Sales are not a bad thing

The wonders of selling to me

Through the ads on prime time TV

Lose their appeal

And all of their zeal

When you see I get hulu for free

While the Beninger reading brought up a lot of fascinating ideas in terms of social control and technology, one thing I’d like to focus on is the concept of marketing, which has changed drastically as communications technology has advanced. The connection between marketing tools and popular entertainment has become so inextricable as to be unexamined by the consumer. If you watch free television or listen to free radio, the cost to you as a consumer is sitting through the advertisements of the show sponsors, who assess demographic data of the program and try to determine what sales method would deliver their product most effectively to you. As Beninger says, on page 20, “Although advertisers were initially wary of broadcasting because audiences could not be easily identified, by 1930 sponsors were spending $60 million annually on radio in the United States alone”. That problem of audience identification and isolating effectiveness is one that he goes on to elaborate later in the text—exploring mediums from questionnaires to house-to-house interviews and the famed Nielsen ratings system.

While most advertising is appealing in a general sense, it is only with the advent of the Internet that we really get targeted ad content. Google has made a fortune on the business model that by analyzing the things that you, as the individual, are interested in (and then selling that information to marketers), they can sell to you and only you. By having a wide variety of ads available to target people who use certain language in their searches, marketers can appeal specifically to people with a much higher rate of success. It is a ruthlessly efficient advertising system, and what’s more, consumers are in some ways grateful for it, because they are receiving product awareness of things much more likely to appeal to them and likely receiving far less marketing inundation that does not.

If you step away from the clichéd view that all marketing is bad and designed to sell you things you don’t want or need—that marketing creates a sense of false need in the consumer who can get along perfectly fine without a product—you begin to see the true genius and benefit of these targeted marketing models—both to buyers and to sellers. While this data accumulation is without doubt an almost insidious form of social control, it is also a way of respecting and acknowledging everyone’s different interests and needs and permitting more demographic subgroups to flourish. No longer are all women ages 18-25 viewed equally and sold to equally. I prefer to look at it as a positive thing, despite the sinister overtones. I live in a capitalist society. I use products. I like to know about new products that may appeal to me. I know that what appeals to me will likely not appeal to most people. Therefore, I appreciate being marketed to directly and unobtrusively, using the Google and Facebook models. It will be very interesting to see what happens to the relationship between media technology and advertising over the next fifty years, particularly as pay models (iTunes, etc.) start to assert their presence. Make no mistake, they’re still collecting demographic data about you and selling it, you’re just not seeing the results as directly.

No need to send a horse. Stop. I've just revolutionized communication. Stop.

Centralizing communications

The telegraph transformed many nations

I can send such clear orders

To my colonial borders

And boost epic real-time wealth creation

Carey writes about the telegraph changing the news and speaks to how the unlimited distance of the wire service created a need for “objective news”. The word limits of the telegraph required only the barest facts to be conveyed, leaving the majority of the article to be fleshed out in the newsroom by people who were not present for the event. This form of editorial flexibility leads to a curious sense of “objective” journalism. If readers labor under the view that they are getting the absolute facts because the root content is the same from paper to paper, it forces news outlets to bury their biases even deeper.

It made me think of current movements in the blogosphere where people cite news articles or report on events directly and openly acknowledge their biases. Now that we live in a time where people have such free access to generating their own content and opinions about shared ‘news’, readers are more active critical thinkers and conscientious writers have found it expedient to divulge as much of their own bias as possible up front. While on one hand, this is a boon for readers, there is still a substantial schism between this amateur reporting and the professionally vetted news institutions. However, the sheer volume of contributors makes it extremely difficult to isolate the information that one would care about and verify that the source of the material is legitimate. In viewing this commentary through this lens, it becomes almost laughable to think that objective news reporting is even possible, especially through a fifty word telegraph.

My form of self-identiification can beat up your form of self-identification

A nationalist identity

Helps to create community

Because then me and you,

Whether Christian or Jew,

Have some sense of fraternity

Reading about the evolution of nationalism this weekend struck a particularly strong chord with me because I traveled to Washington DC this weekend. If there was ever a place deliberately designed with the glorification of the concept of a national identity in mind—it is Washington. In visiting the World War II memorial, what struck me (viewed through the lens of this reading) was the multiple levels of identity being explored. All Americans identify with the memorial as Americans. Each state or territory that sent troops into battle is represented individually, allowing for more personal levels of identification. I saw people taking pictures of themselves in front of the names of their states. Was that the intention of the memorial? Probably not, but as an example of nationalist identification, it was clear to see.

“…all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”

This point cannot be gainsayed, but it begins to call to mind the various forms of virtual communities present on the Internet. People start to partition themselves by identity aspects that were never used as defining characteristics in the past—from stamp collectors to fans of particular television shows—because it has never been easier to create a community and feel an immediate sense of fellowship and identification. Only time will tell if the paramount importance of nationalism currently will diminish or increase as the internet becomes more pervasive. Currently it seems to be moving in both directions simultaneously—as people perceive the differences between themselves and their neighbor to be less, they reflexively raise their boundaries higher and cling to identities that clearly demarcate the Self and the Other. Who knows if we will continue to compound identity upon identity as a way of defining the Self and the Other, or we will seek more rigorously to find our commonalities.

To be connected to one’s fellow man

Means one stays alone for a span

Oh the things schoolboys glean

From lewd magazines

Or reading a Bible that’s banned

Eisenstein posits a great deal of information to digest in a mere fifty pages. While casual students of history take it for granted that the advent of the printing press precipitated things like the Protestant Reformation, there is a great deal of assumed gradualness about the process of disseminating printed documents to the masses. However, not only does Eisenstein dispute these assumptions, she also raises the idea that the act of pushing people away from illuminated manuscripts and towards print began a process of standardizing thinking while it standardized textual presentation. Moreover, the idea of the burgeoning print industry crossing national, religious and linguistic boundaries is an extremely compelling one. The power of print to duplicate and disseminate in a way that far outstripped scribal work completely changed the face of nearly every field- from law to astronomy.

Above all, the most interesting part of the reading was the exploration of the gradual solipsistic isolation and self-reflection that people found themselves in once literacy had become so pervasive. “Not a desire to withdraw from a worldly society or the city of man but a gregarious curiosity about them could by the eighteenth century be satisfied by silent perusal of journals, gazettes, or newsletters. Increasingly the well-informed man of affairs had to spend part of each day in temporary isolation from his fellowmen.” (p. 41) This notion of technology being an agent of simultaneous unification and isolation is one that we will doubtless keep returning to as every technical advance since—the radio, television, computer and mobile devices- continue to advance this seemingly contradictory state.