Captains Of Consciousness Advertising And The Social Roots Of The Consumer Culture
The apparatus of mass impression ... televisions were turning citizens into consumers, living rooms into salesrooms, the commercial media and their role as instruments of consent, alternative journalism, [all] servants of Power. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, published in 1976, became the first scholarly history to critically evaluate advertising and consumer culture as defining forces in American life.
Rather than looking at advertisements one by one as individual attempts to sell a product or service, I approached advertising overall as a widely iterated commentary on issues of want and desire, a new, consumerist way of life was shaped, depicted, communicated, and sold.
Mass production required mass consumption, and a growing number of businessmen, I found, were beginning to speak of the ways that human instinct needed to be mobilized to turn consumption into an inner compulsion. The extent to which mass consumption and advertising were seen as a business response to the perceived threat of socialism was also explored.
Capitalism shifting, over the course of the twentieth century, from an economy defined primarily by production to one defined by consumption.
Advertising helped to establish prevailing models of the self, the family, and the good life in American consumer society.
Captains of Consciousness was, without question, a spiritual child of the sixties.
Literacy is never just about reading; it is also about writing.
Just as early campaigns for universal print literacy were concerned with democratizing the tools of public expression, the upcoming struggles for media literacy must strive to empower people with contemporary implements of public discourse: video, graphic arts, photography, computer-assisted journalism and layout, and performance. [Remember this is 1976]
Distinctions between publicist and citizen, author and audience, need to be broken down.
The line separating classroom from society, interpretation from activity, needs to be broken down.
Men and women had to be habituated to respond to the demands of the productive machinery.
Excessiveness replaced thrift as a social value. It became imperative to invest the laborer with a financial power and a psychic desire to consume.
It was recognized that in order to get people to consume and, more importantly, to keep them consuming, it was more efficient to endow them with a critical self-consciousness in tune with the "solutions" of the marketplace than to fragmentarily argue for products on their own merit.
The theorized "self-consciousness" of the modern consumer
Keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontented with ugly things around them. ... Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented contented ones."
By transforming the notion of "class" into "mass," business hoped to create an "individual" who could locate his needs and frustrations in terms of the consumption of goods rather than the quality and content of his life (work).
The logic of contemporaneous advertising read, one can free oneself from the ills of modern life by embroiling oneself in the maintenance of that life.
In an attempt to boost mass sales of soap, the Cleanliness Institute, a cryptic front group for the soap and glycerine producers' association, pushed soap as a "Kit for Climbers" (social, no doubt).
Much of American industrial development punctuated by attempts to channel thought and behavior into patterns which fitted the prescribed dimensions of industrial life.
The captains of industry try become popular heroes. These are the characteristics tics of a true industrial society, a society in which ideals of production rather than of consumption rules .
The future of business lay in its ability to manufacture customers as well as products. .. required a selective education which limited the concept of social change and betterment to those commodified answers Artists, often gifted in their sensitivities and sympathies to human frailties, were called upon to use those sensitivities for manipulation. Modern industrial society as the world of facts played a role which turned people away from their own needs, their ability to speculate on the solution of these needs, and ultimately from the notion of self-determination determination as a democratic principle. The eradication of social attitudes which were resistant to consumption became a central concern among businessmen. Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud and (along with Ivy Lee) a founder and leader of modern commercial public relations, called for the implementation of a "mass psychology" by which public opinion might be controlled. The mystification of the production process, the separation of people (both as producers and consumers) from an understanding of this process, may be seen emerging early in the twentieth century. Yet by the 1920s both advertising and product design moved in the direction of separating products from the general knowledge of mechanics and from technical understanding-moving in the direction of aesthetic and linguistic mystification. The common development in usage of words such as halitosis and acidosis placed the burden of definition in corporate hands. Where patriarchy had once been supported by the material conditions of society, the rise of capitalism saw it evolve into something like a religion. Ford, through his "Sociology Department," entered the homes of his workers to ensure their fidelity to his concept of proper living. The fact that childhood was increasingly a period of consuming goods and services made youth a powerful tool in the ideological framework of business. By the mid-1920S, the loss of such traditions was widely felt. Where artisan and agricultural al labors had required a period of long training, leading toward a life-time resource to draw upon, the rapidity of the machine had made the worker an adjunct to its rhythms. ... mechanized production depended heavily on the endurance and reflexes of youth. Advertising was a prime source of the idealization of youth. As youth appeared the means to industrial survival, its promulgation as something to be achieved by consumption provided a bridge between people's need for satisfaction and the increased corporate priorities of mass distribution and worker endurance. Beyond this, the celebration of youth was also an idealization of innocence and malleability. J. B. Watson, the psychologist/ad man, had given underpinning to such a strategy. If the children were indoctrinated in the "behavioristic freedom" which characterized the modern industrial world, he argued, business might be able to intervene in the values and definitions of family culture. Alfred Poffenberger, a leading advertising psychologist, , spoke for directing advertising at children. Confronted fronted with "the great difficulty that one meets in breaking habits" among their parents, he underscored the "importance of introducing innovations by way of the young." Corporations which demanded youth on the production line now offered that same youth through their products. As work became less a matter of accumulated skill and more a question of loyal diligence to the task, consumption was depicted as the way men would be able to objectify that diligence within themselves. Rather than viewing the transformations in housework work as labor-saving, it is perhaps more useful to view them as labor-changing. The primacy of industrialism was making a captive anachronism out of the home-defined woman, while the predominant dominant patriarchal ideal still sought to contain her within the traditional domain. Here lay a festering contradiction of modern womanhood, one which would emerge in years to come in a reinvigorated feminism. The American Academy of Political and Social Science, in a publication on the role of women in modern America (1929), concluded that mass consumption had made of the "modern housewife ... less of a routine worker and more of an administrator and enterpriser in the business of living." From the field of social psychology, , advertising had borrowed the notion of the social self as a prime weapon in its arsenal. Here people defined themselves in terms set by the approval or disapproval of others. In its particular economic definition of womanhood, consumer ideology relied heavily on this notion. Americans have increasingly questioned the ability of the marketplace to work out social and personal problems. At the same time, however, the commodity system enjoys a kind of passively accepted legitimacy as the universal arena within which most human needs are to be met in the United States. As production changed and as the social character of work became even more routinized and monotonous, the consumer culture presented itself as the realm within which gratification and excitement might be had-an alternative to more radical and anti-authoritarian prescriptions. Commercial propaganda didn't act as the determinant of change, but was in many ways both a reflection and agent of transformation. Twentieth-century capitalism had entered a period in which all spheres of existence were informed by industry; the commodity had become a universal form. Labor and Monopoly Capital, tells of how the characteristic tic of the modern era has been the "degradation" of labor. Work, once a repository of skill and social interaction, , has become a series of preordained gestures. Utilizing the promise of material well-being, conscripting the notion of industrial democracy, capitalizing on the degeneration of traditional and localized authorities, corporate America associated itself with the tasks of the most critical forces within the society-its opposition-while at the same time attempting to tame those forces. In hailing the modern woman as a "home manager" and in celebrating the child as the conscience for a new age, corporate ideologues asserted that each was expected to devote a high degree of obedience to the directives of the consumer market.