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.