[lit-ideas] Re: The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in a Media Age
- From: John McCreery <mccreery@xxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 11:07:00 +0900
On 2004/04/12, at 0:26, John Wager wrote:
> But would you agree that ads do "frame the discourse" remarkably well?
> It would seem to me that the "third world" sees the U.S. primarily
> through our advertisements, and while they may not "get" the exact,
> particular product they are supposed to buy, they "buy into" buying
> products. It's harder to see the same thing happen inside one's own
> culture, but that also seems true: We learn, as we grow up on ads, to
> "pick from" this list of options. These options become life's choices;
> one can buy a car or a motorcycle or a stereo or more Diet Coke or a
> new
> beautician or a new best-seller, but they are all placed on an equal
> footing of purchases. Life becomes purchasing, becomes shopping. No
> other country, Japan included, seems to be as "good" at this as the
> U.S. is.
I would agree--except perhaps for the last line. The most economical
explanation for current US dominance in advertising (and its soul mate,
popular culture) is the US current position as the world's only
superpower.
An analogous phenomenon is familiar to students of historical
linguistics. The dialect of London or Paris or Beijing may be in no way
superior linguistically to the dialect of Yorkshire, Provence, or Amoy;
but one becomes a national (or, in the case of English, an imperial)
language, while the other fades to the fringes of educated
awareness--education being adapted to the needs of national or, in some
cases, transnational commerce and government.
At least as far as advertising goes, the ability to resist
globalization and effectively deploy an NIH (Not Invented Here)
argument against global campaign concepts depends on one of two
factors: Local-content laws enforced by national governments or raw
economic power. The former explains why, for example, global campaigns
must, at a minimum, be reshot in Malaysia using local models and crews.
The latter explains why Coca-Cola Japan can resist ideas emanating from
Atlanta. An agency in a country with neither local-content laws nor
economic power may simply be told to fall in line or lose the client's
business.
But, these quibbles aside, the issue you raise is one discussed
regularly in my seminar on The Making and Meaning of Advertising. From
an industry insider perspective, the idea that any one campaign will be
an all-powerful magic wand is risible. That doesn't, however, change
the central point in what you say, that to live in a world in which the
overwhelming majority of messages received by individuals are delivered
by advertising and popular culture (the latter being defined as the
product of culture industries with access to mass media) is to live in
a very different place than to live in a hunting and gathering band, a
peasant village, or the kind of aristocratic society described by Jane
Austen.
In the latter the range of messages is far more limited and, ideally at
least, the consensus on which messages are to be seen as good, true, or
beautiful is far more solid. That we now live in a world where, to
borrow anthropologist Grant McCracken's words, "meaning flows," a world
described by Zygmunt Bauman as "Liquid Modernity," is a straightforward
corollary of two basic facts:
1) the sheer amount and variety of information with which we now have
to cope, and
2) the internal dynamic of free market competition that drives what
Schumpeter calls capitalism's "creative destruction" in its ceaseless
search for something new.
IMHO, that is.
John L. McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
Yokohama, Japan 220-0006
Tel 81-45-314-9324
Email mccreery@xxxxxxx
"Making Symbols is Our Business"
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