relies on our commodities,
but the endless loop of new commodities makes it impossible to truly be happy
in the end. This overwhelming barrage of
commodities at all times leads buyers confused and vulnerable, often enabling
the buyers to buy more and they're not quite sure why. Jhally also points out
that our current media advertisement system has now moved to a "vignette
approach," where our commercials are getting shorter and short and rely on
people buying things by emotion rather than thought. And, to make these quick successive
ads memorable, sexuality is thrown in and emphasized to help them stand out. This
"vignette approach" leads to more radical advertising where
advertising companies are constantly competing with each other with who can be
the most memorable.
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