George Monbiot - Advertising and academia are controlling our thoughts. Didn’t you know?
I came across a paper that counsels
advertisers on how to rebuild public trust when the celebrity they work with
gets into trouble. Rather than dumping this lucrative asset, the researchers
advised that the best means to enhance “the authentic persuasive appeal of a
celebrity endorser” whose standing has slipped is to get them to display “a
Duchenne smile”, otherwise known as “a genuine smile”. It precisely anatomised
such smiles, showed how to spot them, and discussed the “construction” of
sincerity and “genuineness”: a magnificent exercise in inauthentic
authenticity...
NB: Monbiot says Our minds are shaped by our social environment, in particular the belief systems projected by those in power; but he goes on to say: The purpose of this brain-hacking research is to create more effective platforms for advertising. But the effort is wasted if we retain our ability to resist it. So then our minds need not be shaped by our social environment, and in fact, were that unequivocally true, Monbiot could not have written this article. It's a good point he makes, but he must get around the relativist assumptions that underpin it. DS
To what extent do we decide? We tell
ourselves we choose our own life course, but is this ever true?
If you or I had
lived 500 years ago, our worldview, and the decisions we made as a result,
would have been utterly different. Our minds are shaped by our social
environment, in particular the belief systems projected by those in power:
monarchs, aristocrats and theologians then; corporations, billionaires and the
media today. Humans, the supremely
social mammals, are ethical and intellectual sponges. We unconsciously absorb,
for good or ill, the influences that surround us. Indeed, the very notion that
we might form our own minds is a received idea that would have been quite alien
to most people five centuries ago. This is not to suggest we have no capacity
for independent thought. But to exercise it, we must - consciously and with
great effort – swim against the social current that sweeps us along, mostly
without our knowledge.
The purpose of this
brain-hacking research is to create more effective platforms for advertising.
But the effort is wasted if we retain our ability to resist it. Surely, though, even
if we are broadly shaped by the social environment, we control the small
decisions we make?
Sometimes. Perhaps. But here, too, we are subject to
constant influence, some of which we see, much of which we don’t. And there is
one major industry that seeks to decide on our behalf. Its techniques get more
sophisticated every year, drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience and
psychology. It is called advertising.
Every month, new books
on the subject are published with titles like The Persuasion Code: How Neuromarketing Can Help You Persuade Anyone,
Anywhere, Anytime. While many are doubtless overhyped, they describe a
discipline that is rapidly closing in on our minds, making independent thought
ever harder. More sophisticated advertising meshes with digital technologies
designed to eliminate agency. Earlier this year,
the child psychologist Richard Freed explained how new
psychological research has been used to develop social media, computer games
and phones with genuinely addictive qualities. He quoted a technologist who boasts, with apparent
justification: “We have the ability to twiddle some knobs in a machine learning
dashboard we build, and around the world hundreds of thousands of people are
going to quietly change their behaviour in ways that, unbeknownst to them, feel
second-nature but are really by design.”
The purpose of this
brain hacking is to create more effective platforms for advertising. But the
effort is wasted if we retain our ability to resist it. Facebook, according to a leaked report, carried out research – shared with
an advertiser – to determine when teenagers using its network feel insecure,
worthless or stressed. These appear to be the optimum moments for hitting them
with a micro-targeted promotion. Facebook denied that it offered “tools to
target people based on their emotional state”... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/31/advertising-academia-controlling-thoughts-universitiessee also
Jacques Camatte: The
Wandering of Humanity
