Human Interactions

[JEANNIE BERNIER]

Mm, okay, tell me, when have human interactions been free of control?  Now
it's the "media" (a rather overused term, don't you think?) that controls us
by telling us what deodorant to use, which toothpaste will get our teeth
shiny and white, what we should think about the Pakistani/India conflict,
yada yada yada.

Before that it was the Church (in the west anyway) telling us what ideas
were heretical, how to get grandma into heaven, what to eat on which days.

Call me a tool of the system (and I am, since I enable all those
privacy-flouting creepy marketing programs as a chosen career) but
corporations are just stupid, not evil.  I know I'm going to get flamed to
H-E-double-toothpicks for this, but if companies really had access to half
the crap about us that the media is telling us they do, I still wouldn't be
scared, because god knows they wouldn't have the first clue how to really
exploit it.

Of course, I would.  Aren't you glad I'm on your side?


Bwahahahahahahhaha!

JB - Collaborateur extraordinaire.




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug Millison [mailto:millison at online-journalist.com]
> Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2000 12:32 PM
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: RE: the Tube in VL
> 
> 
> The fragmentation of mass media audiences into smaller niche 
> audiences -- through the proliferation of TV channels, the Internet, 
> etc. -- would seem to reduce the power of advertising.  I don't think 
> this has reduced the grip of corporate-controlled media on audiences, 
> however.  With more choices, and choices more finely tuned to niche 
> market interests, overall audience participation in 
> corporate-controlled media, and thus their exposure to advertising, 
> marketing, and promotional messages, would seem to be on the increase.
> 
> Advertisers have  found many creative ways to aggregate audiences and 
> thus fight the fragmentation trend. Huge companies (they're getting 
> bigger all the time through mergers and acquisitions, and their reach 
> extends through globalization) have the budgets to buy advertising 
> and disseminate well-orchestrated promotional and marketing campaigns 
> across multiple media.  Flip channels on your cable TV system at 
> dinner time and see how many different channels offer the same 
> McDonald's advertisement in the same time slot; you won't likely 
> escape the same marketing messages by logging on to the Internet, 
> either, as consumer-oriented Web sites get in on the act with ad 
> banners and sponsored editorial features. Leave the TV, computer, and 
> radio behind -- but advertisements and branding programs  are now 
> woven into the fabric of daily existence to an unprecedented degree, 
> yesterday's billboards seem almost quaint compared to the spread of 
> corporate logos and product/service branding messages throughout the 
> built environment, in sponsored events, in the spread of retail 
> franchises (Starbucks, etc.), cross-promotions among companies or 
> among brands of one company, and lots more.
> 
> Such advertising and promotional programs are made possible by 
> increasingly large media and publishing companies, which continue to 
> consolidate (and thus integrate TV, radio, newspapers, books, 
> magazines, Internet, events, etc., under one, efficient, umbrella 
> corporate structure) and offer advertisers comprehensive and 
> far-reaching opportunites to pump marketing messages through 
> multiple-media channels simultaneously.  Product placements in films 
> and TV programs (as well as in newspaper, magazine, and Internet 
> "content" a.k.a. editorial material) have reached new heights. 
> Moving beyond promotion through the use of commercial products and 
> services as prizes on game shows, the games themselves now include 
> advertising/promotional content -- questions about commercial 
> products, and especially about other media products and services in 
> quiz shows like Jeopardy, for example; you see similar infiltration 
> of advertising messages into editorial and programming in all media.
> 
> This kind of corporate intrusion into our lives will only get worse, 
> as media consolidation continues and as the Networked Economy (the 
> sum total of corporate activity on the Internet and related media; I 
> describe it, and how to manipulate it for profit, in considerable 
> detail in a book -- a how-to manual from the dark-side --  I've just 
> co-written, to be published in August; details at my Web site if 
> anybody has an interest) integrates more of today's flesh-world 
> economy.
> 
> Perhaps sales per ad dollar are down, I don't have numbers handy, but 
> that would only reflect a rather narrow measure of investment. 
> Increasingly, marketers  invest in  promotional programs that lead 
> consumers into long-term relationships (frequent flyer or buyer and 
> other loyalty programs, to name one example), through advertising and 
> promotional campaigns designed to meet exigencies of the marketer's 
> return-on-investment spreadsheet calculations, and which use 
> increasingly sophisticated design and narrative strategies to invest 
> consumers in brands on an ever-more intimate level.  Over the long 
> term, they get more bang for the buck, even if this particular ad in 
> this particular medium, returns less.
> 
> So, I don't think the evolution of TV content vitiates Pynchon's 
> critique of same in Vineland. Judging from P's remarks in the intro 
> to Stone Junction, where he goes on about the danger to civil 
> liberties inherent in the Internet,  (only a personal opinion here of 
> course) I doubt that he applauds the spread of corporate marketing on 
> the Internet.
> 
> Vineland is prescient precisely because -- as the quotes rj strung 
> together show -- Pynchon  shows TV (and related media technologies, 
> especially the computer mediation of Prairie's relationship with her 
> mother) to be such an intimate companion to the lives of his 
> characters. This shows how these media distort the lives of human 
> beings -- human beings, remarkably adaptable, can adapt to just about 
> anything (some people managed to remain human even in the worst 
> horrors of the Holocaust, for example; scientists continue to figure 
> out ways we can live with pollution and global warming; etc.), and so 
> of course they manage to make even media-mediated moments human to 
> some degree.  I don't find this the fun and flattering picture of 
> human life that some others apparently do (even the smartest media 
> wind up co-opted by corporate interests -- the beloved The Simpsons, 
> for example, recently served to sell Intel microprocessors, in a 
> massive, well-orchestrated, cross-media campaign).  In Vineland, 
> Pynchon punctuates these media-mediated relationships with moments, 
> free of media, that, by comparison and contrast with the 
> media-mediated moments, underscore the way human-to-human 
> interactions are degraded by the intrusion of media that serve 
> corporate and especially government interests. The most powerful 
> moments in Vineland -- Blood and Vato feeding Brock Vond to the 
> indigenous ghosts across the river; the older generation passing 
> along the values of direct action against corporate interests; and 
> more -- stand out precisely because they lie beyond the reach of the 
> TV and computer media that mediate and control so much of the rest of 
> the novel.
> 
> -Doug
> 
> 
> At 9:20 AM -0500 7/6/00, JEANNIE BERNIER wrote:
> >Regarding 80's vs. 90's (and nought's) TV and it's place in 
> controlling the
> >populace:
> >
> >It's interesting that Vineland is set in a time when 
> suddenly cable is
> >taking over, so rather than the 3 network plus 3-4 oddball 
> UHF stations you
> >may have had access to in 1979, you suddenly have all these 
> new stations to
> >choose from (I want my MTV!) and there's this novelty to 
> sitting and looping
> >for hours through the programming, and advertising certainly 
> took advantage.
> >This is the point at which the "niche" market started to 
> become a reality -
> >rather than your product advertising having to appeal to the widest
> >audience, you were free to start targeting demographics 
> based on which
> >stations you were airing on.
> >
> >Now, advertising is losing some of it's power because 
> there's so darn much
> >of it that it's become background noise.  The reasons that 
> companies look
> >for more and different ways for putting their message in 
> front of eyeballs
> >(those billboards on the back of bathroom stalls in bars 
> come to mind) is
> >that overall advertising effectiveness is on the decline - 
> you get less
> >sales for each dollar spent than 20 years ago.
> >
> >And, as Josh points out, the net is taking time away from TV 
> viewing -  now
> >you've got this whole new novelty medium to pay attention to 
> - just in time
> >too, as it's dawing on us that you can keep adding channels 
> ad infinitum (I
> >want my DirectTV!) but there's still nothin' on.
> 
> -- 
> 
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