Right where you’re sitting, do a quick exercise for me: I’d like you to see how many advertisements you can see from where you are right now. Include company marks and logos; those are for brand recognition, and that counts as advertisement.
How many? I’ve lost count. You might see brand names on your phone case, TV, and other electronics, publisher’s logos on the spines of various books, a distinctive swoosh on the side of a sneaker, tags on clothing, a sticker on a water bottle advertising your favorite coffee shop…to say nothing of the advertisements that may be on your screen even as we speak. The list goes and goes. Go out for a drive, and count again: billboards, signs in shop windows, manufacturer’s logos on cars, tires, and everything else you see…again, impossible to count.
Go on social media, and everything vies for your engagement. Polls, quizzes, pandering posts looking for a ‘like,’ ragebait looking for a comment that will drive their engagement stats up further.
As David F. Wells famously observed (even before social media) in God in the Wasteland, this constant assault of advertising and engagement-seeking has a liturgical, formative effect on you. You are being told, always and everywhere, that everything seeks your attention and recognition. Everything is to you and for you. Nobody says that out loud, but the message is the more powerful for all that. You might have conscious defenses to it if it were said out loud. Instead, they enact it countless times throughout your day. It’s just the constant backdrop of your life.
The initial response to this world of advertising was to optimize the goods and services for it through a process now known as McDonaldization: applying the core principles of the fast food industry (efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control) to other sectors of society. If you could be certain that your Burger King onion rings will taste exactly the same no matter where you are in the country, then mass advertising can move you to buy them. Everything is standardized and reliably on offer anytime you want it.
The next logical step was increasing the available options. Make it possible for any individual consumer to tailor the product to them. This trend reaches its logical endpoint in something like a social media or Spotify feed, where the algorithm feeds you results that are completely personalized. The very ubiquity of this trend has made it possible for some companies to build their brand on resisting it (e.g., In-N-Out’s famously small menu), but most have (sensibly) yielded to consumer expectations. At Burger King, you can “have it your way.” At Chick-fil-a, Popeyes, and most other fast food establishments, there is now a kaleidoscopic array of sauces with which to modify your meal. (I recall some uncharitable observer quipping that the essence of American cuisine is “twice as much food as you need, drowned in the condiments of your choice.”)
This has been our world for a long time. In the late-90s rom com You’ve Got Mail, main character Joe Fox observed, “The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino.” Is it true? A lot of people seem to think so: Google “what your Starbucks order says about you” and behold the pages of results.
This set of trends catechizes us to interact with the world as though everything is to us, for us, and infinitely customizable to our preferences. We are the little godlings of the market, and if one vendor won’t satisfy our every whim, we can be certain there are a dozen other vendors eagerly vying for our attention and the blessing of our dollars.
But not everything works that way. In fact, most of the important things don’t. In a world that wants us to forget this, it pays to make an effort to remember.
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