This week I will be responding a little on last week’s music centered class as well as Sut Jhally’s article about the evil advertising agenda.
I quite like last week’s class. I find it interesting how people define themselves by their music preferences, and was happy to see that the exercise was not just a popularity contest with the most recent hits sweeping the awards. There was quite an eclectic mixture of tastes. I almost chose the Four Seasons as my favorite piece of music, but didn’t since it is so atrociously hard to sing to–having no words and all. Pretending to conduct just doesn’t hold the same level of participatory satisfaction. It would have been interesting to see how classical piece would have compared in that setting with the irreverent but decidedly funny song my initial selection went up against. I am ashamed to admit that my loyalties would have been torn. Whoops, I think Vivaldi just rolled over in his grave. I had better move on to safer topics.
Who else thinks global warming is a big hoax . . . Just kidding, more or less. I just don’t know why every subject I read about comes back to weather. Sut Jhally was making some great points about advertising, and then stretched to include world resource depletion and global catastrophe through rather abrupt climate change and ozone depletion to the list of advertising’s perpetrated atrocities. I bought into the resource scarcity angle and the accompanying pollution. Those are fairly intuitive when considering the wastefulness of Western culture. I have just not been sufficiently convinced that global warming is going to end the species. (Feel free to make an angry comment . . . now.) It is a complex system for heaven’s sake, and the Scientists have yet to produce one prediction or model that has proved accurate.
More interesting in that article was the way advertising seems to be drawing us away for the idea of a society and the social and family interaction that can truely bring happiness. If one honnestly lists the top 20 happy moments in his/her life up to this moment, you can’t help but see that he has a point. Advertising has ingrained the most toys wins philosophy at great detriment to personal happiness found through decidedly less expensive and wastefully means. I am not a huge Karl Marx fan, but his ideas provide a nice contrast to the propaganda shoveled by advertising.
There were several quotes in the article that I found illuminating. The foremost these was the one from Ehrenreich where he talked about T.V. advertising offering solutions to all those little problems we never realized we had. These problems usually relate to personal grooming habits–which so many of us lamentably ignore–and how to increase the joy we receive from other products we already own. We are so busy acquiring these new products that no one has time to address the real, pertinent social issues. Although my life is not wholly driven trying to keep up with the Jones, I will have to admit that I have bought into the hedonistic advertising philosophy. The really sad thing is that I don’t have the time or will to change, and I don’t think I am alone among the mesmerized zombies. At least I have my laptop.
