Notes for "Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse"

by Sut Jhally

What would you say is the one thing that threatens our survival on this planet the most? To Sut Jhally, it is advertising. Advertising pushes us towards material things for satisfaction, while pushing us away from social relationships. It pushes us towards ever-increasing economic production, while simultaneously driving impending environmental catastrophe. It focuses our attention on individual and private needs, while pushing collective issues to the margins. By stressing immediacy, it steers us away from looking at future consequences. In these ways, advertising represents a serious threat to our survival on this earth.

A central problem of capitalism is not only in creating means of production, but also means of consumption. This is advertising's role, and it is a vastly important one that has changed our cultural landscape. How does advertising do this? By connecting peoples' needs and desires to products, a task that is, at a fundamental level, a seemingly incongruous task.

This is reflected in the general response that people have to advertising. As ads invade more and more of our social space, it becomes harder and harder to get people to notice them, to make them 'stand out' against the crowd of ads flooding our lives. This is, to cite Bateson, a kind of schisogenic relationship, a kind of cyclical, schizophrenic regression, many of the results of which manifest themselves in our daily lives, in our cultural values. Will advertising really ever be able to connect that which it is impossible to connect-material wealth and happiness? At a fundamental level, probably not, but what a gargantuan effort has been made to try to connect these two ideas, ideas which are fundamentally as different as night and day, square peg and a round hole.

This feature of advertisting, the attempt to connect commodities to desires and needs, started in the 1920s.

Advertising addresses us as individuals, not members of a society. Social issues, collective concerns are not its domain. Advertising is the voice of the marketplace, and as such it enforces the beliefs of those who require its existence (the business/corporate class), beliefs like the market is good for us, that government regulation is bad.

When it comes to addressing the social problems we face, advertising makes us look in the wrong direction. Though surely the resources exist to solve a great many of the social and environmental problems that we face today, our priorities, seemingly in the hands of big business, are focused elsewhere. Advertising has helped destroy the sense of community that is necessary in solving those collective problems. In fact, our gaze is so stringently fixed in the direction of the market that it is difficult to even think about how to solve our problems collectively. Instead, we see the further encroachment of advertising into institutions once considered free from their influence. Schools, universities, public broadcasting-core components comprising our public institutions-now seek corporate advertising dollars to help fill the gaps left by decreasing budgets. Is this not an intrusion onto sacred ground?

Part of Jhally's solution is that it is necessary to somehow glamorize the struggle for social change, to make it "fun and sexy". This would essentially steal the steam from what fuels advertising and use it instead in ways that would create a better society for all. This is an interesting idea, but more details are needed...