Many of you reading this are living in a society where individual freedom is built into the way that wares are marketed and sold. Yet, within the structure of the open market, there remains one facet of freedom which is the goal of advertisers to tap into and even control: choice. As we have witnessed with the innovations of Internet sales and in-store shopping, people are easily influenced by suggestions that are offered by friends, consumer journalism, TV and print advertising and websites that rank products. In countries like Germany, it is commonplace that people will check out which companies offer the best prices for consumer products in order to help make up their mind which product to buy. To paraphrase Mad Men's Don Draper, “People want to be told what to do so badly that they'll listen to anyone.” And I have to wonder if this statement might be perfectly suited to today’s commodity culture with the rise of technology that now sends us reminders to get up from our desk and take a break from our computer screens. How is choice built into the very technology which we believe liberates our time and minds to make a free choice when in fact, it is the technology dictating what we purchase, or at the very least desire to possess?
Back in the mid-1990s, most businesses still were not doing online sales as many were still contemplating having a company website built. From the early 1990s larger cities were inundated with temp jobs where people were trained in HTML and Photoshop as the business of web design started with the hiring freelancers who mostly constructed visual facades for companies where purchases were an afterthought. Internet presence at that time meant that you could see a photo of the company manager and have access to its address, phone number and email. These sites clearly served no functional purpose for the business expansion beyond that which the yellow pages fulfilled. As the 1990s moved into this millennium and online purchasing increased, businesses were more than interested in opening up shop to a global sector where most anyone willing to pay customs duties might have access to their products. Fast forward twenty years later and the Internet is kitted out with affiliate marketing networks, print media financed by online advertising and the Webby Awards to boot. Everything we might need—from hard-to-find LED lightbulbs, to a family dentist, to movies we can watch from the comfort of our pajamas—is at our fingertips as consumerism is more centralized on individualism where desire is the primary commodity. The illusion is that we have endless choices and we control what we buy.
Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher known as the “the high priest of pop culture,” spent much of his career examining this relationship of media on human desire. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), he writes of the desire to fix ideas and feelings into permanency: “The printing press had, in the Renaissance, inspired a similar desire to give permanence to daily feelings and experience.” McLuhan drew on our emotional relationship both to objects and how we communicate ourselves through these cultural artifacts. Hence, the current era where people imitate celebrity from the Dorothy Hamill haircut which many women sported during the 1976 Winter Olympics to the Justin Bieber haircut, common throughout 2010. People want to possess that which they see and idealize through a deeper social, even personal, experience. Such experiences take the form of haircuts, tattoos, tennis shoes and an endless number of consumer items that from one minute to the next, people just want. Remember the obsession for the Alessi’s 9093 kettle with a blue handle and red bird whistle which many circa 2000 spent well over $150 on? What drives us to buy items as seemingly anodyne as a specific type of tea kettle?
Skip to the current era and online advertising is now infringing upon privacy which targets vulnerable people and teens, but which can just as easily target people based on political ideology or any number of specific categories. In short, thanks to algorithms, anything goes in today’s online advertising landscape where even Facebook ads target users based on myriad information garnered from how we use social media. It is no longer the case that we will be convinced we need a new pair of jeans from a billboard off the highway, but more the case that popups will tell us we want these jeans because we did a Google search on this very object. Add to this that now with review websites like Foursquare the consumer can find out which is the best hotspot to meet friends for dinner or which psychic will find you the love of your life! Almost nothing escapes targeted advertising today to include healthcare choices and printing services. If you have googled a topic, in all likelihood you will see targeted advertising reflecting that search.
McLuhan writes of “the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form” conferring, through technology, those parts of our identities that we wish to be reflected. Advertising hooks into this from ads that tell us that we “need a vacation,” that we “deserve a break,” and that we are “worth it.” Advertising even convinces us that if we don’t have the financial ability to buy something, that we still “deserve” it. Print and television advertising worked to move the viewer into the position of not only having her every desire met, but advertising generated the notion that we already had the desire to own a certain product. In this way, advertising is never about the product but about the relationship of desire to the product. John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing:
The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it. Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer.
Advertisers are the agencies that control the desired effect of how products are sold to us as women are made into objects of sexual desire and possession, men are sold the dream of prosperity and longevity and our cultural values have slowly shifted from being part of the late 19th century shopping experience where people for the first time shopped as a way of passing time to today where we are incorporated into the product. Or as McLuhan states, “All advertising advertises advertising.”
In the end, for all the pros and cons of online consumerism, what we can learn from the Internet— algorithms and all—is that this virtual space in which many of us spend far too much time is quickly becoming a mirror for unconscious desires and manufactured “need” where real-life interactions are what most humans really need. The way technology frames choice for us today has evolved from the early days of print advertising where having a vacuum clear was a novelty item and symbolically likened to the modernization of the domestic sphere. Today, however, the “must-have items” of fashion are sold to us as if an IV drip for survival in a world where unhappiness and despair abounds should we be without them. It is often said that in advertising “less is more.” Yet, the inverse could be said to ring true in terms of how we render ourselves consumers where more is definitely less.
