Coming up for air

I mentioned something in class today to which I'd like to give a little more thought. We were speaking of the "moments of clarity" we sometimes get when we decontextualize the messages that we are bombarded with on a daily basis, and it brought to mind Plato's allegory of the cave. This simple parable basically deals with the artificiality of a worldview constructed on derived experience rather than direct experience:

Imagine prisoners who have been chained since childhood deep inside a cave. Not only are their limbs immobilized by the chains, their heads are chained as well so that their eyes are fixed on a wall. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised walkway, along which shapes of various animals, plants, and other things are carried. The shapes cast shadows on the wall, which occupy the prisoners' attention. Also, when one of the shape-carriers speaks, an echo against the wall causes the prisoners to believe that the words come from the shadows. The prisoners engage in what appears to us to be a game - naming the shapes as they come by. This, however, is the only reality that they know, even though they are seeing merely shadows of images. (Wikipedia)

We can perhaps view our common perceptions of the world that surrounds us as being "shadow" images being presented to us by marketers. The moments of clarity we seldom experience are thus fleeting by nature: we are so unaccustomed to grasping reality with our own hands that the sensation is deceiving, suspicious and, invariably, short-lived.

We are afforded temporary moments where we feel like we truly grasp what matters, and unfortunately, those moments are few and far between. I remember feeling like I had a clear understanding of what mattered to me when my father died: a family, friends, and an honest life worth living. I don't know what happened between then and now, but here I am again, seemingly striving to fulfill ... what, exactly? Am I once more rushing to become someone I believe I have to become, or am I truly motivated by my own desires? How much of what I want do I really want? How much of what I want do I really need?

A close friend of mine seems to have it all figured out: live a good life, treat your friends with respect, love your family, and desire nothing more than what you need. Above all else, have a passion. That last element is especially crucial. I think, sometimes when I let myself entertain such notions, that perhaps my true passion is not being served, but rather placated and drowned by other ambitions, the origins of which are unclear.

Maybe the greatest insight this blog will provide is the means to uncover this passion. We'll see.

Some new thoughts

I'm sitting here after combing through the code of this godawful template and attempting to wrest some measure of control from it (the results are plain to see), and this afforded me some time to reflect on the question put to us in the last class. To restate: Assuming the film we watched is accurate in its depiction, how would we change it?

First of all, I have to say that a lot of the comments that came up during class were fairly predictable. Not that I think they weren't thought out properly, nor do I think my own musings are more profound. Rather, I mean that humans have a general tendency to dismiss disquieting truths at first blush. My sense is that a lot of the thinking this will stimulate will bring about some uncomfortable realizations, and that should be a good thing.

There were some shocked reactions at the juxtaposition of the campaign in Iraq with images of vapid advertising slogans back in the United States, the obvious intent of which wasn't necessarily to imply causality but to provoke a visceral reaction in the audience. Which it did, probably all too well. The thing is, I certainly didn't think it wasn't that big of a stretch. I mean, what kind of obdurate self-delusion must someone labour under to think that the North American lifestyle comes at no cost to someone else, somewhere else? And how much of a stretch is it to think that a government bent on maintaining stability would go to great lengths to secure this stability, at least until it's someone else's problem?

There's a danger of slipping into paranoid conspiracies, but, then again, the alternative is to blithely sail through life, pretending nothing's wrong. And there's already a lot of that going on. Bombarded by an endless stream of distorting attacks on our sense of self, and at once attempting to make sense of it all and carry on with our everyday lives is already a sizeable burden.

How do we change it? I'm not sure we could. As in all things, the degree of vigilance one brings to bear on daily affairs is entirely personal. My sister is a brilliant, educated woman, but the confines of her world are very much limited to her immediate surroundings. This is not a failure of intelligence, but of werewithal: faced with the daily rigours of motherhood, house payments and neighborhood robberies, the extent of her theories on consumption are most likely fairly superficial, but at least she has them. Maybe Robert Louis Stevenson is right:

"[...] it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!" (Crabbed Age and Youth, 1877)

But perhaps that's not asking enough of ourselves. Maybe we're capable of much more, and it is somewhere between skeptical scrutiny and openness to wonder that we can find the right balance. Carl Sagan was a passionate advocate of critical thinking, and often bemoaned the almost limitless credulity and intellectual torpor that afflicted humanity. He also calls for this balance:

"It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas [...] If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you [...] On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones." (Scientific American, 1987).

That's enough for now. Maybe later I'll make some sense of all this.

Language: An example

To most people, the subject of how languages and cultures are interwoven is of abysmal interest. But if we are trying to understand why and how marketers exert such influence, I think it's elementary to start at the beginning, and this example of how language and culture are interlaced is, in my humble opinion, both eloquent and illustrative in this regard.

In subordinate clauses, German phrase structure calls for the the verb to be placed at the end of the sentence (a Subject-Object-Verb, or SOV structure). Hence, it is harder to know what exactly one is saying until the sentence has been fully rendered, i.e. until the action (verb) has been introduced.

By contrast, English, as well as French and most Romance languages, are SVO languages (Subject-Verb-Object). How we see this reflected in the cultures is in a commonly observable behaviour: Germans almost never interrupt one another when speaking. In point of fact, it is deemed very impolite to do so. The reason is clear: the speaker hasn't yet fully delivered his/her message before the end of the sentence, and interrupting someone mid-sentence bespeaks a lack of interest in what is being said.

The French (and Spanish and Italians), on the other hand, can and often do interrupt one another. Not that it is deemed polite to do so; in point of fact it is still seen as somewhat improper (proof positive that the French aren't as abrasive as they are often made to appear). But think about how French and Germans are perceived to be, even on a stereotypical level: the passionate, boisterous Frenchman, and the unfailingly polite, structured and orderly German. Did language influence behaviour, or was it the other way around? It is both, and the reason is clear: language and culture are the same. Understand one, and the other is made plain.

I'll get off the topic of linguistics now. I realize this little excursion may have seemed a little tangential to the main intended topic of these posts, but language's importance is too often underestimated in human affairs, and I personally can't dissociate words from their effects.

Language and metaphors

One of my favourite quotes is by a lesser-known playwright and journalist named Joseph Michael Straczynski: "The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language." I've always found there to be an innately resonant truth about one's ability for critical thinking being dependant on an ability to manipulate and understand the written word. But in the context of the "reality filters" that we discussed in class, the argument gains new potency.

Stephen Pinker, a noted linguist and peer of Noam Chomsky, begins his book "The Language Instinct" by describing language as a way of forming a complex concept rich with semantic, cultural and perhaps ideological content, insides someone else's head by the use of an abstraction--the word. The word itself is arbitrary, having meaning only because it is an agreed-upon abstraction for a common experience. And it is precisely because these abstractions derive from a shared experience that language is such a fundamental part of culture. I like to think of language as culture crystallized: it gives tangible shape and substance to something that is fundamentally experiential, and the study of a culture's language gives far more insight into its mores, beliefs and values than would an equal amount of ethnographic research.

Plenty of examples come to mind is just how intrinsic language is to a culture, and perhaps I'll detail such an example in a later post. Some commonly used examples are the existence of a dozen words for snow in Inuit languages, or the absence of the singular possessive (mine, yours) in certain cultures predicated on shared resources. What these idiosyncracies reveal is that cultures are awash in symbolism that invariably gets captured in language. The ability to see these patterns becomes a matter of the utmost importance to anyone wanting to understand a given culture. And, in turn, the ability to manipulate the images, associations and cultural references that words evoke becomes paramount to anyone interested in shaping culture. Enter the marketers, or what Douglas Rushkoff calls "The Persuaders."

A quick example here is McDonald's "i'm lovin' it" ad campaign from 2003:

What we see in this are three current cultural references, played out alongside a brand that is trying to appeal to the audience segment to which those cultural symbols "belong". First, the use of the uncapitalized "i" is evocative of the shorthand used by the new generation of text- and instant-messagers. That a new generation has been raised on the keyboard, and that such shorthand has become so pervasive is a topic for another discussion, but suffice it to say that a slogan like this would have been mocked just ten years ago.

Second, the abbreviated form of the word "loving" is a reference to the contracted speech of fast-talking teenagers. Finally, and most jarringly to those of us who pay attention to such things (and we are a dwindling minority), state verbs such as like, believe, know, own, remember, understand, want and love aren't usually accepted in the continuous form. Proper grammar would call for the slogan above to read "I love it", much the same way that "I believe it" is preferable to "I'm believing it". But again, this is a subtle wink and nod to popular culture, where deformations of language are a hallmark of subcultures, especially when these deformations come to be captured by pop culture.

I'll follow this post with a more detailed example of how language and culture are interlaced. But now, I need some food.

How much of me is truly mine?

So this is meant to be a chronicle of my ruminations and thoughts on culture, consumption and the marketing engine. To be fair, this isn't the first time I've lent thought to this general arena, albeit under different auspices. You see, I used to be a bit of a firebrand.

I've long been fascinated with the reasons why people believe what they do. To be fair, this interest didn't always manifest itself as an earnest desire to understand people's beliefs. More often than not, it took the form of a sometimes arrogant desire to expose what I perceived to be willful ignorance. I remember back in grade school thinking that much of what I was being taught as religious truth made no sense to me. The experience remains a powerfully formative one not because the most compelling memories I have of these times are about my rational assessment of religion, but abour how hard it was to ween myself from those teachings, even after I had renounced them.

David Ogilvy, the marketing guru, said "Customers need a rational excuse to justify their emotional decisions, so always include one." The implicit lesson therein is that a lot of what we believe, we do so because we are given the arguments to justify what are fundamentally emotional choices. Believing in a god, I came to believe, wasn't an act of lucid rationality (not should it need to be, really). It was a choice born of an emotional desire for stability and belonging. To be a part of the club. (And the rational excuse comes neatly in a 2,000 ear-old volume of parables. But I digress.)

To what extent understanding the nature and origin of those beliefs is necessary in order to integrate them into one's worldview is clearly up for grabs. By and large, the most compelling thing I've learned throoughout all of this is that beliefs, ideas and worldviews are more a means than an end: the majority of people adopt mindsets that are consistent with the place they wish to occupy in the world, rather than with what they deem to be rationally defensible. Do I believe this MBA education is valuable because without it I deem myself to be incompletely prepared to achieve what I want to achieve? (This, by the way, presumes that I know what I want to achieve, which I do not) Is it because the distinction will be adequately recognized in the marketplace, such that I will be judged to be more valuable to an employer than I would have been without it? Maybe, but mostly it simply couldn't be that I want it to be valuable because to think that it could be worthless after spending so much time and money towards its completion would leave me, well, less than fulfilled.

So we all fall prey to adopting beliefs and mindsets that bear little to no connection with objective reality, and truthfully, the world is that much more manageable because of it. The question is: if we know we are being played, and we know our weaknesses, should we endeavour to reveal the great and powerful Oz for what he is?