Why We Need To Keep The Old Ones Near
I don’t recall what it was that started the conversation the other day but a couple of us fogeys were sitting in the garden talking about how powerful advertising has become now. As someone who was actually born BEFORE there was television in every home, born before computers, flat screens looming over highways, and someone who remembers Burma Shave signs as a highlight of a road trip (https://www.legendsofamerica.com/66-burmashave/), I see advertising as I believe it really to be: the psychological cockroaches in all of our corn flakes. Burma Shave signs were an early advertising campaign for a shaving cream. They would be placed in sequence along a highway, at a time in history when a “highway” was often a two-lane road, in such a way as the people in a car or buggy would read them as they drove past. They often rhymed and were quite catchy.
As long as someone has wanted to influence someone else’s decision-making there has been advertising. Just check the Wikipedia article below that starts out a very long time ago. Every time I drive along one of the highways in Egypt I am reminded of the evolution of advertising here and in much of the developed world. I remember seeing scenery while moving from one place to another, unlike the current nonstop billboards that line our highways urging us to buy a home, or a second or third home (like who has the money now?) somewhere near the sea, a lake, a shopping mall…who buys those things? I remember when someone invented elevator music that was supposed to keep people calm while sliding up and down inside a building in a little box. Many of us were horrified at this “progress” and many of us continue to be horrified.
Forty years ago (that’s in the 1980s, people) no one could imagine standing in a corner store having Fox News pouring out over their heads. Or that it could be droning on hung on a wall in a restaurant. This is capitalism, folks. It is entirely based on the idea that for the society to go anywhere, everyone must keep shopping and buying. It doesn’t matter what anyone buys, but everyone must buy, and the role of advertising is to tell everyone what to buy. If you don’t think about this much, it’s all normal and seems ok, at least if you are under 40 or 50 years old and from an urban background. The concept that an individual is primarily of value to a society as a consumer is one that I recall hearing discussed with a great deal of concern in the late ’50s and early ’60s. I recall friends of my parents coming to visit us with their two sons who were a bit younger than I was. Stefan and Warren’s nicknames were Stuffy and Worry, but everyone found it hilarious that Warren’s plan for his life was to grow up to be a consumer. Little did he know. In fact, he grew up to be an independent farmer and promoter of organic farming.
As a grad student in social psychology in the ’70s, I had to slog through the hundreds of studies on how to influence people, how to cause them to change their minds…or not to. And when in the course of discussing the ethics of experimental research we read about John B. Watson’s work at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1900s. (https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert). Briefly, Watson was working on operant conditioning and he took a 9 month-old infant who had no fear of anything and taught Little Albert, as he was forever known, to fear rats and many other animals by putting one next to him and exposing both the rat and Little Albert to a loud frightening sound. At the end of the experiment, they did not bother to decondition him to the rats, and Little Albert remained terrified of animals for the rest of his short life. This was the final blow to my interest in experimental social psychology. I dropped out of grad school to become a teacher, while John B Watson left Johns Hopkins to go to work on Wall Street in advertising. He’s probably responsible for a lot of what advertising has done to humanity.
