Occupy Wall St. Presentation

Here is the video link for the tumblr and the video I will show in class today.

Advertising in a Post Modern World

Advertising, as we know it today, is a smarter, stronger, and considerably subtler breed than what our grandparents knew. Advertising pre 1980s was a rather straightforward occupation; here is our product, and this is why it’s better than the other guys. Advertisers were in the business of selling products, concrete things that could make your life better in some measurable way. However, advertising today has left its materialistic bonds of metal and plastic for more intellectual ones. Now days when we buy a product, we are not only buying a material object, but also an idea.

            Consumers and advertisers have played a cat and mouse game as long as advertising has existed. Public Relations firms will create an ad campaign and consumers will grow resistant to it because they know someone is trying to sell them something, and so the ad agencies had to create new ways of marketing that consumers wouldn’t be resistant to. This cycle played out for a while until advertisers realized that the best way to sell a product is to not appear that they’re selling it at all. Thus Video News Reports, or VNRs, were born. VNRs were created when marketers combined selective exposer, selective perception, peripheral processing, and the hostile media phenomenon to lure consumers into trusting their local broadcasting networks. They do away with the premise of an ad entirely and so create a new reality of what the viewer sees. Not only do marketers create products such as VNRs, but they also use the same techniques to infiltrate both the government and social media. Social media is increasingly taking up more and more of the average American’s life. People trust their friends’ opinions, and advertisers realize that so they create blogs and false social media to mislead people. By giving the illusion that something is popular it instantly becomes more valuable, and social media has created a venue for companies to shout to the world that what they are hocking is indeed popular. By creating fake blog and social media profiles companies can create the false sense that what they are doing is “trending”. By creating fake grassroots campaigns, or astroturfing, large corporations can create the image in the public mind, and thus the social reality, that the policy decisions that they want are supported and fought for by the American people. This seriously impacts the way a democratic government is meant to function because it intentionally obscures the will of the people. Knowledge of the human mind is a dangerous thing when wielded improperly.

            American’s lives have become filled with advertising. We live in a world where fake news, fake friends, and fake movements tell us how to be safe, what’s cool, and what we should believe in. Its almost as if the world were becoming interconnected for a person to live their own lives anymore.

Look how far the Daily Show has Come

I would be interested to see what Manjoo's take on the Daily Show and the Colbert Report now days. I think there was a major shift in John Stewarts mind after he was found to be the most trusted person in news. Both programs occupy fascinating niches in the American news media because even though they are entertainment, they have more actual news people working for them. John Stewart has complete creative control over his show and he has used it to build the most popular show on Comedy Central. This has given him an astronomical budget because is CC really going to piss off its golden child? Of course not. His news team actually does more in depth research and fact checking than traditional news outlets. He also calls people on their bs, something that traditional news outlets are afraid to do because they fear some people will call them biased. If a major republican front runner came out and started talking about how vaccines cause autism major news outlets would present both sides of the story when one side is flat out wrong. John Stewart on the other hand would just say that they're crazy and they shouldn't be taken seriously instead of trying to pander to people who will take issue with what he says anyway.

WTF Kansas?

So last night Topeka, Kansas decriminalized domestic violence. The county that Topeka resides in cut the police budget by 10% and in response the police are no longer going to prosecute misdemeanors, which include domestic violence abuse. This means that any misdemeanor has to be prosecuted at the city level, something the city council though was to costly, and so they just said screw it, we might legalize domestic violence. This is completely insane. Instead of doing doing something logical, like raising taxes, to fill their budget gap the city thought it might be a good idea to just out and out legalize hitting your wife. I honestly don't undertand the mental gymnastics that would have to happen for someone to consider this a good idea. If this were to happen it would set women's civil rights back over a hundred years. This is a complete and utter failure of government to protect the rights of its citizens and hope it never comes up for a vote because I'm scared of what the result could be.

During my reading of True Enough I came across the idea of Social Reality. This is what I was trying to talk about in class. The world of hard sciences and math is dominated by objective reality, there is a right answer to how and why things happen, but when you deal with people everything becomes subjective. People only think something is art because they all agree on it. Street art is a really good example of this because while some people see it as a popular form of self expression in the public sphere, other, such as the police, see it as vandalism and the destruction of public property. The culture that we live in only continues to exist in its present form because people who participate in it think it is the best. If everyone woke up tomorrow and decided that they were unhappy with everything you could reasonably expect the culture to change.

1984: The college Years

1984: The College Years

            Many students in college read George Orwell’s 1984 and discard as simply a story about communism that holds to relation to their lives. However, 1984 has a distinct relationship with the way college students socialize. Human behavior is controlled through social facts, the norms, values, concepts, and expectations that a group imposes on an individual. 1984 is still valuable to today’s college students because Big Brother is analogous to the social norms experienced by college students. Orwell demonstrates the coercive manner of social power through Big Brother’s use of one’s coworkers, friends, and love interests to manipulate and control the people of Oceania. Social norms are powerful forces that goes unseen by those they influence.

            In college, as well as beyond the walls of campus, our peers surround us. Winston’s coworkers at the ministry of love encircle Winston, the protagonist, all of whom ensure his orthodoxy to the party. Tom Parsons is one such person. He is a man who is a “mass of imbecile enthusiasm… on whom… the stability of the party [rests]” (23). This kind of person posses a threat to Winston because he has internalized the social norms of the party to such a degree that he would gleefully turn Winston into the Thought Police at the first chance, and thank them for the opportunity. The kind of man who “puts in an appearance at the Community Center every evening for the past four years” has abdicated his ability to think to someone or something and turned himself into a fanatic (23). Parsons has absorbed to the message of the party totally, he lives and breathes to please the unfeeling father figure that is Big Brother. Big Brother has manipulated the social norms of the workplace in order to maintain control of its citizens.

Like Winston, many of today’s college students find themselves in a work environment that punishes unorthodoxy. College students crave the acceptance of their classmates and this need for social acceptance leads to fiercely upheld social norms. The strongest social norm that I have seen in the academic setting is the resistance to talk in class. When a student talks in class they are broadcasting to their classmates that they care about the topic, and caring about school is seen as something social outcasts, such as nerds and geeks, do. Participating in class discussion is met with social punishment both in and outside of the classroom. In 1984 Big Brother punishes unorthodoxy by torture, but on college campuses punishment takes the form of social ostracization. Outside the classroom, classmates will avoid interaction with students who regularly talk in class because by talking the student is demonstrating a different set of values than those who remain silent. Inside the classroom, the student’s classmates will avoid interaction as well as simply submitting to the talking student’s authority when in group projects. Both the party and a campus culture influence their citizen’s behavior through the use of social controls.

            Winston must successfully navigate the terrain of his peer group to avoid the iron fist of Big Brother just as college students must tiptoe through the social scene of their campuses. Winston has to be careful with who he associates himself with so that he does not alert others to his rebellion against the Party. He has to keep away from those who “see too clearly and speak too plainly” because when they do eventually get “vaporized” they would implicate him (54).  Winston is limited to superficial relationships with his peers that arise from a needed cooperation. He must avoid giving people the sense that he has “OWNLIFE”, or “individualism and eccentricity” (82).  Thinking is hunted down and eliminated in Oceania because it poses a threat to the Party’s dominance, however, Big Brother cannot observe everything at once so they have twisted people into wanting to spy on those they are cordial with.  

            A college student’s peers also demand that he or she conform to social norms. The peer group that one joins defines one’s identity. During the first few weeks of a college student’s freshman year they are thrust into a new social setting where friendship bonds are rapidly forming. In order to not miss out on this important period of relationship development people will conform to whatever they think will gain them social acceptance. This ends up only reinforcing the present campus culture because in an attempt to fit in freshman will imitate upperclassmen in hopes of gaining their approval as well as their peers who will see them as already being acclimated to the campus culture. People will go out to drink and engage in reckless on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights because they don’t want to stand out as different from their peers, even if they don’t necessarily want to.

It is impossible to be in a romantic relationship, a relationship that is based off trust and communication, with someone when they “wince and stiffen” at their lover’s touch (67). If people were to be enjoying themselves and their partners in sex then they would see the whole government and its initiatives as “bloody rot” (134). The true value in the extreme puritanism is that it can lead to “induced hysteria, which [is] desirable because it could be transformed into war fever or leader worship” (134). One begins to live in both in the present and in the future. One wants to give the person they love everything of himself or herself and build something even more beautiful from their love. The Party has engineered a model for “romantic” relationships that both places an enemy in one’s bed and reinforced devotion to the party.

There is also a distinct lack of truly romantic relationships present on college campuses. In 1984 sex was reduced to a physical act because it was made into something repulsive, but on today’s college campuses sex is purely physical act because people perceive that everyone is doing it. There is no longer any romanticism in sex. This is reinforced by the “bro” culture that is dominant on many college campuses. This bro culture is one that emphasis hyper-masculinity and the objectification of women. This culture fosters negative attitudes towards women because males see them as commodity to be gotten rather than a person to love. The concept of dating as described by one student was “hooking up with the same person every weekend”. Even though men and women may not want to have causal sex, they still will in order to gain the acceptance of their peers. College students need to be aware of norm shifts so that they don’t have to go along with them if don’t want to. College students are having the norms of a romantic relationships redefined for them by their campus cultures.

Novels like 1984 give college students the knowledge that a social norm exist and exert power 
over our lives, and by doing so gives students the ability to either accept or possibly change the norm. Big Brother’s use of social control to change the relationship between coworkers, peers, and lovers is similar to how a college campus will resocialize its incoming students. If people ever want to change the way their college culture operates and influences people then they must understand social norms and how they impact students.