Mark Bartholomew

Reviews various legal and social developments that have brought advertising into all sorts of spaces it never was before, including schools and other public/government spaces like national parks as well as on the bottom of TSA screening bins and on top of fire hydrants (KFC buckets advertising “fiery chicken wings”). Advertising is hard to avoid in other ways, too, as advertisers track you online and know more about you than you know about yourself. These changes, Bartholomew argues, are likely to change people’s self-concept in deleterious ways, making it harder for them to imagine noncommercial values and selves, and making them act as if they were always being watched, which will also ultimately destroy the trust necessary for social cohesion. (I’m more skeptical about the latter bit: we seem pretty good at acting as if we weren’t being watched—I think of it as the Freudian “I know very well that advertisers are tracking my every move, but all the same they aren’t really seeing me specifically.”) Advances in neuroscience make it easier to manipulate us more reliably below our ability to consciously detect—advertisers can manipulate our memories and our emotions to get us to buy. One example: though consumers say they hate Cheeto cheese dust on their fingers, brain scans show otherwise—perhaps due to “a pleasurable sense of subversion” (though I would have gone with stimulus-response/reminder of the delightful salt overkill that is Cheetos); when Frito-Lay revamped its ads with this result in mind, showing a Cheetos lover ruining another person’s load of white laundry and other antisocial behaviors, its sales jumped. Bartholomew worries that similar ads may ultimately encourage social transgressions, and I have to say that the legacy of the 2016 election doesn’t make it any easier to disagree with him. The less we pay attention to ads, the more their peripheral evocations of well-known brands are likely to leave us with favorable attitudes towards those brands. And the effects aren’t limited to our attitudes towards the brands themselves: In one study, “a brief flash of the Apple logo, so brief a flash that the logo was not consciously recognizable, caused people to become more impulsive when making financial decisions.”

Celebrities have increasing prominence and increasing legal protection for uses of their images, especially in advertising, which stifles the ability to use celebrities to talk about culture while also reinforcing a culture in which everyone tries to perform micro-celebrity. “When you are constantly selling yourself, it becomes less disconcerting to sell for others.” For this reason, along with fake reviews and paid promotion, we can’t tell who’s trying to sell to us or what the difference is between selling and genuine belief. He points out that the older term “star” was replaced by “celebrity” at precisely the point that fame itself, and not special skill or talent producing fame, became a primary cultural focus. I was also intrigued by his argument that celebrities’ performances of intimacy on Instagram and reality TV obscure the real processes of celebrity self-presentation. “[W]hen we self-identify with the celebrities in our Twitter feeds, we see ourselves as free entrepreneurs, branding and revealing ourselves by choice to succeed in a marketplace whose currency is visibility. When others complain, perhaps about privacy policies … or about the forced necessity of participating in these privately controlled spaces, we feel less sympathy. Labor is for loseres; we, like the celebrities we follow, are management.” Again, I see connections to Trump’s narratives of white fragility/dominance that proved so effective in 2016.

Bartholomew has some suggestions for legal responses, though they would be uphill battles even with a Democratic Congress and White House. I’m definitely in agreement with the point that courts are denying the government the ability to get equal attention to required disclosures—courts have struck down image-based warnings as too emotional and multivalent, but that’s why advertisers use images to get us to buy all the time. Commercial speech is too insulated from government regulation.… (plus d'informations)