So I read this book....and I want to talk about it. It's called The Code of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society, by Sut Jhally. It covers the basics of Marxism, and its relations to products, and the labor force.
Cable networks sell audience-viewing time to advertisers for more money than I can sit comfortably with. The cliffhanger rests in how much are we, as an audience, worth?
We are paying the networks through our own consciousness. That's irritating. Think you get out of it with new technology like TiVo and Fios? Nope. The cyclical motion of us working in a non-media environment to pay for those commodities validates us right back where we started. Our money, our time, and our mind is handed over to broadcasting networks whether we like it or not.
So why? Why do we even watch TV? Studies show it's addictive, that we don't even really like it, that we feel guilty when we admit just how much we actually watch. Interesting...
Now, I’ve never been convinced of anything extremely negative about the realm of advertising. Although, it only took the first few points of The Code of Advertising to significantly make me question my sense of security.
Jhally’s impressively unbiased view of his observations initially made me assume he was a critique of advertisement. His illustration of Marxism unveiled worker suffrage that seemingly has no signs of improvement. We’re under the mercy of advertisement. His comeback to the defense of advertisement was that it doesn’t offer a reality that isn’t there; rather it reflects aspects of our social life that can be taken interpretively. This isn’t an outlandish concept, although it’s not exactly....soothing. Perhaps it is not advertising I should scapegoat, instead, the industry is merely trying to survive in the world of capitalism. Ultimately, my scope has been broadly widened.