Having let my subscription lapse months and months ago, I'd forgotten about that New Yorker issue last month that featured ads by Target exclusively. Found it in a stack of recent issues and, really, I wasn't moved one way or the other. I mean, the issue that appeared in my mailbox last week (for reasons passing understanding—are companies picking up that tab, too?) was stuffed with a Starbucks coffee filter. Could a thousand Halliburton print ads be more annoying? I doubt it.
Michael Bierut at Design Observer mentions this issue and says the s-word: subliminal. Remind me, what's the HTML for rolling one's eyes? Sure, I don't doubt that images change our perception of the world even as we perceive them—certain kinds of images, anyway. The fact that the standard for brainwashing keeps changing without our evidently being brainwashed ought to tell us something. But television commercials, marching our minds toward an event horizon beyond which independent thought is, uh, unthinkable? Visual pollution, a public warp zone of negative visual input that sucks away at our capacity for information that doesn't come in megawatts? The Internet—with all those blinking parts? This brave new world, into which we have been having entered for so many decades now, is very ugly in spots but has never struck me as, or proven to be, particularly poisonous. Insofar as advertising images do affect our perception of life, I'm not sure it's obviously negative.
Observer notes that all the Target ads do amount to a context that doesn't complement the traditional New Yorker illustrations—that's a sharp concern, and good reason to tut-tut editor David Remnick and co. for the issue. But taken generally I think Remnick is making the right calls, however whorish it seems when you hold in your hands a magazine that won't close flat for all the bizarrely shaped junk inserts crammed inside. Blogs and online content have to be chipping away at his erstwhile subscriber base (maybe I'm a case in point), the strong brand name notwithstanding, and a print magazine has to make up the difference somewhere.
Notes
1. OK, now tell me about how I'm wrong about thinking that I'm not brainwashed. I'll welcome my new/longstanding marketing overlords!
2. Tried hard to work Expect More, Pay Less into the above, but it wasn't going to happen.
3. Read Everything Bad Is Good for You. Stephen Johnson's right—mostly. He never quite gets around to addressing the not-so-extreme behaviors associated with entertainment media. I would've liked to hear him address whether an active addictive entertainment (like MMORPGs) is preferable to a passive addictive entertainment (like TV). Stimulants or depressants, SJ?
6878265, have you ever read Infinite Jest? In DFW's novel, they've stopped numbering years, which are instead referred to by the names of their corporate sponsors (or their brands). So instead of "2005" we'd have the "Year of The Whopper", the "Year of Glad", or the "Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment", etc. It's meant to be absurd, but who knows, that might be next.
Posted by: David at September 26, 2005 4:49 PMInsofar as advertising images do affect our perception of life, I'm not sure it's obviously negative.
Wow. How have I known you this long without this revelation coming out? We need to have some drunken arguments, my friend.
I'll agree with the general thought that ads in a magazine are about as innocuous a form of marketing as exists. I suspect any outrage over this move has more to do with Target seeming declasse to New Yorker readers.
But seriously, can you doubt that we're being constantly manipulated by advertising? You can't count on your self-awareness to save you. They've got you pegged in the "nominally self-aware twentysomething" demographic, and are ready to sell you its acoutrements. If this stuff didn't work, people wouldn't spend billions of dollars on it.
Try counting the number of corporate logos visible from where you're sitting right now. If it's less than a dozen I owe you a beer.
Posted by: tom at September 26, 2005 5:36 PMAnd aren't you the guy who thinks aesthetics and morals are inherently linked?
Posted by: tom at September 26, 2005 5:37 PMI always thought the link was between morals and anesthetics. Tom, what brand of beer are you offering to buy?
Posted by: David at September 26, 2005 5:54 PMYglesias keeps saying that. If I ever maintained that morals and aesthetics are linked, I'd like to backtrack furiously. I hold some crackpot ideas about ethics and aesthetics, though, that I'll post about some time soon (or stammer through the next time you catch me at the bar).
I'm not implying that I'm not a member of a readymade demographic or that there aren't logos all over me and my environment. I'm just fatigued by the vague Adbusters line of reasoning that holds prima facie that this manipulation amounts to a serious decline in our quality of life. Dissolve that concern from the larger question of corporate politics—obviously, corporations very much directly affect the lives of people. I'm saying that the fact of totalistic advertising is not evidence in itself that totalistic advertising is ruining us as human beings.
Maybe there are explicitly psychological reasons why 75 pages of Target is worse than the 75 pages of the usual bunch of companies that you're used to, and I'm just not aware of them. But the complaint seems to be that it just seems more egregious.
I've got limits as to what I think we ought to have to endure—just last night our friend in the gummint was telling us about congressional consideration of naming rights for U.S. national parks, e.g., Exxon-Mobil Yellowstone.
Posted by: Kriston at September 26, 2005 6:09 PMI agree that the Target edition of the New Yorker isn't really any worse than the normal one, as I hope I implied. I think it probably just sits the wrong way because it bestows a sort of totalitarian mood to the magazine, and because Target is considered trashy.
I agree we have to weight the costs and benefits of advertising. There's no going back. But, when you say:
I'm saying that the fact of totalistic advertising is not evidence in itself that totalistic advertising is ruining us as human beings.
It's not clear that it's ruining us, but I think it's clear that it removes control of your own mind. That's the point, isn't it? Or, rather than remove it, produces it, as that portion of your thoughts and prejudices would naturally be shaped by random agents and events that aren't pursuing any particular agenda. It's the idea of deliberate, constant and subtle manipulation that creeps me out, and why I'm sympathetic to the Adbusters line (although I think their tactics and what they perceive to be their motivations are frequently pretty silly).
Posted by: tom at September 26, 2005 10:59 PMNow admittedly, there are much worse directions that that sort of control could be put toward than making you buy shit you don't need. It's still creepy, though.
Posted by: tom at September 26, 2005 11:01 PMCreepy, most def. I remember distinctly getting the heebie-jeebies at the grocery store after I read that all cereal-box cartoon mascots stare downward (to toddler eye level), and I haven't eaten breakfast since. But "bad" for me (or toddlers)? Only if I actually eat that much sugar every day, I think.
Posted by: 6878265 at September 27, 2005 11:51 AMI showed that issue to my illustration class, and I have to say that it impressed me. Much of the work was handsomely executed, and because of the restraints on palette (all of the ads had to conform to black, white, gray, and red), it probably un-trashed the magazine a bit.
But I didn't go out and buy anything from Target afterwards, and don't plan to.
Posted by: Franklin at September 29, 2005 7:51 AM