Engineering and Freedom, Part 9

click here to read part 1 

click here to read part 2 

click here to read part 3 

click here to read part 4 

click here to read part 5 

click here to read part 6 

click here to read part 7 

click here to read part 8 

  

Commercial broadcasters refer to advertising, euphemistically, as “interruptions” of regular programming. 

But given that the customers of broadcast media firms are not the viewers, but the advertisers, it would be more useful to think of the programming as interruptions of the commercial “messages.” The raison d’etre of the commercial media are the ads, as seen in the fact that in mass-circulation magazines, the first thing a reader is presented with when opening the front cover is not its table of contents, but rather an advertisement. 

The glossier the magazine, the more impossible it is to find the table of contents; to get people to look at the ads is the reason also that most mass-circulation magazines, rather than placing the text of their feature articles in a serial fashion, almost always break them up, using the device “continued on page...”. 

Feature content, whether it is in magazines or on broadcast media, is what attracts consumers. The advertising, what pays for this content, is in psychological terms the associative stimuli to the primary stimuli of what is usually called programme “content.” 

Without the primary stimuli, no one would bother with the associative stimuli. However, because the primary stimuli, the programming, is entertainment which is offered virtually without charge, the associative stimuli is almost automatically guaranteed a vast audience. 

And, since this audience is given entertainment to “relax” to with virtually no effort on their part, they are at their most vulnerable to the conditioning power of the ad stimuli. Barry Skinner introduced his behavioural psychology theories during the 1930s, the decade in which commercial broadcasting over radio was institutionalized in the United States (Skinner’s master, John B. Watson, had been dismissed from a professorship, due to sexual impropriety, and then went to work for the J. Walter Thompson ad agency). 

The environment of broadcast media, the “media ecology” as some have called it, is really a vast “Skinner box,” the device the psychologist constructed in order to his demonstrate his theories of behaviour. Within this box, a lab mouse was conditioned to perform a certain behaviour, pressing a lever, and it was rewarded, on occasion, with a food pellet. 

Eventually, Skinner translated his ideas into popular works, in which he argued that human beings should give up their “freedom and dignity” in order to live in a conditioned utopia. 

Apparently, he didn’t notice that many of his countrymen, and to a lesser extent, those elsewhere in the Occident, had given up their psychic liberty, if not their self-respect, to the massive experiment in operant conditioning called commercial broadcasting. 

Except, perhaps, that where the lab mouse was expected to press a lever to receive his reward, the TV viewer is expected not to do anything, not to turn the channel and not watch something else, which would cause him to miss the advertising. 

When they do, programmers immediately remove the primary stimuli, the programming, and replace it with something that it will attract more viewers to the associative stimuli, the ads. Some critics refer, inaccurately, to the habitual use of TV and other media, as well as the consumer behaviour that follows from it, as an “addiction.” 

In fact, actual addicts usually realize their dependency on an alien substance. Those involved in and influenced by the “information” economy (which is, by now, practically everyone), do not realize that they have a dependency at all. 

And, where the addict will do almost anything to get his fix, consumers dependent on “the media” for entertainment would quickly reject it if they were made to pay its full cost. However, it is the goal of mass-media advertisers and programmers (not a conscious one, likely), to attract the youngest possible audience to what they have to offer. 

This is why, for example, commercial-television programmes can charge such a premium when they are rated as “popular” with young viewers, even for shows that have significantly less viewership than others that are popular with those over fifty years of age. 

The young, unlike the elderly, have greater psychic room to be persuaded by mass means, and thus are of much better use to the controllers of broadcast media. Commercial advertisers, without any real recognition of this fact, act in the same fashion as do ordinary propagandists of totalitarian regimes, in seeking to brainwash the young into diffidence of their elder kin relations. 

The “teenager,” who came into his/her own truly during the late 1940s and ‘50s, was the earliest of the market-research industry’s explication of society in terms of age-relative demographics. 

This category has now been joined by the similar fractionalizing of the progress of life into “twenty-something,” “thirty-something,” the “over-fifty”, and now, “tweens” and younger. Once, children’s programming was at worst merely cloying and ridiculous to adults. Today such shows serve as nothing but advertisements for the merchandise that yields their production companies profits far in excess of what they receive from putting together the actual television programmes. 

Indeed, since most children’s programming includes advertisements for other children’s products, they are advertisements paid for by other advertisements! This has occurred even as the “content” of the most popular children’s shows has become as non-violent and apparently innocuous than entertainment for kids has ever been. 

If kids’ shows consist of bright-painted, perpetually-grinning dinosaurs, cuddly animated bears, and most tellingly, alien babies wearing television heads with antennae sticking out, and if all these characters do is gibber and occasionally sing a song, their parents will fail to notice that their children are being conditioned by a constant barrage of ads to be demand-fed in the manner of a lab mouse in a Skinner box. 

People blamed the best-selling book by Dr. Benjamin Spock on baby and child care for “permissive” society of the post-‘60s generation. But could any instruction manual on child-rearing be more permissive than the electronic device the very existence of which was to stimulate the passion to consume in anyone that came into contact with it? If even grown adults require forbearance not to be taken in by its hypnotic glow, how are children to resist it at all? 

The lure of the television, for both adult and child, is summed up in the phrase, “TV is the cheapest babysitter.” Like nothing else, TV keeps kids out of trouble, by rivetting their attention and leaving them stationary for long periods at a time, whilst the parents do the necessary household chores and get some rest. 

Studies on the adverse behavioural effects on children of TV shows always focus on “content,” on the number of violent acts per hour, the relative number of “stereotyped” gender images in a programme, etc. missing the bigger point that the form of the medium itself, by encouraging physical sedation, with the simultaneous exposure of many advertised inducements for food with mal-nutritional value, is a formula for slow death by obesity. This is as much an adult as a pediatric problem, of course, first in the U.S. and then in any other country that possesses commercial television in any abundance. 

Part 10 of Engineering and Freedom 

Engineering and Freedom, Part 7

click here to read part 1 
click here to read part 2 
click here to read part 3 
click here to read part 4 
click here to read part 5 
click here to read part 6 
click here to read part 7 

It is given among most retailers (especially the large ones) that December is “break-even” month. Not only do most retailers rely on Christmas to make money; they also fail to make money at all other times of the year. 

This must mean they have to borrow money to stay afloat all year, with the promise they’ll pay it back after the buying season. The larger meaning is that a significant portion of the consumer economy could not endure, based on the "normal" patterns of consumer behaviour (i.e. purchases made for oneself, rather than gift-purchases). 

It is only through the bourgeois potlatch tradition known as Christmas, where people compete to spend more money in giving than in receiving, that the consumer sector is as broad as it is. 

This concerns also the trend toward the replacement of the term “holiday” for "Christmas" in annual displays and advertising. This is a trend that began a decade or more ago, when public schools, citing large non-Christian minorities and the separation of church from state institutions, cancelled Christmas pageants, or substituted them with “holiday” concerts in which traditional Christmas themes were absent. 

The attempt by businesses to ignore the religious basis of the “holidays” is aimed to demolish entirely what remains of Christmas as a time to practice the best of Christian values - that is alms for the less fortunate, and love of one’s kin and neighbours. It is true that, as some argue, Christmas is coincidental with some of the other major religious holidays, including of course Hanukkah, as well as the Hindu “celebration of light.” 

However, the tradition in December of gift-giving is Christian, if not in origin, then in practice. While Hanukkah, for example, involves gift-giving, it is of a far less ostentatious and sombre variety than what is seen in all but the most fundamentalist of Christian homes. 

Throughout modern times, the conspicuous consumption identified with December 25th was leavened somewhat by the regard given to Christian values, if only formally. The disuse of the term “Christmas” in “holiday” advertising serves not only to bury the religious value of gift-giving, it seeks also to co-opt the traditions of other religions, as well, by making their winter holidays consumer-oriented. 

As stated, the very construction of the mass media was dependent not on market demand, but upon the subsidy of industrial and (to some extent) state interests. The author Richard Sennett, in his book, Flesh and Stone, compares the experience of driving an automobile to that of watching television:   

It is one result of the great urban transformation now occurring, which is shifting population from densely packed urban centers to thinner and more amorphous spaces, suburban housing tracts, shopping malls, office campuses, and industrial parks ... this great geographic shift of people into fragmented spaces has had a larger effect in weakening the sense of tactile reality and pacifying the body. This is first of all because of the physical experience which made the new geography possible, the experience of speed. People travel today at speeds our forbears could not at all conceive. The technologies of motion — from automobiles to continuous poured-concrete highways — made it possible for human settlements to extend beyond tight-packed centres out into peripheral space. Space has thus become a means to the end of pure motion — we now measure urban in terms of how easy it is to drive through them, to get out of them. The look of urban space enslaved to these powers of motion is necessarily neutral: the driver can drive safely only with the minimum of idiosyncratic distractions; to drive well requires standard signs, dividers, and drain sewers, and also streets emptied of street life apart from other drivers. As urban space becomes a mere function of motion, it thus becomes less stimulating in itself; the driver wants to go through space, not to be aroused by it. The physical condition of the travelling body reinforces this sense of disconnection from space. Sheer velocity makes it hard to focus one’s attention on the passing scene. Complementing the sheath of speed, the actions needs to drive a car, the slight touch on the gas pedal and the brake, the flickering of the eyes to and form the rearview mirror, are micro-notions compared to the arduous physical movements involved in driving a horse-drawn coach. Navigating the geography of modern society requires very little physical effort, hence engagement; indeed, as roads become straightened and regularized, the voyager need account less and less for the people and the buildings on the street in order to move, making minute motions in an ever less complex environment. Thus the geography reinforces the mass media. The traveler, like the television viewer, experiences the world in narcotic terms; the body moves passively, desensitized to space, to destinations set in a fragmented and discontinuous urban geography. (Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, New York and London ,W.W. Norton and Company, 1994, pp. 17-18.) 

No artefact has done more to effect social estrangement than the automobile. That is why it is not only sold, but actually designed, as a corporate technology. Automakers create cars as much as statements of their users’ status and character, as for any strict engineering purpose. 

The automobile industry could never sustain its great capital, promotional and labour expenses simply by making a product affordable to the everyman. To pay for itself, the automobile industry has used every avenue of persuasion, from the traditional (the used-car salesman) to the ultra- modern (broadcast advertising and constant “improvements” in makes and models), to keep sales growing year after year. 

The ad industry grew with the auto sector in a mutually reinforcing curve. Modern advertising’s reliance on the iconic and the irrational suited perfectly the auto industry’s use of visual and superficial styling to sell new cars by making older models appear prematurely obsolete. 

The marketing industry would not have achieved its present economic status without the billions spent on advertising by the auto industry. The auto-makers’ promotion of the car was not restricted to the commercials, either. 

Car companies have always provided, free of charge or at low expense, their products to commercial television producers. The relatively meagre losses this incurred were worth, literally, millions of dollars in free publicity to auto firms when some well-known fictional character was seen driving around in their respective makes and models each week. 

The extent and identity of the thorough reformation of society as wrought by motor transport remains undocumented because advertiser-subsidized broadcast and periodical media are an integral part of these vast changes. 

Beyond the fact that the commercial mass media were from the start substantially underwritten by auto companies (not to mention oil-refiners), the media industry would be greatly diminished were it not, for example, for the easy availability of motor vehicles to transport personnel and equipment from studio to location and back again. 

The utility and legitimacy of the motorcar itself is not questioned by the mass media, only the efficiency and “safety” of motor vehicles as a consumer product. The media are unconcerned with the inherent lack of safety of the automobile — that there is no way to avoid the thousands of deaths and injuries caused by car accidents each year — not because of their active complicity with auto or oil companies to censor these facts. 

Rather, it is that the automobile is so essential to the media industry itself, that the machine’s full effects remain invisible even to the people who are supposed to portray or report on society. The public at large thus never has had the chance to get the “big picture” of the car. 

Broadcast technology is thus crucial to the operation of the modern engineered city. Radio listeners are never more numerous than during so-called “drive-time,” when people are looking to be apprised of weather and traffic problems that could be disruptive to a smooth journey to and from work. 

Television sets have only recently started to be placed in automobiles, but broadcast TV has always played a key role in allowing people to overcome feelings of alienation that inevitably arise in the low-population-density settlement of modern urban areas. Since World War II, city-dwellers have adopted “virtual” relationships with their favourite TV actors and hosts as a substitute for real interaction with friends, neighbours and relations. 

To the engineers of the modern city, people without cars are a problem to be dealt with, like dirt in the parts of the machine which must be regularly cleansed to keep the system working. 

Large groups of people collected together, whether for protest demonstration or community festival, stops road traffic from moving entirely. Urban planners have designed the buildings, chiefly shopping centres and the like, which serve the automobile-city by keeping pedestrians away not only from automobiles, but also to prevent them from enjoying any spontaneous contact with one another entirely. 

That today’s urban-dwellers are then forced to find counterfeit social contact through broadcast media such as radio or television, only reinforces the means of social estrangement in the first place. The mass media are technologically complementary to the automobile. 

The car is a means of public conveyance that is also a powerful extension of the private sphere. In his Psychology of the Car, author Peter Marsh noted that people have built rooms for their cars — garages and car ports, and while driving, they pick their noses or apply lipstick, as though they were at home. For millennia, the private has been a space in which people disrobe from their public personae and try to “be themselves.” If this involves the indulgence of baser, “naked” emotions, so be it, so long as normal decorum is replaced once the private goes the public. The cabin for an automobile’s driver and passengers is also a private space, one which encourages analogous behaviour. Normal inhibitions against reacting to public misbehaviour, as occurs with people on the street or in a public building, are minimized within the motorcar. 

Graphic and audio technologies, on the other hand, are public media which are (usually) experienced privately. In the engineered society, as Marsh notes, an individual can live, work, shop without ever stepping onto public property. 

Electronic media ensure that what is public is consumed privately. The lynchpin holding together machine-engineering with electronic-media is advertising and marketing. In fact, the apparent differences between the private and public interest have been obscured through marketing and advertising. 

Government bureaucracies, traditionally drab and unbending, have taken to market research as a way of targeting their “real clientele.” Communications between governments and citizens increasingly take the form of advertising, just as elected politicians never really cease to campaign. 

Big business, on the other hand, has sought to remake itself as a purely altruistic player, through selective, highly-publicized charitable donations, by plastering their brand names on worthy initiatives for the underprivileged, and by paying big bucks for the advertising which employs a folksy and stirring score over beautiful imagery to dull the audience to the realities of the commercial world. 

However, commercial broadcasting has always been a vast, on-going market research survey. The livelihoods of those in the industry depend on the word of a thousand or so households carefully chosen to reflect the demographic makeup of much larger populations. The job of the “representative sample” is to simply and tediously fill out market surveys every few hours or so, giving answer as to which programmes they’re tuned to, which commercials they’ve seen, how many and who are in the room, what are their age groupings (15-24, 25-34...), and so on. 

This is in turn is the make-work for many more people than most might suppose. It was when the decisions were made to commercialize broadcasting media that the information economy was conceived. The owners of mass media had no other choice but to make it happen, if they wanted to know which of their offerings the audience actually listened to, and thus what fee could they charge their customers, the sponsor, to pay for its production. 

For radio or TV, the audience could never be something that was seen or heard, and instead became packets of data passed back and forth for profit. The audience became literally the object or “entertainment” of the mass-media industry, the great crowd whose tastes had to be partially-divined. The value of market research became apparent in short order, and public-relations grew around figures and firms associated with the mass media, like politicians, the media companies and, of course, the industries that use broadcasting to hawk their stuff. The computer industry in the 1960s got a big boost from public and private bureaucracies seeking to crunch all the data they’d been collecting from their market research. A greater proportion of the people in Occidental countries likely have more private information on file with marketers than did the Stasi have of the population of East Germany. 

Part 8 of Engineering and Freedom 

Engineering and Freedom, Part 6

click here to read part 1 
click here to read part 2 
click here to read part 3 
click here to read part 4 
click here to read part 5 

Formerly, the word “communication” conveyed the idea of what terms such as “transport” or “transportation infrastructure” mean to people today. 

“Communication” means literally to “bring people together,” and this is precisely what technologies such as the rail train, the automobile and the airplane carry out. 

However, all of these automated forms of communication require expensive and elaborate infrastructure in order to be functional. This infrastructure, in order to be realized, had to rely on subsidies provided by the state. In the past, transportation of people and goods was synonymous with the “communication” (in the contemporary sense) of news and information from elsewhere because news could travel only as fast as people. 

The shipping of goods en masse by turnpike, canal and railroad communications went together with the advertisement of these goods in periodical media. 

With the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s, communication of information transcended the communication of goods and people. Just as the railroad resolved the problems inherent in the communication of goods over long distance, the telegraph resolved the problem of the communication of “news” over distance. 

The railroad and the telegraph newspaper together created the abstract “market,” as opposed to the situated marketplace. General-interest newspapers, subsidized by advertising dollars and fed with information by the telegraph, were the only medium with enough reach to create mass interest in the goods on promotion. 

However, the subsidy of postal communications was key to the newspaper boom in the period after the founding of the United States. Paul Starr, in the Creation of the Media, observes that 

[The U.S. postal] network far exceeded the postal systems of any other country. As of 1828 ... the number of post offices per 100,000 inhabitants had grown to 74 in the United States, compared to 17 in Great Britain and 4 in France. In fact, the per capita volume of mail was about the same in the United States as in France, but the American postal network was more comprehensive. The French authorized a new post office only where it could generate $200 in revenue, a principle that would have closed 90 percent of the post offices in the United States. A radical new conception of postal communication emerged in the earliest years of the republic. ... the postal service as a medium of civic communication and nation‑building was embodied in the legislation that became the new system's charter, the Post Office Act of 1792. The law ... had three key elements: It made Congress itself responsible for designating postal routes, gave newspapers special discount rates and privileges, and categorically barred government officials from violating the privacy of letters. By assuming direct control of postal routes, Congress opened a direct political channel for local demands that would spur the development of a broader network. The clamor from localities for new post offices and post roads was incessant, but Congress was not merely acceding to local interests; it wanted to tie the western territories to the union, and postal service helped to achieve that purpose. From 1792 to 1828, Congress established 2,476 new postal routes, abandoning the principle that every route had to be self‑supporting. In 1825, it authorized the postmaster general to designate a post road to the courthouse of any new county seat. As the Post Office did not run a deficit in this period, the federal government was, in effect, using surpluses from the older states to subsidize service into newer ones; almost half of every dollar in revenue from the mid Atlantic states went to support routes in the South and West. (Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, New York, Basic Books, 2004, p. 88.) 

“In contrast,” Starr continues, “British North America as of the 1830s had a far more limited postal system. From Quebec east to New Brunswick, there were more than 100,000 people but only seven post offices. While the Canadian Post Office returned a surplus annually to the British Treasury, it was unable to respond to continual pleas for service from new settlements. Rates were high, and the volume of postal communication was low. In 1846, an assembly petitioned the queen for more adequate postal service so Canadians might be on an equal footing with the citizens of the United States .... In the United States, the subsidies to newspapers adopted in 1792 were critical to the emergence of the first national news network.” (Starr, The Creation of the Media, p. 89).

The situation in Europe was quite different. Not only did the state provide no subsidies to newspapers sent through the post, all nations (Britain included, until 1855) imposed “stamp” taxes on newsprint and advertisements. This had the effect, Starr writes, of inhibiting the emergence of “publics”, as existed in the United States. 

Private capital accumulation was not adequate enough to finance nationwide postal networks, in the U.S. or anywhere else. The costs of transporting printed information over the long distances, even of the original 13 states, would have been too high in order to sustain a large enough reading public, to support in turn mass-market publications. 

State-run postal systems operate by having short-distance mail subsidize the costs of long-distance routes, which is why a postage stamp costs the same, whether mailed across town or across the country. The subsidized postal system in the early United States gave publishers the opportunity to have regional and national audiences. 

These rates were, moreover, the same for big players as well as the smaller ones. “Infrastructure” means, literally, “between structure,” and historically, the state has established the ground, or network, by which communication throughout the polity takes place. 

Later on, after the first Great War, industrialists took to the new medium of radio to broadcast to an even larger audience — more numerous because it included even those who could not or didn’t like to read newspapers or other periodicals. Both radio and then television were developed not through the direct sale of entertainment product to viewers, but rather, through the purchasing of air-time to advertisers, and the industries that underwrite them. 

Broadcast media, like mechanized transport, would not have become generalized network systems if they relied for their financing market demand based on price. Just as no ordinary motorist could really afford to bear solely the costs of automobile transport, no average viewer could afford to shoulder the direct cost of the entertainment programmes she enjoys watching or listening to. 

Where private industry did not finance through advertising the construction of broadcast media networks (ie. everywhere except the United States), it was the state that did so. 

The “new” media such as the Internet and wireless telephony, which are seen popularly as manifestations of the capitalist ethos at its anarchical best (or worst), in fact are the products of government/military research and development. 

What might be called “the problem of communication” has been throughout history both the end and the cause of much government intervention and regulation of the civil society. In ancient times, only the most centralized of governments were able to build sophisticated road communications to bring far-flung, diverse populations together. Some states were able to achieve a high degree of centralization through the control of a natural waterway, such as the ancient Egyptians did with the Nile. 

In modern times, governments have solved the problem of industrial overproduction by building canals and railways between markets. Governments also stepped in to build highways to accommodate automobile traffic, as well as airport facilities. 

Advanced transport facilities serve to liberate people from “journey”, travel as ponderous and even dangerous travail. At the same time, they come under the regulation of state, which subsidizes some or all of the costs of sophisticated media of communication. Of all means of transport, sailing has always been the least dependent on state subsidy in order to prosper. 

Governments have been involved in the construction of naval fleets and port facilities, but nautical communication can function very well without a centralized authority for financial support. 

The great commercial city-states of ancient and modern times were nearly all sea-bound traders. The cities of the Hansea league of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries became a powerful confederation through the mastery of the North Sea trade, until their independence was swallowed up by the land-based feudal monarchies of Europe. 

Empires arise from the meeting of land and sea, when those dependent on the commodities-wealth of territory bump up against the shipping-based wealth of the cities. The former usually subjugates the latter, using the conquered city as a capital by which to control both land and sea communications. 

The financing of sophisticated communications technologies such as the rail train, the car, the airplane, radio, television, wireless and the Internet, contradicts the classical-liberal idea of capital accumulation. 

Where production is regulated by prices only, a firm can increase profits by improving productivity, or introducing some innovation — the proverbial “building the better mousetrap.” With these profits, the business would re-invest some (or ideally all) of the profits into further improvements in production, with the aim of increasing profits even more, which can again be re-invested for a better profit margin, and so on. 

This is a gradual process, though, where technology progresses by increments. It is a valid description of certain, relatively simple (but still important) technologies. The sophisticated, networked technologies under discussion here required great outlays of capital at the initial stages, in order to be functional at all. 

Private business was often involved in the development of these media from the beginning, or became involved subsequently. But it was the state which provided the impetus for them. The cash economy is self-regulatory, because demand and production are determined by prices. The market price to consumers of modern technologies would have been too much for any but a wealthy minority to bear. 

However, these same media depended upon mass demand to function, as well. Accordingly, the state subsidized the cost of their infrastructure, in order to inspire such a level of demand. Investment in transportation and communication was a form of socialism, but practised by all modern and modernizing governments, no matter what their political persuasion. 

The automobile, the airplane, the other internal-combustion technologies, as well as the mass media, effectively formed the engineered environment of modern times. Material culture is fed by the mass production, that so depends on regulation and subsidy of transportation in order to be a going concern. Commercial enterprise and exploitation has taken place within the engineered civilization, on a scale not witnessed in the past, but it did not come about as a result of market demand, nor could the price-driven marketplace accommodate its development. Internal combustion, and the earlier types of engines, objectified the body’s digestive system, and thus automated the action of the hands and legs in production and transport. It gave rise to the industrial engineering of the nineteenth century, and the automobile and airplane in the twentieth. 

During the course of the last century, engineering advanced from the automation of physical actions and processes, to objectifying the nerves and senses in electric communications media such as the phonograph, radio, the movies, television, and most recently, the Internet. 

The mass media, all of which present a counterfeit of direct experience, are really the objectified and extended voices and countenances of they who own and control them. These technologies, and particularly the broadcast media, have been used to engineer markets and society for decades, to the detriment of reason and individual freedom. 

In the early industrial era, capitalism was synonymous with heavy manufacturing and resource extraction, and the proletariat were alienated from work through the limited use of their skills in the mass production process. 

The face of big business, which was the big businessman’s face and name, was a very ugly one indeed. Business during the nineteenth century had learned how to automate many of the physical actions, and even some of the gross mental aspects (the telegraph’s imitation of the electric charge of nerves) of the human body. 

It yet had no means, however, to bring together mentally the fragmentation of talent and skill that raw industrialism represents. Broadcasting, first with radio and then with television, was developed as an instrument of propaganda, initially for commercial purposes during the 1920s, and then increasingly for political ones during the ‘30s and ‘40s, by totalitarian regimes and by Western governments that fought the totalitarians. 

After the war, though, broadcasting became exclusively the domain of commercial propaganda, as the more overt political boosterism of state broadcasting was toned down for purposes of “neutrality” (socio-political propaganda was left to the state school system). 

Axiomatically, advertising spreads the gospel of its sponsor, presenting the product only with “the best face.” Early on, business hired stars of stage and screen to personify their products. Hosts of TV news, sports and chat programmes are unlike movie stars in that they are not supposed to provoke the audience. An even, calm disposition must be kept by TV hosts at all times. In so far as the faces that appeared on commercial television had to be acceptable to its customers — big business — TV personalities have become, too, the acceptable face of the business-financiers of electronic media. 

Television was a godsend to the public relations side of business, at least, because unlike other forms of mass media, it can actually present a face, an actual person’s face, communicated immediately to millions of people. 

The ubiquity of corporate spokespersons since the beginning of commercial television, reflects the desire of businesses to create icons — “icon” in the sense of representative, rather than celebrity hero — to stand in for themselves and their entire organization. 

The spokesperson usually has absolutely no input in the decisions which he is to convince millions of people are wise or good for them. In so far as they are simply faces and voices for the decisions of others, for all intents and purposes they are nothing more than the masquerades or imposters, for the collective decision-making of corporate or bureaucratic management. In essence, television allowed business corporations to become “incorporated” in the symbolic, as opposed to legal, sense. 

Businessmen had extended the mechanical powers of the human body through their possession and management of capital property. The electronic image allowed them to extend also their own powers to appear and to speak to the masses, through the hiring of media spokespersons. 

Spokespersons were the idols, the living fetishes, representing concerns whose actions and decisions were suitably obscured by the attention that the many paid to the fetishes. Broadcast advertising employs the tactic of the medicine man or spiritual healer the world over, who distracts his trusting crowd with the one hand, in order to do a sleight with the other hand, to achieve his seemingly miraculous feat. 

This is the technique of professional magicians, too, and advertising has always had a subliminal association with evil, the devil in the older sense of a trickster rather than as a bloodthirsty man-wolf. It is the corporate spokesperson himself who is the idol, the fetish is the product itself, and the advertisement the sleight-of-sight-and-sound which distracts the audience from the merits or lack thereof of the product itself. 

The corporation itself fulfills its legal wish to be an artificial person by becoming, through its spokespersons and public relations representatives, an actual symbolic person, its reality maintained by constant doses of media exposure. 

Corporations and bureaucracies, in putting their best face forward through media marketing, are doing no more than what any individual person does when in public, but on a massive, global scale. 

They take the same risks as any person who assumes an appropriate face for the public, only to find that image betrayed by word of her behaviour outside the eyes of the public. 

On the model of the corporate spokespersons, politicians and celebrities have learned to use electronic media to sell themselves to the public, thereby taking the risk that this image will be undermined by their behaviour when outside the sight of the cameras. 

Nevertheless, the growing expense of marketing through electronic media has meant that only larger concerns can shoulder the cost of it. When this principle is applied to the electronic media itself, it means that the total number of information sources available to people in any particular medium is limited. Media which are financed by the monies of corporate and government advertising are considered “mainstream.” 

Those media which are not so subsidized are called “fringe,” “underground” or more recently, “alternative.” Corporations, through broadcast advertising, seek to inspire behaviour that is the very opposite of what they require of their own personnel in order maintain themselves as an on-going concern. 

Work life, particularly at the junior and senior executive levels, requires a high degree of commitment, planning, organization and hard work. Yet the consumer ethic, as expressed in advertising, seeks to undermine all of these values in favour of spontaneity, leisure and profligate expenditure (See Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, New York, Basic Books, 1976).   

Moreover, advertising wants to foment not judicious and individualistic decision-making in purchases, but instead, the type of herd behaviour generally associated with “fads” or “crazes,” where people buy something just because everyone else is buying it. This is social behaviour in its most basic form, where the logic and correctness of any action is simply that others around you are doing it, too. 

Encouraging pack behaviour is in keeping, on the other hand, with what might be termed the “communistic” nature of modern business organizations. Virtually any ladder-climber today knows that to get ahead in the business game, work comes first, and family, friends, romance and everything else non-work comes second. This is only a symptom of a more general trend, where work and work-life itself has become the primary social unit for many people. Increasingly, corporate management seeks to control not only the skills of its workforce, but their minds, too, with racial and gender sensitivity training and cult-like “motivational training.” 

Part 7 of Engineering and Freedom