Mind Shadows_____AdbustersHistorically, Americans have been regarded as naive by Europeans. Mark Twain wrote Innocents Abroad, a title which suggests a view held even by Americans of themselves. To add dignity to a role, English movies once cast as Canadian any character with a North American accent. The general perception of Americans was that they were well meaning, although somewhat uncouth, prone to wearing Hawaiian shirts at a dinner party.
This view of naive Yanks has changed, at least in terms of Americans' regard for themselves.
Modern US society has become extremely self-conscious, with a high sense of the ironic. Why? Because the public is now flooded with words and images; we live in an electronic age. Information and graphics almost overwhelm as they tend to manipulate. Self-consciousness and irony come about as a defense against media manipulation. They are a means to distance the beholder from the beheld. Attendant upon them is cynicism, also a distancing function.
In an age before universal literacy, and to prove the truth of his belief, a rube might have declared, "It says so in the book," as if printed media decided any issue. During the 1930s people panicked into their cars and scurried onto roads after hearing Orson Welles' radio broadcast of a Martian invasion. For the general public, media had a different kind of power to persuade because it tended to be trusted as another form of communication, one that complemented speech, press, the town hall, or a stump speaker.
Long gone are those days.
If you haven't visited the Adbusters site, you should. It is satire for the self-conscious--those who acknowledge they are consumers but feel guilty about it. They enjoy the hipness of its pages. One ad proclaims the viewer can become the next Tiger Woods if he buys a $5,000 golf club. The graphics are clever, and demonstrate talent, but that's not all.
Adbusters reveals no philosophy or other rationale than to appeal to those who share its cynicism toward corporate manipulation of consumers. Readers feel vaguely guilty about their participation in an acquisitive society and turn to Adbusters to assuage their sophisticated view of consumption. Meantime, they continue buying, unmindful of the remarkably privileged citizenship they hold in a first world country.
Don't get me wrong. I hold no brief for mindless consumerism and am also cynical about the manufacture of consent, which continues to subdue and control public behavior. (Presently in the United States five media conglomerates control 94 percent of all media.) No, my brief is not for consumerism. Instead, it is for thinking things through, which is not demonstrated by Adbusters and its conceived target audience. An Adbusters Q & A might go this way: Want to gripe about materialism? Turn to our pages. Sick of advertiser mind games? We're your first resource. Want to feel above it all while you go on spending? Try us.
Adbusters is in truth among the ranks of those it claims to oppose. It is slick, charges six bucks a pop for its newstand magazine, and appeals with images and captions rather than well-reasoned words.
It seems to subvert graphics with an anti-establishment counterpart, but that is not the case. With knee-jerk campaigns and captions, it does not reflect well-conceived philosophy or long-term strategy, but only feeds its own pretensions. It does not offer rationally alternative viewpoints but appeals to an audience used to the twenty second sound byte.
One could argue that its cynicism, irony, and sophisticated self-consciousness are the counterpoints to social outrage and social activism because they do distance the viewer. Suave hip is in; uncool anger is out. This serves to disengage rather than engage the public against Corporate America. Click: Adbusters
