ADV 442: ADVERTISING & SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY HANDOUT PACK
“ I love studying social
communication
in advertising.
It’s like pure honey.”
NOW WITH MORE CHEESE
Table of Contents
Handout
Page
The Appeal
2
Puffery
3
Disinformation
4
Visuals
5
Magic
6–7
Gender in Advertising
8 – 10
Race & Ethnicity
11 – 12
Global Advertising & Cultural Imperialism
13 – 14
Political Advertising
15 – 16
Databases, Targeting, & Mass Surveillance
17 – 18
On-Line Advertising
Atmospherics & Hyperreality
19 – 20
21 – 22
Appropriation
23 – 24
Popular Resistance to Advertising
25 – 26
Views of Advertising 1: Free Market Liberalism
27 – 28
Views of Advertising 2: Left Liberalism
29 – 30
Views of Advertising 3: Marxism
31 – 32
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2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
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12
13
14
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Databases, Targeting, & MASS Surveillance
This unit extends previous discussions of the research function of the full service agency and is related to the
broader topic of the role of the social sciences in advertising. Remember that one of the ways the research
function developed was as the formal “research arm” of the full service agency. Personnel in the research
department regularly use social science techniques to see how people respond to advertising messages. This
area of the agency (or independent contractors) work quite closely with creative personnel to “test”
campaigns.
However, there is another research component of the agency that focuses on where consumers are located
and on predicting their behavior, especially in relation to media use. This type of research actually antedates
the other kind and goes back all the way to before the birth of the full service agency. George P. Rowell’s
American Newspaper Directory, for instance, was a 19th century attempt to document the circulation and
readership of various newspapers. Early forms of research into how people were using magazines and
newspapers were also undertaken at this time in efforts to “target” consumers most effectively. Basically, the
problem was how to locate, group, and track consumers so that they can be made objects of specialized sales
communications. A related objective is the prediction of consumer behavior based on previous purchases.
In recent years increasingly complex computer databases have been created that allow the targeting process
to be pursued in very sophisticated ways. Furthermore, the increasing presence of these technologies in our
lives has created new ways to track consumers and to generate records of their everyday interactions. These
powerful marketing techniques accordingly raise fears over the loss of personal privacy, commercial intrusions
into more areas of our lives, and the pervasiveness and sophistication of new forms of mass control.
Four Basic Categories of Consumer Information
Databases of consumer information now routinely contain billions of individual records compiled into profiles
of individual consumers and market segments. The four basic sources of this information are:
l Demographics: in this class, demographics refer to data that describe characteristics of a population,
especially when divided into consumer segments. Demographic data describe characteristics like
age, income, ethnicity, and geographic location.
l Psychographics: data systems that collect and classify aspects of people’s psychological make-up and
their lifestyles. SRI’s well known VALS system, which we discussed earlier in the semester, is a wellknown example of a psychographic system.
l Behaviorgraphics: sources of data that record behavior, especially past consumer behavior.
Nowadays, such records are generated and compiled from many routine consumer interactions, such
as surfing the web and credit card purchases.
l Geodemographics: these systems integrate information from numerous databases and divide the
population into “clusters” of consumers based on demographic, psychographic, and behaviorgraphic
variables. The basic claim is that there are clusters of people scattered across the United States who
look and act similarly, have similar attitudes, and live in similar neighborhoods. Although they are
geographically dispersed, technology now allows these ”segments” to be tagged, tracked, and made
objects of specialized sales efforts (including selective political communications). The Claritas
corporation’s PRIZM system is a well-known example of a geodemographic database.
The sources of information described above are integrated in various ways and support new techniques for
monitoring and targeting people with advertising and other sales communications (such as junk mail and
telemarketing). The terms listed below help us further understand these data systems and concerns associated
with their use.
17
Key Terms
l Panopticon (Panopticism): the panopticon was a design for a prison created in 1787 by the philosopher and social reformer
Jeremy Bentham. The highly efficient circular design exposed each inmate to constant observation, but the inmates
were never able to confirm whether they were actually being observed from the darkened central tower.
Contemporary media theorists use the image of the panopticon in discussions of how contemporary information
technologies keep large populations under surveillance.
l Surveillance: the process of keeping close watch over a person or group. Traditionally, this type of monitoring has been
associated with keeping official watch over a person who is under suspicion, for instance by secret police or undercover
agents. Increasingly, this term is used by media theorists to describe the way marketers and other parties observe and
track entire populations using computerized systems, including new media systems.
l Surveillance Capitalism: a form of capitalism in which the collection and commodification of personal information
becomes a lynchpin of consumerism. Surveillance capitalism has become possible with the rise of digital technologies
and the pervasive collection of transaction generated information (TGI)
l Transaction Generated Information (TGI): information about people’s commercial and non-commercial day-to-day
activities produced whenever they interact with computerized systems. TGI is aggregated within computer databases
and allows data miners to identify patterns and commonalities among groups of people, as well as to locate individuals
and track their behavior. Examples of interactions that create TGI include shopping with credit cards, using
supermarket discount cards, surfing the web, using a cell phone, and using an ID card to pass through an electronically
monitored door.
l Addressability: the ability of computerized devices to identify and selectively communicate with each other because each
device can be pinpointed in time and space. In the context of advertising, addressability allows consumers to be
targeted with specialized ads whenever they are using addressable media systems, including when they surf the web,
use their cell phones, etc.
l Data Mining: the process of identifying patterns and commonalities in large quantities of information. Marketers “mine”
computerized databases of consumer information to identify ways in which they can segment people into valid
consumer groups and identify patterns and commonalities in their behavior. This process allows then allows advertisers
to more efficiently match market and audience segments and to make such groups targets of increasingly specialized
sales communications.
l Segmentation: In this class, segmentation refers principally to the process of dividing the population into groups of
consumers. As we have discussed segmentation is the basis for targeting portions of the population with specialized
sales communications. The ability to segment media audiences and consumers has been dramatically increased by the
development of computerized communications and media systems in the last 25 years.
l Targeting: in advertising, targeting refers to ways in which consumers can be made the object of specialized ads based on
demographic and psychographic traits. In the last few years, the rise of computerized information systems and
databases has produced qualitative leaps in the ability of marketers to track people and target them with specialized
sales communications.
l Interactive Advertising: forms of advertising made possible by computerized media systems that involve interaction
between consumers and the sponsor of the ad. Addressability allows a minimal level of interactivity whereby a
communication device owned or used by a person identifies itself transmits personal information to another party who
them targets the person with specialized communications. So far, internet applications that allow people to interact
with a web page’s content have been the most visible applications of interactivity, but some advertisers look forward
to a time when much of the sales environment becomes addressable and interactive. Interactive agents are a form of
interactive advertising that uses software programs to imitate real people. Persons using a web site (not necessarily a
consumer site), for instance, will find themselves encountering scripted conversations designed to promote a sponsor’s
products.
l Filter Bubble: in this class, a filter bubble refers to a state of intellectual seclusion that shapes people’s awareness of the
world as their exposure to information becomes limited by efforts to organize them into on-line target segments. Filter
bubbles arise automatically on-line through mechanized efforts to profile, predict, and match a person’s interests to
on-line content and related ads. Another way to phrase this idea is that the commercialized web continually tries to
create a reality tunnel that limits the information we encounter. Facebook is an excellent example of this process.
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TERMS RELATING to On-line Advertising
The rise of on-line advertising has transformed the practice of advertising in fundamental ways. The
development of the World Wide Web sped up changes that advertising institutions had been undergoing
since the 1980s or even earlier. For example, the complexity of coordinating media buying across many
thousands of websites accelerated the break-up of traditional full-service agencies in favor of specialized
independent firms held by Media Holding Companies. On-line advertising also changed the ways
campaigns are distributed and financed. For example, people on the web can be targeted based on
individual profiles rather than grouping people into audience segments. The terms below outline some
of these developments.
___________________________________________________________________________
UNBUNDLING: the process, beginning in the late 1990s of spinning off the media buying/media
research functions of the full-service agencies as separate businesses.
MEDIA BUYING COMPANIES (MEDIA COMPANIES): companies that specialize in researching
audience demographics, negotiating prices, and purchasing advertising time and space across
different types of media. Media Buying Companies identify and collect media inventory to sell
to advertisers seeking to mount an ad campaign targeted to specific market segments.
PPI (COST PER IMPRESSION): in online advertising, CPI refers to the cost advertisers pay each time
an ad is displayed (each impression) to each potential customer. CPM refers to the price for every
thousand people who view the advertisement(s).
PPC (Pay Per Click, CPC - Cost Per Click): the amount payed to a website’s owner each time a person
clicks on an ad. Google’s Adwords is a prominent example of a pay-per-click service.
ADSERVER (3rd Party Adserver): these are computer servers owned by media buying companies
or related firms that coordinate the delivery of targeted ads to website visitors based on their
profiles. Ad serving also tracks ad-related behavior, such as the number of times people click on
ads, and are the basis for determining billings to individual websites.
PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING: refers to ways in which buying ad space on-line has become
automated. Originally, space and time on websites were bought and sold in the traditional
manner using human beings to locate appropriate sites and negotiate prices for each ad
campaign. Programmatic ad buying automates this process by using databases to select
appropriate sites and price out purchases across many websites, often in real time. In effect,
some aspects of the practice of advertising are being turned over to machines that coordinate
the delivery of campaign ads to profiled individuals that fall within the sought after market
segment.
WEB BROWSER: are software applications (apps) that allow people to access information on the
World Wide Web. Browsers allow people to “visit” web pages and view their content. Some of
the most popular browsers are Chrome (Google), Safari (Apple), Internet Explorer (Microsoft),
and Firefox (Mozilla). Browsers have a variety of ways to customize one’s privacy settings and to
protect one from on-line surveillance.
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COOKIE (HTTP Cookie): Cookies are small files with ID tags that are picked up by a browser and
stored on your computer. Cookies are created when you use your browser to visit websites.
Although not all sites use cookies, any website that needs identify you or track your movements
will typically use cookies to do so. For example, cookies can do things like remember your
registered login for set periods of time, settings for use of sites resources, user preferences, and
other types of customization. As you use the WWW your browser will pick up cookies that record
the sites you have visited and your activities on those sites (for example, products you have
looked at while on-line shopping or shows you watch through streaming services). Cookies can
be set to “expire” and disappear after a specific amount of time, but some cookies are designed
to remain on devices permanently. Browsers typically provide tools for users to find and delete
cookies from their computer. However, a certain kind of cookie, called a ZOMBIE COOKIE, will
be recreated from information on personal devices even after a user tries to delete it. The use
of cookies clearly presents ethical and privacy concerns.
TRACKING COOKIES (Third-Party Tracking Cookies, Persistent Cookies, Permanent Cookies): As
the WWW has become more commercialized, new types of cookies have been designed that
gather long-term information about individuals’ browsing habits and are the basis for profiling
individuals on the web. Commercial websites now commonly deposit cookies created by other
companies (third parties) on people’s computers. These third parties are typically firms that
create databases of consumer information for advertisers seeking to target individuals rather
than traditional audience segments offered by mass media. Current versions of some browsers
allow users to block third-party cookies, for example, by indicating that “you do not want to be
tracked” in settings. However, declining tracking cookies does not mean that a browser will stop
displaying ads, only that these ads will not be individually targeted. Removing ads from the
browsing experience requires ad-blocking tools. Note that the use of cookies is actually more
difficult on mobile devices.
WEB PROFILING (Cookie Profiling): refers to tracking a person’s overall activity online thereby
creating a detailed “profile” of their web presence. Profiling is accomplished by using persistent
or permanent cookies to gather information about a person’s web activities across all the sites
they visit. Marketers are able to profile people by buying advertising rights on thousands of
popular websites. The cookies provided by site administrators or third-party firms collect
information and send it back to advertising company (or third-party) servers to create a single
“profile” of a user. Each profile is the basis for targeting potential customers based on how they
browse the Internet. Depending on its level of detail. a person’s web profile will include
demographic information, browsing habits, and records of specific searches. As people land on
sites that sell advertising space to marketers, they will encounter banner ads targeted to them
based on their profiles. Websites that do this make money both by selling advertising space and
by selling data collected by their users.
AD BLOCKERS: software applications, usually in the form of browser extensions that can block the
placement of ads on webpages a person visits. Ad blockers are becoming so popular that they
are threatening the commercial basis of many websites.
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Atmospherics & Hyperreality
Atmospherics refers to designed aspects of the physical environment that are designed to attract customers
and influence purchasing behavior.
The origins of modern atmospherics go back to the late nineteenth century and the development of
department stores as opulent “palaces of consumption” (Ewen). Forms of “programmatic architecture,”
such as novelty buildings along roadways, also count as atmospherics. After World War II, the development
of modern shopping malls and themed shops, like popular restaurant chains, led to the further development
of atmospherics, as did theme parks like Disneyworld. Since the 1970s, the study of atmospherics has grown
into a research specialty in which people study subtle environmental influences on buying behavior.
Based on insights from this type of research, people design environments to increase sales as much as
possible, often employing principles that work below customers’ conscious awareness. Contemporary
atmospherics also extend the brand image (marketing concept) into physical settings.
Everything within the retail space, including the employees, is chosen to match and extend the brand. The
field of atmospherics includes a wide range of research specialties, including the following:
● PROGRAMMATIC ARCHITECTURE: ways in which spaces are designed to convey various effects or
experiences. Originally this term referred to novelty “mimetic” roadside stores that mimicked
whatever was sold inside. The design of both the exteriors and interiors of malls are key
examples of contemporary programmatic architecture.
● THEMED ENVIRONMENTS: retail spaces designed to convey a coherent and all-encompassing
brand identity by appealing to all the senses. Often themed environments are based on a
commodified version of a cultural or historical setting.
● SOUNDSCAPES: aural cues and programmed musical formats designed for use in commercial
settings. One type of aural cue is the use of commercial music formats like MUZAK. MUZAK was
originally limited to “elevator music,” but over time it has expanded to include programmed
selections of popular music as well as sound effects and other kinds of commercially engineered
tones. MUZAK is the name of the company that produces this content
(http://www.muzak.com/), but the term is also used generically to refer to these programmed
music formats.
● AROMACOLOGY: the study of how olfactic cues can be used in commercial settings. Olfactic cues
are used to associate the brand with a certain odor that is regularly applied within shops. But
this aspect of atmospherics also includes the use of odors to influence purchasing behavior below
conscious awareness.
● TEMPORAL CUES: ways is which the passage of time (or its stillness) is communicated in commercial
environments. This can be done by using combinations of lighting, aural cues, temperature, and
architectural effects. Temporal cues can also be conveyed through the use of props, costuming,
and architectural features that suggest a certain period of history.
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Atmospherics & the Administered Society
In his book Coercion (1999) Douglas Rushkoff links the development of atmospherics with efforts to
devise scientific and artistic techniques that make people more compliant with efforts to sell them
products. This theme links the use of atmospherics with the topic of the administered society,
because contemporary atmospherics involve efforts to scientifically influence people’s behavior
without their awareness and in ways that override conscious control.
Two key concepts related to this theme are:
● THE GRUEN TRANSFER: named after the commercial architect Victor Gruen, who was a pioneer in
the design of shopping malls, the Gruen Transfer refers to the moment when, through the
influence of atmospherics, a person ceases to be a customer with a particular product in mind
and becomes an undirected impulse buyer (Rushkoff, 85). Many architectural effects in malls,
themed shops, and other commercial spaces like casinos are purposely designed to elicit the
Gruen Transfer.
● COERCIVE ATMOSPHERICS: a term coined by Douglas Rushkoff to describe the study of how floor
arrangements, colors, sounds, and even smells stimulate us to buy more (Rushkoff, 89).
Coercive atmospherics are a branch of behavioral psychology, which links their use to the
theme of the administered society.
The Privatization of Public Space
A theme closely related to atmospherics is the privatization of public space. Media theorist Herbert
Schiller coined this phrase to describe the process of transferring control of public spaces or
institutions to commercial interests.
Privatization occurs when public institutions, such as museums and sports centers, are
commercialized. This means that spaces that were once publicly owned and linked to the ideals of
democratic governance and citizenry are appropriated and used as stages for promoting companies
and selling goods.
This process of commercializing public space changes the social environment in ways similar to the
appropriation of popular culture. For instance, selling naming rights to public structures like
stadiums, events like museum exhibits, or even subway stops changes the signifying function of
these spaces – they cease to refer to the local history of a place and refer instead to powerful
commercial and corporate interests.
Privatization also involves substituting true commercial spaces like public streets and parks with
pseudo-public spaces like malls or even wholly privatized towns like Celebration, Florida. Such
spaces, according to Schiller, seem like streets and public squares of the past but are actually private
spaces where civil rights are substantially curtailed. Large, enclosed sales spaces like malls are the
ideal spaces of a totally commercialized society where powerful parties limit people’s ability to
participate as citizens rather than consumers in the workings of their society.
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One basic way that advertising interacts with the social environment is by appropriating forms of popular
culture. When viewed in this way, popular culture supplies a constant flow of new material that
advertisers take and incorporate into advertising texts. This process appropriates popular forms and
commercializes them through commodification. It has been argued that commerciaization transforms
popular culture by separating artifacts from the people who produce them and their original sites of
production. Some authors, like Douglas Rushkoff, draw a distinction between culture as a form of popular
expression and the consumption of commodified popular culture.
A secondary step in this process of commodification is popular re-appropriation. Through reappropriation people take back forms of commodified popular culture and reintegrate them into their
everyday lives. An open question is whether re-appropriation can reinvigorate popular culture extensively
enough to overcome the pervasiveness of commodification.
This interplay between marketing/advertising and popular culture can be thought of as a cycle that
proceeds in the following stages:
Expression
k
m
Popular Re-appropriation
Commercial Appropriation
j
l
Commercialization
Ads take pre-existing meanings from the social world to position products in relation to specific market
segments. These meanings are communicated through sets of images (signs) that make up popular
referent systems. For instance, the famous Marlboro Man campaign makes use of a well-known referent
system consisting of items like horses, cowboy
hats, lassos, a certain physical type, and so on
that signal “the West” to people acquainted with
that referent system. Advertisers commercialize
these referent systems by incorporating them
into advertising texts and inserting the
commodity among other signs, thereby
suggesting that the product is a natural part of
the culture that originates the referent system.
In this sense, advertising can be thought of as a
technique for cultural engineering that
reorganizes
the
social
world
around
commodities.
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KEYWORDS: Appropriation & Popular Culture
POPULAR CULTURE: The experiences, practices, artifacts, and ideas that make up human beings’
everyday life.
Popular culture includes things like the clothing, finding food and cooking, shopping, making stuff,
buying stuff, playing or using music, playing sports, hanging out with friends, etc.
Occasionally people will contrast two aspects of popular culture: its expressive and its commercial
dimensions. Expressive popular culture refers those aspects of life that people actively shape
through their direct participation. Commercialized pop culture (sometimes referred to as “mass
culture”) refers those forms of popular culture that are manufactured away from popular control and
distributed through mass media by the “culture industries.”
One problem with this distinction is that today’s popular culture is so commercialized that it is difficult
to find instances of popular culture that are free of commercialism. For instance, most of pop music is
highly commercialized, but people avidly pursue these commodified experiences.
APPROPRIATION: refers to the process of taking possession of something. This term often connotes
seizing something illicitly or improperly, as in taking something without consent.
CO-OPTATION: a variation on the meaning of appropriation, which means to take control of
something by absorbing it. This term suggests that something is politically or culturally
neutralized and becomes commonplace and “safe” through assimilation.
SELLING OUT: a “vernacular” or everyday phrase, selling out is one way that people commonly talk
about the processes of appropriation and co-optation. It typically refers to the idea that artists,
politicians, and others have somehow compromised their values in search of wealth and
mainstream acceptability. The suggestion is that a person has deviated from an original sociopolitical stance that compromises their credibility. A “sell out” is typically regarded with disdain by
an original core group of admirers, though they may become even more successful by selling out.
REFERENT SYSTEMS: sets of interrelated signs that express a cultural code. Advertising appropriates
referent systems, which then appear as a set of cemmerciali signs in ads.
COMMODIFICATION: to turn something into a commodity and make it available on the market, or to
use something as an aid in selling something else. Commodification is a form of “commercial
appropriation.” Popular culture is absorbed (appropriated) into commercial culture by means of
commodification.
GREENWASHING: ways in which companies superficially appropriate environmental themes in their
advertising to make themselves seem responsible and environmentally aware without seriously
changing their business practices or products.
RE-APPROPRIATION: to take back and thereby transform a cultural artifact that has been appropriated
by someone else.
POPULAR RE-APPROPRIATION: (In this class) refers to ways in which people take advertising
messages and artifacts, transform them, and incorporate them into their everyday lives.
Popular re-appropriation transforms commercial artifacts (at least somewhat) into expressive
forms of popular culture.
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Popular Resistance
to Advertising & Sales Communications
The term POPULAR RESISTANCE is used in media and social theory to discuss ways that people respond to forces
of oppression in their lives and in the world around them. Resistance refers to forms of opposition to those in
power.
This concept has strong political connotations and sometimes refers to ways that people consciously organize
for social change, for instance, by engaging in demonstrations, boycotts, or other types of explicit political
activities. But in media theory this concept has also been extended to cover activities that are not overtly
political or traditionally considered “political.”
Some media theorists argue that people can have oppositional readings of media texts such as TV shows, so that
even when people are using media that are controlled by a few powerful corporations, their reflective
interpretation of media messages would be considered a form of resistance. Some of the activities that fall
under the concept of the ACTIVE AUDIENCE, which you may have encountered in other communication classes,
could be seen as forms of resistance.
The institutions and practices of advertising are also objects of popular resistance. Many groups see advertising
and sales communications as social problems that need to be redressed in some way. These problems include
the connection of advertising with environmentally and socially damaging forms of consumer lifestyles,
problematic content in advertising – for instance, the persistence of repressive gender ideologies in ads – ways
in which consumer surveillance infringes on personal privacy, the targeting of children, the privatization of public
space by commercial interests, and the degradation of democratic politics by sales techniques.
The ways in which people respond to these issues, both as individuals and groups, comprise the field of popular
resistance to advertising and sales communications. These forms of resistance can range from organizing for
social change on a global scale to modifying ads in public spaces to disrupt their consumerist messages.
Popular resistance to sales communications draws on established political traditions. People from a broad range
of political viewpoints recognize popular resistance and civil disobedience as occasionally necessary to preserve
freedom and human dignity.
Common forms of resistance to advertising & sales communications
l CITIZENS GROUPS: groups of concerned people unaffiliated with government or official political
organizations who work together to bring about some change in the law, public policy, or company activity.
Student groups that engage in political activism for various causes on many college campuses are examples
of citizens groups.
l ACTIVISM & CITIZENS ACTION CAMPAIGNS: these are grassroots political movements of citizens who
organize to bring about social change. The tools of action campaigns include demonstrations, boycotts,
petitions, letter-writing campaigns, publicity stunts, media literacy programs, guerilla theatre, and
performance art, etc.
l MASS DEMONSTRATIONS: Nonviolent gatherings of people espousing a political cause. Demonstrations
typically involve rallies, marches, speech-making, guerilla performances, and/or sit-ins. As Naomi Klein
explains, the contemporary anti-corporate resistance movement uses such tactics to publicize the
oppressive conditions under which people who produce consumer goods (and who remain invisible in
advertising) are forced to live and work.
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l CULTURE JAMMING: “The practice of parodying advertisements and hijacking billboards in order to
drastically alter their messages” (Klein, 280). More broadly, culture jamming refers to several ways of
modifying mass media messages and intruding on consumer environments so that people are startled into
moments of reflection. Culture jamming aims to “shock” people out of the everyday frame of mind that
accepts consumerism as natural (Lasn).
l DEFACEMENTS: a form of vandalism designed to alter or
damage ads that are placed in public spaces (billboards,
bus stops, etc.). Some community and religious groups
have been known to organize demonstrations in which
they deface billboards that target their communities with
tobacco and liquor ads and some forms of culture jamming
involve defacing ads.
l SKULLING: defacing ads to make the head of a model look
like a skull. Skulling has a striking effect and is used to
disrupt consumerist messages in the environment. It has
been encouraged as a form of everyday audience activity
directed at the fashion industry.
l SUBVERTISEMENTS: ads with anti-marketing messages designed to disrupt the flow and “light buying mood”
associated with commercial television and other commercial media. Subvertisements aim to increase
consciousness of and resistance to consumerism.
l GUERILLA PERFORMANCE (GUERILLA THEATRE): forms of street theatre typically directed at unsuspecting
audiences and intended to draw attention to a social or political issue. Guerilla performances involve
tactics such as satire, parody, and overt protest as forms of
social critique. Sometimes these types of performances
take place within stores and are designed to disrupt the
taken for granted features of consumer environments.
l SHOP DROPPING: The opposite of “shop lifting,” this is
the act of covertly placing modified products on display in
retail stores, especially with the intent of altering the
consumer environment. Shop dropping is somewhat
related to performance and installation art.
People continually develop new ways to respond to the prevalence of advertising and other marketing messages
in our environment. These are only a few examples. Maybe you know of others or have developed your own
strategies of resistance.
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Views of Advertising 1:
“Free-market Liberalism”
Reference article: Sandage, Some Institutional Aspects of Advertising
Free market liberalism is a powerful economic ideology that to one degree or other is the basis for many
contemporary institutions. This theory has several components that relate to the role of advertising in
society. This view celebrates capitalism and is associated with classical economic theory. Many
”conservative” ideas are associated with the philosophy of free market liberalism.
A theory of the market and the individual (Acquisitive Individualism)
l Society is (or should be) nothing more than a voluntary association of individuals pursuing the
satisfaction of their wants.
l “The market” is (or should be) the central institution linking human beings to each other.
l Economic exchange in the marketplace is the fundamental way in which people satisfy wants.
l The only way to create a prosperous social order is to reduce governmental intrusions into the
economy, thereby “freeing” the market.
A psychology and theory of rational behavior
l “Wants” are personal preferences and originate mostly within the individual.
l People are most happy when they can satisfy their wants at the least cost.
l Individuals are rational economic actors who follow a “deliberative sequence” to make decisions:
1. a person recognizes a want
2. searches for a means to satisfy the want
3. evaluates competing alternatives, and
4. makes a decision
l People (sometimes unconsciously) engage in the deliberative sequence to optimize the satisfaction
of wants while minimizing their costs.
Note that in this model of decision-making, the primary purpose of advertising is to inform consumers
by given them information they can use to evaluate their buying options. The content of advertising is
assumed to be information-centered and to facilitate rational decision-making. The informative content
of ads relates, in this theory, to the traditional rational appeal.
A theory of consumer capitalism and advertising
According to free market liberalism, individuals are considered to be the basic decision makers in a
capitalist economy. This idea is called the theory of consumer sovereignty, and the main point is that
production follows the aggregated demand created by millions of consumers individually trying to satisfy
their wants.
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Advertising is thought to fit into this theory in the follow ways:
l Manufacturers study people’s wants and design products to satisfy their pre-existing or emerging
desires.
l Afterwards, advertising informs people about these alternatives.
l Without advertising it would be difficult for people to make good decisions in a complex consumer
society.
l So, advertising does not manipulate people: it educates them about useful alternatives.
l Social order and democracy would be threatened without advertising.
According to this view, ads have substantial informative content that people use to make rational
consumer decisions (Ads influence steps 2 & 3 of the deliberative sequence, but have no substantial
impact on steps 1 & 4).
People who adopt this free-market viewpoint consider advertising to be a beneficial aid to economic
development. By distributing information to consumers, ads help expand markets and make them more
efficient and rational. Thanks to advertising, consumption rises to the level of industrial production, but
does so naturally.
The common motto associated with this viewpoint is that “advertising follows, it does not lead,” – that
is, advertising does not define or modify individual wants, it reflects them. There is no way to
consistently inflate economic demand or artificially expand consumption. In this view the market is
inherently stable and rational (if not interfered with).
Free-market liberalism also redefines democracy in terms of the market and advertising. Consumerism
and democracy are thought to naturally coincide in the form of “consumer democracy,” a type of society
in which personal freedom is identified with “freedom of choice,” or the ability to satisfy wants in the
marketplace free from government intrusion. Political debate is thought of in terms of a “marketplace
of ideas” in which people rationally “buy into” a particular viewpoint publicized using the commercial
mass media and organized like a typical product campaign. As Sandage argues:
“This is a consumer-oriented concept. It recognizes the right and power of consumers. It is
consumer democracy. It harmonizes with political democracy. It can be truly effective only
when communication is adequate to bring consumers to the level of understanding and a
knowledge of alternatives available. Full and honest disclosure, with competition available to
provide knowledge of alternatives, can provide such communication. Society expects
advertising to perform this function.”
Policy recommendations
Proponents of the free-market viewpoint argue for policies they believe will create a better society:
l Deregulate (liberalize) markets as a way to allow people to satisfy their wants more efficiently.
l Limit governmental regulation of advertising and emphasize personal discipline and responsibility
in consumer decisions.
l Create a “weak enforcement regime” in which companies are urged to voluntarily police their
activities and government agencies are reluctant to intrude on business operations.
Keywords
l The Theory of Consumer Sovereignty l The Deliberative Sequence l Consumer Democracy
28
Views of Advertising 2:
“Left-Liberalism”
Reference article: Jacobson & Mazur, Commercialism
Although there are many variations in these viewpoints, “Left Liberalism” is a mainstream political
philosophy that like “Free Market Liberalism” has influenced the development of many institutions in
the United States.
This view accepts capitalism as an efficient and potentially equitable way to organize society, but tends
to argue that the market should be regulated to operate properly and for the good of everyone. In
contrast to the extreme individualism of free market liberalism, left liberalism recognizes a social
dimension of human life. Exponents of this political/economic/social theory have articulated a broad
critique of advertising’s role in society.
A theory of society and the individual
l Human beings are social creatures who need others to develop fully as individuals.
l Because humans are social creatures, wants are shaped in part by social conditions.
l Although the market is an important institution, society is not synonymous with the market (for
instance, government is not and should not be part of the market).
l The market must be regulated to function efficiently and to protect individual rights and liberty.
A theory of commercialism, corporate capitalism, and advertising
Corporate capitalism and the planned economy:
l Extreme consumerism is a distortion of healthy human life; one in which commercial values have
become artificially over-emphasized through commercialism (the tendency of capitalism to turn
everything into commodities – things that can be bought or sold).
“When confined to appropriate limits, the business side of life can coexist with family, religion,
recreation, and other facets. But when unleashed and allowed to grow without restriction,
commerce adds an “ism” and becomes a philosophy – “commercialism” – that destroys the
previous balance…. Commercialism teaches us a lesson that is at war with the teachings of our
founders. And that commercial message is this: To be a citizen means no more than being a
consumer – patriotism and commercialism are one and the same thing. Hunter College
professor Stuart Ewen says that the captains of commerce are moving us from a citizen
democracy to a “consumer democracy.” In such a world, the citizen’s most cherished right,
indeed his or her duty, is to consume.” (Jacobson & Mazur, p. 13)
l Commercialism is closely related to corporate capitalism, a type of society in which corporations
become politically and economically powerful at the expense of individual freedom and social
wellbeing.
29
l In corporate capitalism public institutions are weakened and turned into expressions of corporate
interests (the “privatization” of culture).
l In contrast to the deliberative sequence associated with Free Market Liberalism, Left Liberalism
argues for a “revised sequence” (John Kenneth Galbraith) in which a few large corporations have a
lot of power to set prices and manipulate consumption patterns by means of advertising and sales
communications. So corporate planning, based on techniques like planned obsolescence and price
fixing, displaces consumer sovereignty.
Commercialism and advertising:
l Advertising is a technique for artificially expanding consumption.
l Generally, advertising is not designed to inform people so they can make better decisions, but is a
kind of deceptive propaganda for commodities that makes extensive use of techniques like puffery,
promises of magical deliverance from our cares, innocuous breaking of norms, etc.
l Advertisers increasingly employ scientific techniques in an effort to manipulate (rather than inform)
people.
l Marketers and advertisers have no misgivings about using these advanced techniques to target
people, including children, with feelings of inadequacy and longing.
l Advertising is part of a broader consumerist culture focused on expanding consumption (fashion
obsolescence, design ensembles, the marketing concept, etc.)
l Advertising redefines basic human needs, like the need for love or security, in terms of commodities.
Policy recommendations
l Establish a “strong enforcement regime” to regulate markets and the practice of advertising with
the goal of creating a more equitable and just society.
l Strengthen public institutions by adequately funding them and protecting them from commercial
intrusion (schools, government, media, etc.).
l Encourage people to organize and participate as citizens in the political system (the consumer
movement).
l Regulate (broadcast) media in line with the idea of the “public airwaves” and to ensure as much
participation by the public as possible.
l Regulate advertising to protect the general public and specific groups, like children, against
deceptive practices or to prevent excessive influence on media content.
Keywords
l Commercialism l Privatization of Culture l The Consumer Movement l The Revised Sequence
30
Views of Advertising 3:
“MarxisM”
Reference article: Kellner, Advertising and Consumer Culture
In contrast to “Left (Progressive) Liberalism” and “Free Market Liberalism,” Marxism has not substantially
shaped public institutions within the United States. However, Marxist critics and those influenced by
Marxism have articulated a well-developed analysis of the advertising’s role within consumer capitalism.
The basic Marxist view is that capitalism is the most advanced form of society achieved so far. However,
this type of society is still based on forms of oppression. The most fundamental division in capitalist
societies is between people who own or control the means of production (“capitalists”/employers/the
ruling class) and wage laborers who must sell their labor to live (employees/workers/wage laborers).
One result of this antagonism is that a lot of effort must be expended to maintain order within capitalist
societies and keep class relations at least partly stable. This antagonism underlies the Marxist analysis
of consumerism and advertising.
A Theory of the “Administered Society”
l Capitalism is the first type of society to be faced with the problem of “too much” (Marx): the
productive capacities of society are always expanding and must somehow be absorbed.
l Although free market liberals often tout the “law of supply and demand,” we actually live in a
society where supply continuously exceeds demand. Marxists and others call this contrived
situation “artificial scarcity.”
l This economic arrangement generates what is called “the problem of realization”
Within capitalism “profit is only extracted when goods are sold in the marketplace and the value
of goods is converted into a usable form (money). Once the basic needs of food, shelter, and
clothing are satisfied for most people, capitalism faces the problem of “realization,” of making
sure that huge numbers of goods produced beyond this minimal level are consumed.
If capitalism cannot overcome this, it will collapse, because if goods cannot be sold there will be
no further investment in production, resulting in a stagnant economy.” (Leiss, Kline & Jhally)
l Because of the tendency toward overproduction and the problem of realization, capitalism tends to
be unstable. Capitalist societies have to be consciously integrated by social institutions ruled by the
ruling class.
l The ruling class has responded by creating an “administered society,” a type of society where
science is used to manipulate human beings by displacing social antagonisms onto consumerism.
Advertising as Technology & Ideology
l Marxists stress how the institutions of marketing and advertising are used to shape culture in
capitalist societies.
l Sales communications are examples psychotechnologies (Theodore Adorno), marketing techniques
designed to induce people to consume.
l Advertising is a form of capitalist ideology: ads redefine life in terms of products while disguising the
role that people play in creating their own society (commodity fetishism – Marx).
31
l Advertising and the broader mass culture help maintain the hegemony of the ruling class because
people understand their lives and possibilities in terms that maintain capitalism. Hegemony insures
that oppressed people contribute to their own oppression by sharing elite definitions of reality. In
the case of consumerism, people “buy into” definitions of success that plunge them continuously
into debt, and this cycle of consumption, debt, work, and more consumption keeps the system going.
The Self & Consumer Capitalism
l In consumer capitalism, people develop a “commodity self,” in which they increasingly define their
sense of identity through mass-produced goods.
l The commodity self is a kind of pseudo-individuality – a superficial individualism that doesn’t
translate into substantial control over one’s self and one’s life. As Kellner (p. 253) notes:
“… the individuality offered by consumer culture is a pseudo-individuality, constructed and
promoted for the purposes of manipulation and social control. Thus to be genuinely free and
individual, one must free oneself from a whole system of pleasures, consumption, and
entertainment administered by the power structure.”
l People also understand their lives in terms of the “marketing orientation” (Erich Fromm); meaning
that our actions and relationships are experienced through economic categories and as offering
chances for profit.
“In the market concept of value, the emphasis is on exchange value rather than on use value, this
has led to a similar concept of value with regard to people and particularly to oneself. The character
orientation which is rooted in the experience of oneself as a commodity and of one's value as
exchange value I call the marketing orientation.
In our time the marketing orientation has been growing rapidly, together with the development of
a new market that is a phenomenon of the last decades - the "personality market." Clerks and
salesmen, business executives and doctors, lawyers and artists all appear on this market.” – E. Fromm,
Man for Himself, pp. 69-70.
Approach to Policy
According to Marxists, there are inherent problems that make capitalism unstable and which cannot
be fixed by government regulation. Furthermore, the State (government) is to a large extent an
instrument of the ruling class and tends to further its interests. So, regulation is a naïve, liberal
approach that will not improve life past relatively narrow limits. Regulation can be useful and can
further social justice to a degree, but beyond this superficial level, substantially regulating the market
will produce economic crises. So:
l People must organize broadly as workers and with other progressive groups to expand human rights
and reform and transcend capitalism.
l People must also work to strengthen existing civil institutions that guarantee access to information,
education, and that are the basis for participating in and expanding democracy.
Keywords
l The Administered Society l Artificial Scarcity l Psychotechnologies l Ideology l Hegemony
l Commodity Self l Pseudo-Individuality l The Marketing Orientation
32
ADV442 Handout Packet
Compiled by Professor V. Berdayes
Department of Communication
Barry University
Miami Shores, FL
33
iPolitics
This selection is from
Mark Andrejevic, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era.
Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2007.
The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge "to be active"
to "participate" to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.
-Siavoj Zizek, The Parallax View
In the spring of 2006, as the nation's political parties trained their
sights on the upcoming midterm elections and, farther down the
road, on the next presidential election, the chosen weapon of at least
one candidate was the database. An advisor for former first lady
Hilary Clinton announced plans to create a $10 million company
that would amass as much detailed information about prospective
voters as possible. As one news account suggested, the data-mining
push, heavily funded by financier and outspoken Bush administration critic George Soros, would help close the database gap between
Democrats and Republicans. Although Democrats have historically
had an edge over Republicans when it comes to grassroots, getout-the-vote campaigning, the GOP's successful adoption of target
marketing technology reportedly made a significant difference in
the 2002 midterm elections: "For the first time in recent memory,
Republicans ran better get-out-the-vote programs than Democrats .... Democrats have become increasingly fearful that the GOP
is capitalizing on high-speed computers and the growing volume
of data available from government files and consumer marketing
firms-as well as the party's own surveys-to better target potential
supporters." 1
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Suggestively, the Democrats proved highly effective at using the Internet
to raise campaign funds-thanks at least in part to their legacy of grassroob
campaigning, which was facilitated and amplified by the social networking
capacity of the Internet and, famously, by the Meetup.org Web site in particular. What the Republicans did more effectively, thanks in part to database
tools and the strategies devised by consultant Karl Rove, was to target campaign spending. If Democrats were better at harnessing the power of social
networking, the Republicans did a better job of marketing.
Political campaigning, to put it in slightly different terms, has entered the
database world, a realm of asymmetrical data gathering, data mining, and
target marketing. As one pair of researchers describes it, "the panoptic aspect of such political surveillance ... reflects the extent to which the political and the commercial are inherently intertwined and inseparable under
current articulations of American democracy." 2 This connection perhaps explains why the business-oriented Republican Party was more effective in its
database-driven marketing campaign. The flip side of the championing of
privatization by post-welfare state neoliberalism is the ongoing adoption of
private-sector strategies for political purposes. In the era of electronic mass
media, this is far from a novel strategy; political consultants have long made
careers out of finding ways to use electronic media to market their candidates. The point is not merely to observe that politics has become a form
of marketing-this happened quite some time ago-but rather to consider
the impact on the political process of emerging interactive marketing strategies facilitated by monitoring techniques and technologies. This chapter first
outlines some of the trends in political marketing and then develops a theoretical framework for a critique of mass customized politics. Finally it draws
on this framework to critique the impact of data-driven forms of separation,
sorting, and surveillance on democratic politics, arguing that not all participation is democratic in character.
The Political Promise of New Media
The mobilization of the promise of interactivity comes into its own in the
realm of politics-the realm from which the popular reception of new media as tendentially democratic is drawn. The sentiments of new media theorist and game designer Celia Pearce neatly complement those of ubiquitous
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political consultant and cybercelebrant Joe Trippi. Both, for example, invoke
the promise of technologically facilitated democratic revolution. As Pearce
notes, "The digital age introduces a new form of international socialism, a
new kind of democracy that Marx never even imagined."' The political and
economic elites that have developed and promoted the technology have, she
suggests, spun the Web into rope for their own hanging: "The Newt Gingriches of the world, who have inadvertently popularized the thing that will
be their undoing should be very, very afraid. Because when it comes right
down to it, an online underclass is much more powerful than an armed underclass."4 Joe Trippi evinces a similar revolutionary fervor: "Every institution
that doesn't understand that the technology is finally here to allow people to
reject what they're being given and demand what they want had better start
paying attention. The revolution comes for you next."s
The story of the political deployment of the Internet is, according to
Trippi, a story of the revitalization of democracy: "Most of all it's the story
of people standing up and making themselves heard. It's the story of how to
engage those Americans in a real dialogue, how to reach them where they
live, how to stop selling to them and start listening to them." 6 This opposition
is, as I have been arguing throughout the course of this book, not just a false
one, but a usefully misleading one. It suggests that technologies that facilitate
"listening" necessarily empower those invited to disclose information about
themselves. However, the emerging model of data-driven relationship marketing undermines the opposition described by Trippi: the sellers are able to
sell more effectively precisely because they are able to listen more efficiently.
In the end, the marketing-based model enlisted by the Republican Party triumphed, whereas the high-profile challenge by the Dean campaign, managed by Trippi, famously went down in flames, fanned by the viral spread
over the Internet of the candidate's famous screech speech.
The facts not withstanding, the general promise of empowerment outlined in Chapter 1 has been explicitly taken up by scholars studying the role
of media in politics and, according to one account, "a number of theorists
have argued that such technologies may help contain or provide the public sphere necessary for true participatory democracy."' Cybercelebrants are
engaged, perhaps unwittingly, in parroting the litany of claims that have
greeted each new electronic medium in the twentieth century, from the telegraph to cable TV. It is worth rehearsing some of these claims to provide a
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bit of historical context for the current enthusiasm bubbling up around the
democratic potential of new media.
What emerges from a survey of the celebratory responses to new media
technologies during the twentieth century might be described as a form of
repetition compulsion: a stubborn ahistorical reiteration of the mantra that
any device that facilitates the transmission of information is inherently democratizing, not least in the sense that it enhances mutual respect and understanding-resources for collective action and reasoned deliberation. In
their early history of the telegraph, for example, Charles Briggs and Augustus
Maverick wrote that the device "binds together by a vital cord all the nations
of the earth. It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer
exist, while such an instrument has been created for an exchange of thought
between all the nations of the earth." 8 An early fan of radio directly applied this
line of thought to the new medium: "How fine is the texture of the web that
radio is even now spinning! It is achieving the task of making us feel together,
think together, live together." 9 Speaking of the medium that would, toward the
end of the twentieth century, become dominated by figures including Rush
Limbaugh and Howard Stern, another commentator observed, "Radio might
even produce a new kind of politician, a man without the ordinary tricks of
delivery, but possessed of a quiet, logical persuasiveness." 10 As for TV, authors
Barry Schwartz and J. G. Watkins predicted cable TV, the medium that provides us with Fear Factor, Blind Date, and professional wrestling, would not
only "create great access to information; it will also greatly assist self-identity,
democratic processes, educational environments and community cohesion." 11
l\tledia scholar Vincent Mosco has devoted an entire chapter of his book,
The Digital Sublime, to the utopian predictions surrounding electronic media,
and he draws on the work of another noted scholar, James Carey, to sum up his
findings: "As Carey ... notes, starting with the telegraph we observe a renewed
triumphalism asserting that every improvement in communication would
end isolation, link people every-where, realizing in practice the 'Universal
Brotherhood of Universal Man."' 12
Just a little familiarity with history adds some grains of salt to our reception of claims, such as those of futurist William Wriston's, that "the force of
microelectronics will blow apart all monopolies, hierarchies, pyramids, and
power grids of established industrial society," or author George Gilder's assertion that the personal computer will become "a powerful force for democ-
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racy, individuality, community, and high culture." 11 New media technologies
have done a much better job of assimilating themselves to the interests of
established political and economic hierarchies than blowing them to bits.
Even as cybercelebrants hype the revolutionary power of blogs and social
networking, media moguls like Rupert Murdoch enlist the rhetoric of revolution as a marketing strategy. Shortly after buying the social networking
site MySpace for half a billion dollars, Murdoch observed, "Technology is
shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the
media elite. Now it's the people who are taking control. ... We're looking at
the ultimate opportunity.... The internet is media's golden age." 14
Given the historical context, it is perhaps testimony to a persistent case of
technological amnesia that media theorists still feel confident making claims
like, "Far from the telescreen dystopias, new media technology hails a rebirth
of democratic life." 15 New media guru Howard Rheingold is more circumspect, noting that whether the Internet comes to serve as an online agora or
a virtual panopticon will depend on who controls it and for what purposes.
Still, his outlook remains on the whole more optimistic than pessimistic,
and he insists, "The political significance of computer mediated communication lies in its capacity to challenge the existing political hierarchy's monopoly on powerful communications media, and perhaps thus revitalize
citizen-based democracy." 16
Considered in the abstract, enhanced interactivity, information access,
and the ability to build community over long distances certainly sound like
positive, if not necessarily revolutionary, additions to the media landscape.
The argument of this book is, however, that an abstract consideration of such
technologies is both incoherent and misleading: incoherent because it makes
claims diametrically opposed to the evidence supplied by concrete applications; misleading because it implies that actual applications are determined
by the technical capabilities themselves-that, for example, the Internet, by
its very nature, ought to be inherently threatening to centralized, hierarchical
power relations.
The real question that needs to be addressed is how new media technologies are being turned to political ends not in theory, but in practice. And
this practice increasingly takes place within a context characterized by the
accumulation of control over information facilitated by the digital enclosure. Thus, any consideration of political uses of new media needs to explore
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not just the capabilities theoretically available to individual users, but the
actual application of these capabilities in the age of "digital capitalism." 17 It
is one thing to say with Joe Trippi that the Internet could be the "most democratizing innovation we've ever seen," and quite another to consider the
ways in which it is being used as one of the most powerful technologies for
centralized information gathering, sorting, and management that we've ever
seenY The following sections consider the ways in which the Internet has
been enlisted by politicians and their consultants as a tool for management
and marketing-a model borrowed from and based on target and relationship marketing. An important consequence of the political adoption of this
model is, as one group of researchers notes, "an opening up of the market for
political information." 19
Political consultants-never far behind the marketers-have realized for
some time that market-research algorithms can yield information useful not
just for selling products, but for recruiting voters. The problem was finding
cheap and efficient ways to gather and sort the information. One political
consultant, for example, recalled how research revealed several decades ago
"that Mercury owners were far more likely to vote Republican than owners
of any other kind of automobile-data that was so constant across the country ... that it couldn't possibly have been the product of chance. 'We never
had the money or the technology to make anything of it. ... But of course,
they do now."' 20
Generating the type of information useful to political parties requires accumulating as much information as possible about voters in order to sift
through it and discern reliable patterns of voting behavior that might be
exploited by political operatives. Just as background details like education
level, place of residence, and reading habits help predict what type of products a consumer is likely to buy, they can serve as reliable indicators of which
hot-button political issues voters care about-at least, that's what political
consultants are telling parties and candidates. As the former head of the Republican National Committee put it, "We can tailor our message to people
who care about taxes, who care about health care, who care about jobs, who
care about regulation-we can target that way."" 1
The clues and cues that guide targeted political marketing campaigns are
not always obvious, but they can be extracted by sifting through large databases for unexpected or unanticipated correlations. One Republican consul-
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tant commented, "The microtargeter would tell me, 'You know, if you own a
Ford Explorer and you garden and like the outdoors and you're over 50, there
might be a high likelihood that you care about tort reform.' ... I don't know
how they do this, and I was skeptical, but it works." 22 The result is a change
in the mode of address adopted by political campaigners-instead of tailoring a general message designed to maximize common appeal and minimize
offense, the goal is to target individuals and groups based on key motivating
issues-to provide not a generalized, blurry portrait of the candidate, but
a customized, high-resolution perspectival portrait that can be modified to
meet the interests and concerns of specific audiences.
During President George W. Bush's second term, the prevailing political
wisdom was that Republicans under the leadership of former direct-mail
consultant Karl Rove had the database edge-and were using it very much
in keeping with standard marketing strategies that were based as much on
emotional as on rational appeals. During the 2002 elections, one report
stated, "Consultants working for the Republican National Committee developed strategies to design messages targeting individual voters' 'anger points'
in the belief that grievance is one of the strongest motivations to get people
to turn out on Election Day." 23
Detailed databases allowed for some significant changes in campaign
strategy. Whereas the prevailing political wisdom had been to avoid districts
heavily populated by opposition party voters, target marketing allowed for
tactical poaching: "The advantage of data-based targeting is that political
field operatives can home in on precisely the voters they wish to reach-the
antiabortion parishioners of a traditionally Democratic African American
church congregation, for instance." 24
The result, in short, is the attempt to manage masses of voters, Taylor
style, by disaggregating them. This niche-marketing approach requires the
same asymmetry of information in the political as in the commercial realms:
the accumulation of detailed information about consumers combined, ideally, with a corresponding lack of information about alternatives (or undesirable aspects of the product being pushed) on the part of consumers.
Conservative field operatives picking off the abortion foes in a traditionally
African American church congregation want to make sure to avoid touching on the other campaign planks that might alienate these voters and make
them hesitate to become one-issue voters.
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As in marketing, so in politics: compiling detailed information about voters in a cost-effective manner largely depends on their entry into the digital enclosure. In theory, political operatives could develop detailed databases
about voters by going door to door, conducting in-depth interviews about
everything from political preferences to shopping habits, and compiling
public and private records, but the cost would be prohibitive-not least because voters would likely find the process disturbingly invasive. By contrast,
the privatized digital enclosure provides access to extensive databases of information gathered for other purposes. Like marketers, political data miners
can avail themselves of the migration and accumulation of information in
marketing databases. Moreover, they can harness emerging interactive technologies to the ends of political research.
Consider, for example, the case of Knowledge Networks, an instant polling company founded by two Stanford political scientists who realized, as
had market researchers before them, the information-gathering capability
of interactive communication technology. Knowledge Networks turned the
TiVo model of interactive content delivery into an instant political polling mechanism by spending millions of dollars to equip more than 40,000
homes of selected viewers with Web TV s. The viewers received the interactive
TV device-their portal into the digital enclosure-free of cost in exchange
for agreeing to spend ten minutes a week answering pollsters' questions over
the Internet. 25
In order to raise the more than $40 million needed to purchase, install,
and link the 40,ooo-plus Web TVs that form the virtual infrastructure of
Knowledge Networks' digital enclosure, the professors had to make it dual
purpose: a system for both market and political research. Political polling
is, perhaps not surprisingly, a few steps behind commerce when it comes to
the development of relationship marketing-a process that Knowledge Networks pushes toward its logical extreme: always-on information gathering. In
addition to the weekly polls, the Web TVs gather detailed information about
viewing habits and Web surfing behavior that can be used to create profiles
of the respondents. The device that is used to gather instant responses to, for
example, the performance of candidates during a political debate also collects a constant stream of information about viewers even when they aren't
directly engaged in the polling process. The invitation to participate in the
process of instant online polling, in other words, doubles as a perhaps less
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obvious inducement to enter into a relationship characterized by always-on
monitoring.
The use of interactive TVs as a polling tool is continuous with a longstanding tradition of the deployment of communication technologies that
provide access to the private sphere as a means of simultaneously extracting
information from it. As we saw in Chapter 3, the early polling and ratings industry embraced the telephone as a technology for catching people at home
and gathering information about them in discrete bursts: the radio show that
they happened to be listening to at the time of the call, which products they
had recently purchased, and, eventually whom they planned to vote for.
Recent debates surrounding government surveillance in the United States
have demonstrated that the telephone remains an important monitoring
technology-one that promises, thanks to the development of cell phone
networks, to become increasingly individualized and continuous. In addition to the telephone, specially equipped radio and television sets can become monitoring technologies, thanks to the invention and development of
Audimeters and then People Meters. Digital TV and the Internet represent
both the continuation of this trend and a quantum leap forward in information gathering technology thanks to their built-in interactive capability.
Whereas telephone surveys, Audimeters, and related devices require the audience's active consent and participation, interactive networked technologies
come with a built-in, passive information-gathering capacity that promises
broader coverage and decreased audience awareness of monitoring practices.
Nielsen households, for example, have a constant reminder that information about their viewing habits is being gathered: the requirement to fill out
viewing diaries, or to punch in when they are watching TV. TiVo viewers, by
contrast, receive no such reminder. As in the case of the Internet, the monitoring that takes place is largely passive in the sense that it is generated as a
by-product of using the technology itself. The result is what might be described as a passive form of interactivity-what the philosopher Slavoj Zizek
has described (in a different context) as "interpassivity." 26 The machine does
the interacting for us. Viewers are active in the sense that they are always providing information about themselves-but not critically active in the sense
of being aware that monitoring is taking place and how the information is
being used.
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In the political context, the smooth functioning of niche campaigning
depends on this precritical or passive form of participation. The effectiveness of niche campaigning depends, at least in part, on voters not realizing
that they are being provided with a customized appeal, one that may look
very different from those received by voting groups with different political
views from their own. As researchers who have studied this new breed of political research tools have noted, even when participants are informed about
the information-gathering capability of their Web TVs (which the researchers liken to spyware that covertly gathers information about online activity), over time, this awareness tends to fade into the background: "Spyware
is sometimes installed with the generally underinformed agreement of the
user, who often later forgets about its presence." 27
In addition to the information collected through dedicated devices like
those installed by Knowledge Networks, political researchers, like marketers, are able to make use of information that people disclose both offline,
in the form of public records and proprietary databases, and in the form of
the "free" information that millions of Internet users post online. Thus, for
example, the popular press has highlighted the ways in which personal information posted online to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook
has been used for research purposes and background checking by police and
potential employers. A student who posted a photo of himself drinking beer
in his dorm room to his Facebook site, for example, found himself accused
of violating university policy, an accusation supported by evidence he had
supplied himself. 2R
Thanks to the ease with which digital files can be transported, large
amounts of data gathered, for example, by the state for driver registration
or property tax records can be imported wholesale into commercial databases and used for target marketing purposes (depending on local laws,
some of which charge hefty fees for information gathering, restricting it to
well-heeled corporations; or they place other restrictions on the availability
of some public records). The information that we enter into magazine subscription forms finds its way into direct-mail databases, and the information
we enter into online forms can rapidly be assimilated into marketing algorithms. Perhaps one of the defining characteristics of the digital enclosure
is that within it, information constantly flows and migrates. This does not
mean, however, that it can't be controlled. Yes, firewalls and databases can be
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breached, but for the most part, the flow of information is not as anarchic
as the high-profile press coverage of file-sharing networks might suggest. 2 ~
Large amounts of information can be gathered, stored, and transmitted
cheaply and efficiently along well-controlled channels. One of the goals of
market research within the context of the digital enclosure is to tame the
anarchy of available information: to gather data about Web-surfing behavior, MP3 listening patterns, and self-disclosure sites like MySpace and impose order on it by aggregating it, sorting it, and extracting usable patterns.
To capture this kind of information, political marketing research firms,
such as marketers, rely on automated information gathering: "Their spider programs crawl through the Web, automatically collecting website content, such as a person's email or physical address, or an organization's press
releases." 30
One of the reasons for the increasing value of information captured within
the embrace of the digital enclosure is that it does treble- and quadrupleduty: for marketing, policing, campaigning-and, as I will argue in the following chapter, for interpersonal or peer monitoring. However, the shift in
information-gathering capacity facilitated by the enclosure is both quantitative and qualitative. By embracing sites of domesticity, leisure, and labor and
permitting always-on connectivity, the enclosure provides information not
just in discrete packets-a survey here, a focus group there-but a continuous flow of data. Consider, for example, the latest version of Apple's iTunes,
which can relay a continuous flow of information back to "headquarters"
about what music you're listening to while you're listening to it. Similarly,
the Web TV devices installed by the researchers at Knowledge Networks do
more than capture the information from spot polls (although they do this
also); the devices capture a continuous flow of information about viewing
habits, Web surfing, and so-called clickstreams (information about which
hypertext links viewers click on). What emerges is a detailed, personalized
image of consumer behavior: the twenty-first-century version of the forms
of personalized monitoring pioneered in the workplace by Frederick Taylor
and his associates. The cost problem has been solved, thanks to automated
forms of information gathering and sorting. Politicians and marketers alike
can incorporate detailed and automated forms of listening-or feedback
monitoring-into their attempts to sell consumers on products and voters
on candidates.
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Some Consequences
Democracy, understood as a political system in which rulers are held accountable to the citizenry, relies on the interplay between two mechanisms of
publicity: one that allows for public scrutiny of government decisions, policies, and actions; and one that makes public opinion manifest to policy makers. Critics of mass society have made much of the so-called refeudalization
of the public sphere, understood as the default of government mechanisms
of publicity to public relations, in conjunction with the relegation of the role
of citizens to that of passive observers saturated by the mediated spectacle of
power. In its most popular form, this critique manifests itself in the denigration of infotainment-the triumph of news that entertains without providing citizens with the information they need to hold their rulers accountable.
Spectacular entertainment keeps the masses occupied and politically isolated, while real politics takes place behind their backs. According to critical
theorist Jurgen Habermas in his discussion of the fate of public debate and
deliberation in mass society, the result is "a staged and manipulative publicity
displayed by organizations over the heads of a mediatized public." 31
The tendency Habermas critiques is exemplified by the usurpation of public debate by talking heads, spin doctors, and political spokespeople on cable
news. Debate has defaulted from participatory public endeavor to spectator
sport for the masses. Instead of cultivating public participation in the process of democratic deliberation, such shows display viewpoints as a range of
"givens" among which viewers are left to choose. Habermas laments, "Publicity loses its critical function in favor of a staged display; even arguments
are transmuted into symbols to which again one can not respond by arguing
but only by identifying with them." 32
A related result is the decline of a countervailing force of publicity-that
which comes in the form of public opinion, or the public expression of the
will and judgment of the populace to which political rulers are to be held
accountable. Just as the public needs to be informed about the actions of its
\eaders, so too do the leaders need to be informed about both the public's
reaction to policy decisions and its policy priorities. As Habermas, among
others, has argued, when media-managed spectacles replace deliberation, the
formation of public opinion is itself impaired. Without accurate knowledge
about government actions and policies, the formation of public opinion
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takes place in a vacuum-or, little better, amid the predetermined viewpoints
and policy options promulgated by political and media elites. Furthermore,
without mechanisms to facilitate engaged political debate (rather than mere
spectatorship ), public opinion remains underdeveloped and incoherent, and
therefore increasingly subject to manipulation.
Political theorist Benjamin Ginsberg has argued that public opinion
polling-a "science" that emerged out of the late nineteenth-developments
discussed in Chapter 3-changes the terms for the expression of public opinion. This latter might be described as citizen publicity: the right of citizens to
have their opinions heard by their rulers. Specifically, public opinion polling shifts the expression of public opinion away from its manifestation in
the form of action (such as public demonstrations and protests) and toward
the measurement of attitude. The shift is a crucial one because it allows for
the management of public opinion before it is expressed in action. The measurement of attitude, combined with the expansion and proliferation of massmediated forms of communication in the early twentieth century, anticipates the goal of the scientific management of public opinion. The development of the marketing and public relations industries coalesces around this
goal of feedback-based opinion management. These industries do not spring
full grown from the heads of public relations and marketing pioneers like Ivy
Lee and Alfred P. Sloan. Rather, as Chapter 3 suggests, they harken back to
nineteenth-century ideals of information-based management-and in particular to the notion that observation and measurement provide the information necessary to "rationalize," or make more efficient and effective, a
variety of human endeavors.
Thus, the crucial element of the structural transformation of what might
be described as "citizen publicity," understood as the public expression of
public opinion, is the shift from publicity as public action to publicity as
the preemptive measurement of attitude. That is to say, what takes place in
the early twentieth century is not the silencing of the masses, but the probing, observation, and measurement of the citizenry. Citizen publicity is redoubled: it occurs not just in the form of the actions taken by the citizenry
in response to or anticipation of government action, but also in the monitored expression of opinions about what the public is likely to do and why.
As in the case of the scientific management of production, the gathering of
this information by public relations practitioners (whether public or private,
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corporate or political) is prompted by the attempt to more effectively manage the populace: to influence action not by directly, physically impinging on
it, but by helping to shape attitudes before they result in action.
The advent of the digital enclosure and its deployment for political purposes (in the form of increasingly detailed databases and continuous monitoring, as in the case of Knowledge Networks) doesn't challenge the logic of
previous forms of marketing and campaigning so much as it promises to
perfect them. If strategies for public opinion management rely on the gathering of detailed information about attitudes, behavior, and their interrelationships as well as on information asymmetry (marketers know the details
of consumer behavior, but consumers don't know the details about how this
information is being used to target or manipulate them), the digital enclosure facilitates market-based campaigning techniques on both counts.
In other words, the obverse of the world described by political consultant
Joe Trippi-one in which "the Internet is the most democratizing innovation we've ever seen"-is one in which interactive technology can be used
to perfect strategies for target marketing and the centralized management
of public opinion by political elites. 33 It is the world imagined by a privacy
consultant with government experience: "The nightmare scenario is that the
databases create puppet masters." 34 In this nightmare vision, the one whose
monitoring apparatus is currently being assembled by political consultants
and database experts in anticipation of upcoming elections, "every voter will
get a tailored message based on detailed information about the voter. The
candidate would know what schools the voter went to, any public records
that showed they supported some cause, any court case they've been involved
in. There might even be several different messages sent by a candidate to the
same home-one for the wife, one for the husband and one for the 2}-yearold kid." 35 Far from public empowerment and democratic rebellion, such a
scenario envisions what one commentator describes as "a nearly perfect perversion of the political process": "The candidate knows everything about the
voter, but the media and the public know nothing about what the candidate
really believes." 36
At stake in these alternative versions of the future-one of empowerment,
the other of centralized control-is the very meaning of the term democratic
participation. By participation, do we simply mean the ability to provide
increasingly detailed information about ourselves? If so, then the offer of
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participation can double as an alibi for the perfection of marketing strategies-both political and commercial. If, however, by participation we mean
a conscious, considered, informed, and meaningful contribution to the governing process, it is important not to distinguish this at every turn from a
version of participation that equates submission to detailed monitoring with
participation.
Defining Participation
What is the difference between meaningful partiCipation and consumer
or citizen feedback? What, in other words, might one mean by a notion of
"meaningful participation"? One way to think about the difference between
these two versions of participation is by revisiting the distinction between
feedback and shared control in Chapter 1's discussion of cybernetics. A heatseeking missile may be cybernetic insofar as it adjusts to signals from its
target, but to call it "interactive" or "participatory" would be to suggest a
misleading commonality of interests between projectile and target. As the
target shifts and changes direction, it inadvertently relays information about
its new trajectory back to the guided missile. The relation between target and
missile-or targeted and targeter-might, in this respect, be described as an
interactive one. It is this version of interactivity that is invoked by marketers
who, perhaps not coincidentally, make use of the vocabulary of"aiming" and
"targeting" to describe their advertising campaigns and strategies.
This is not to overlook an obvious and important difference between target marketing and missile attack: in the case of the former, the impact on the
target isn't fatal (at least in most cases, cigarettes excluded)-but it may well
run counter to the self-expressed interests of the targeted. Despite what they
may say, marketers have a bottom-line goal that remains inaccessible to the
needs and desires of consumers, even if information about those needs and
desires is crucial to attaining this goal. We can thus differentiate between two
layers of feedback in its broadest sense: the first allows for the adjustment of
strategies to achieve a given end (boosting record sales, destroying a rocket);
the second influences the goal-setting decisions themselves (whether profits
are more important than, say, diversity of music or quality). The marketbased model of interactivity promises shared control at the second level, but
it delivers only on the first.
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Democratic politics, by contrast, promise public participation all the way
up, as it were, to the goal-setting process itself. Indeed, this level of participation might be considered one element of the definition of meaningful
participation, elaborated in more depth in Chapter 9. A second elementone emphasized by constitutional scholar Cass Sunstein-is the creation of
optimal conditions for public deliberation about shared goals. As Sunstein
suggests, the adoption of marketing and advertising techniques by political campaigns ignores an important difference between consumer decisions
and political decisions: the former relate to individual preferences and only
indirectly influence society as a whole, whereas the latter are explicitly about
collective decisions that (directly) influence society as a whole. 37 My decision
to buy a particular laundry detergent does not have broader social consequences in quite the same way as does my vote for a new school tax proposal
or a congressional candidate. Moreover, as Sunstein argues, political participation envisions a decision-making process that "does not take individual
tastes as fixed or given. It prizes democratic self-government, understood as
a requirement of'government by discussion,' accompanied by reason-giving
in the public domain."-'~
The database-informed customized campaign model of political marketing transposes the perfection of what Sunstein might describe as a consumerist model onto the political process. Far from contributing to democratic
participation and deliberation, the version of interactivity envisioned by the
database consultants and target marketers offers to perfect a cybernetic form
of public relations: the customization of marketing appeals that are based
on detailed profiles of individual voters. The consequences of this model of
interactivity are threefold: the further disaggregation of the citizenry, the facilitation of sorting and exclusion when it comes to information access, and
the further normalization of surveillance as a legitimate political tool. In the
following pages, I explore each of these consequences in a bit more detail.
Customization and Disaggregation
The French social critic and activist Guy Debord described consumer capitalism as a society characterized by the triumph of the spectacle-one in
which consumers and viewers were "linked only by a one-way relationship
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to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another." 39 The
mediated spectacle, as Debord notes, "unites what is separate, but it unites it
only in its separateness." 411 Consider, for example, a description of Manhattan's
Upper West Side on the evening of September n, 2001, by one New Yorker
who, looking out the window of his ninth-floor apartment at nightfall, noticed
something unusual about the view. Usually the buildings visible across the way
presented a patchwork of lit and unlit windows. On that evening, however,
almost every window was lit, in part by the bluish glow of a TV screenY
With the city for all practical purposes closed down, everyone had returned
to the privacy of their apartments to watch the news coverage, each to view
the same horrific images repeated over and over on their separate screens.
They were united by their relation to the images that each received separately
in the privacy of their honeycombed apartments. This is perhaps an extreme
example occurring in response to an exceptional situation, but the process
of separation and unification it illustrates arguably characterizes everyday
consumer and political conditions. Our media-saturated society provides
us with (at least for the moment) shared images, information, and culture,
which we experience, for the most part in conditions of relative isolation,
from the privacy of home via the television or, more recently, the Internet.
From the perspective of democratic participation, the process of separation identified by Debord undermines the conditions for debate and deliberation. It disavows and suppresses the collective character of democratic
politics, reinforcing a consumerist model in which citizens are treated not
as part of a deliberative body, but as isolated shoppers in the marketplace
of ideas. As critical theorist John Brenkman observes, the tendency of consumer society is to "destroy the space"-of deliberation and collective action
in which critical public opinion can be formed. 42 Countervailing publicity-the citizenry making known its wishes to public officials and representatives-is reduced to the privatized polling of spectators.
The promise of interactive media is predicated in part on a critique of
this process: thanks to the Internet, the public no longer need depend on
centralized, top-down, mass media; nor are citizens all sharing the same images. Moreover, the interactive capability of the network allows media consumers to become media producers. New media guru Howard Rheingold,
for example, envisions a world in which citizens equipped with souped-up
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versions of cell phone video cameras could engage in distributed peer-topeer journalism: "Imagine the power of the Rodney King video multiplied
by the power of Napster. ... Would it be possible to turn the table on the
surveillance society and counter the media monopolies?" 43
The promise, in short, is to rearrange the relationship between spectators so they are no longer linked only by a "one-way relationship to the very
center." Instead, they could be linked in a myriad ways to dispersed centers,
participating in the shared production of a proliferating series of spectacles.
Instead of tuning into the network news, viewers could surf the Internet for
all kinds of publicly generated "news" about the world covering a range of
interests and perspectives. If you're tired of watching Americans interview
other Americans about the war in Iraq, you might be able to tune in to video
narratives about life in Baghdad that were shot, edited, and posted to the
Internet by Iraqi residents-or defense contractors, for that matter. Wired
magazine has dubbed the prospect of distributed information production
a form of "crowdsourcing"-turning over the duties of production to the
populace, which, thanks to the development of interactive technology, can
"solve problems [and] even do corporate R & D" in addition to providing
"content" in the form of more images for shared consumption. 44
Two questions need to be addressed regarding the promise of distributed
media production-the crowdsourcing of the spectacle. The first has to do
with whether a distributed spectacle overcomes the atomism that undermines conditions for collective deliberation. The second has to do with the
impact of customized information on the populace. If the citizenry, relegated
to the role of spectators, has surrendered the task of critical deliberation and
accepted the model of politics as one more form of individualized consumption, could the promise of participation revitalize interest and participation
in the deliberative process? Does peer-to-peer journalism undo the default
of publicity to public relations, and does it furnish improved conditions for
public deliberation? The hope of distributed reporting is that it might provide citizen-journalists with a more complete and accurate understanding of
the world around them and the political issues affecting their lives.
One possible danger, anticipated by legal theorist Cass Sunstein, is the loss
of shared resources for collective deliberation. People need an overlapping
knowledge base of some kind to be able to engage in meaningful political discussion. In a world of information glut, it becomes possible, Sunstein argues,
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for people to become so specialized in their information consumption that
they lack the resources to engage in debate on topics of general interest in a
democratic society. 45 Thanks to the proliferation of information resources
online and on television, it is conceivable, for example, to devote one's news
consumption entirely to NASCAR racing, fantasy baseball, or online gaming. Nevertheless, the danger that more information could lead to less shared
knowledge doesn't provide a convincing argument against the importance
of providing the populace with a variety of perspectives and information. It
was even easier to have nonoverlapping knowledge sets before the proliferation of always-on, customized news and information outlets, because lack of
information is equally a hindrance to collective deliberation.
The real danger posed by the proliferation of information resources lies
in the tendency to reinforce a savvy postmodern skepticism that threatens to
default to an incoherent relativism. Sun stein worries that, for example, political polarization might result from conservatives only getting their news from
Fox, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, and conservative Web sites, and
liberals limiting themselves to Democracy Now and The Nation, with the result that neither group would face challenges to its political predispositions.
The real threat to deliberation lies a bit deeper: in the mind-set that allows
individuals to feel comfortable deliberately seeking out only a select group of
news sources with predictable slants. The standard explanation of this phenomenon-sometimes called "selective exposure"-is that people, loathe to
having their opinions unsettled or challenged, seek out information sources
that confirm their values, attitudes, and prejudices. But this explanation
doesn't do justice to the deeper pathology of the savvy postmodern attitude,
which provides a specific justification for choosing those outlets that fail to
challenge one's worldview: because all portrayals are biased in one way or
another, there is nothing to prevent viewers from selecting those that present
the views with which they identify and screening out the rest.
Political commentator Josh Marshall describes this popularized version
of postmodernism as one characterized by the belief that "ideology isn't just
the prism through which we see world, or a pervasive tilt in the way a person
understands a given set of facts. Ideology is really all there is." 46 This savvy
reductionism equates the recognition that all viewpoints are biased with the
assertion that bias is all there is. That this formulation is incoherent in its
absolute dismissal of absolutes does not detract from its popularity among
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not just the tragically hip, but also, as philosopher Bruno Latour suggests, an
increasingly savvy and skeptical populaceY
The result is what might be described as a preemptive defense against
the charge (recklessly popularized by critical theory) of being a dupe. It is a
fate that can ostensibly be avoided by asserting in advance the claim that all
truth claims and statements of fact are simply ruses of power. Latour, referring to the proliferation of conspiracy theories after the 9/11 attacks, asks,
"Remember the good old days when revisionism arrived very late, after the
facts had been thoroughly established, decades after ...
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