Adverts – the unauthentic self

Developing an advert involves considering the consumer’s knowledge, language, culture and ideological perspective. This process is important as it helps advertisers decide how to associate signifiers and signifieds in different ways to create new signs.

When we, the consumers, read, see or hear the advert, we decode it so that it creates some interest and sense in our mind. Therefore, advertising works as a match-maker of signifier and signified to create meaning – the surface meaning & the deep meaning – that suits its own purpose.

But adverts are selling us something besides consumer goods & services. They are providing us with a structure in which we, and those goods & services are interchangeable. They are selling us ourselves in a form that we are not. The day adverts stops trying to achieve that, people might stop looking for themselves as they will have achieved an authentic self.

Media – the ‘Truth’ bearer

Through discourse, human subjectivity and perception are shaped by Media, which has come to play the role of the ‘truth’ bearer. Today, it has gained the power for defining ‘normal’ within society & culture.

Media is able to construct subjectivity by defining lifestyles that it does not actually sell to us, but convinces us into by carefully constructing the limits of normality, truth and social success. By establishing codes and signs of normality, Media accomplishes a task that religion once mastered.

And now we are seeing the consolidation of ‘Social Media’ – the democratization of information creation & distribution. We are shifting away from monologues, as Social Media is essentially about dialogue created by the public. Information sharing, collective perception aggregation, multi-faceted analysis – are some of the aspects of Social Media that make it extremely powerful, but hard to control.

However, this does not mean that the traditional Media platforms are going to be obsolete. There are still large chunks of global populations, or specific segments within nations, that do not have access to digital technologies and Social Media platforms – digital divide. For this reason, traditional Media is not going to be completely replaced because it still has a market to satisfy.

But Media convergence and the democratization of the Media industry are contributing towards reinventing the whole concept of the Media content. A new infrastructure is progressively taking shape and its function is to connect those who want to provide content with those who are looking for it. The aim for this transformation is to give consumers more control over media flows. We are set to see yet another shift in the role of the ‘truth’ bearer.

Goodbye ‘Service Economy’, Hello ‘Experience Economy’.

Mauritius is catching up, sort of…

The human value chain is being…

…distorted through the dose of ‘quick remedies’ we seek. Such a craving for making things happen quicker than they should does indeed help us progress quicker, but we don’t necessarily become better.

We bypass steps, which we consider to be procedures rather than processes. ‘Divorce becoming a banality while job hopping becoming a trend’ are some of the products of ‘quick remedies’.

Some would say all this is closely linked with technological advancement, globalization, shifting economies or democratization of the tools of production. I think the source of this distortion is the fear of being emotionally weak and vulnerable.

The dynamics of this country…

…are slowly changing. The ‘protégé’ culture is gradually fading out. But there are still some who manage to  resist this logical evolution in socio-economic & cultural paradigms.

The day technology becomes widespread and accessible, i.e the digital divide becomes a minor issue, a new era of democratic power will emerge – that of public/people power. Then the ’protégé’ culture will become irrelevant and illogical. 

But one thing we have yet to learn as a nation is ‘how to manage power collectively’. For power management to become effective and positive, cultural and religious divides have to remain outside the equation, status divides have to be minimized, and intellectual divides have to become secondary.

Public power is going to depend on the chemistry that flows from individual to individual, and I rest my chemistry for now, with patience.

Strategy is simple…

…people complicate it.

 

Why?

 

Because humans think they have leaped light years ahead of humanity based on their adaptation to post-modernity (fashionable modernity) . They fail to recognize post-modernity as an intricate element of the human condition – the need to adapt to change coupled with the reluctance to change. And they fail to understand that strategy is interconnected with the human condition instead of being related to modernity. The modern bandwagon is therefore just an illusion of progress. We should spend more time stopping and looking at where the human condition has reached instead of looking at how modern we are.

 

 

We construct our…

…identity around the other. The other is necessary for us to understand who we are and determine our own position. If the other is not there, then we are void.

If man stopped thinking…

…about the next things that should happen after now, man would be living a satisfied life. But since man thinks about how now will lead to next, man is living in constant uncertainty.

Don’t try to be creative…

…without a purpose. Some people will say that it is hard or even impossible to be creative when they are restrained within a context or set of rules. We talk a lot about ‘thinking outside the box’, and over the years, it’s become a fashionable term.

But do we really understand what it entails? The process to ‘think outside the box’ starts with a person forgetting all the information, knowledge and experiences they have acquired since they were born. Easy? I don’t think its worth even trying.

Therefore, thinking outside the box is just an illusion. We will never be able to achieve it as the thought of trying to think outside the box already defies the whole idea of the true ‘outside the box thinking’.

 

What’s achievable is to ‘think inside the box’ and to build on what is already there. To be creative inside the box means to generate fresh thinking within a set of rules and context in order to build things from the inside out. It means creating new ideas by connecting unrelated but existing planes of thought. This is  what creativity is.

Being creative without a purpose and without a box is to create things that have no relevance.

The first rule for thinking creatively is to define the master objective to achieve through the creative process, and this is the first step towards ‘thinking inside the box’.

The power of Representation

“What IT IS does not mean a lot to me, but what IT REPRESENTS means much more.” – some might find it hard to admit but it is increasingly becoming part of our social norm.

We own a lot of things that have very little use value, but instead have more representational value.

Buying a cellphone and buying the latest cellphone – the first one enables us to communicate our thoughts to others in order to be connected with them, and this is extremely useful, while the second one enables us to communicate our status, taste, wealth, etc.

We buy a house for shelter, but we buy a house in a posh area with more rooms than we need and a garden with pool in order to show our status, taste, wealth, etc…

We buy a car to get from point A to be B but we buy a luxury car with options we barely use just to show our status, taste, wealth, etc…

How useful is representation becoming in today’s society? The more I study it, the more I conclude that it is not becoming more or less useful. Instead, it is gradually sinking into the norm. It is becoming part of human evolution.

I still adhere to the theory – ‘What we do has not changed. Its only how we do that has changed.’ But I think ‘representation’ is one of the core elements that makes up humanity, alongside the need to procreate, eat, survive, find shelter and communicate.

The need to represent establishes one’s difference. It helps someone form their identity. It helps people make sense of who they are in the social context. It enables people to develop a greater aim in life, over and above the basic human aim. It enables people to aspire.

So I do agree that the need to represent can lead people to do ‘extravagant’ things. But I believe that within the human context, representation has enabled us to evolve. It has prevented us from staying in one position, with one way of thinking, and one way of doing things. Representation has generated diversity, plurality, individualism, collectivity, and most importantly, it has created desires to see beyond what is already there.

Representation fuels progress.