Why I've Been Writing about Advertising

More than thirty years ago, I developed and taught a high school course called Mass Media in which one of the primary units dealt with advertising.  The focus of the course was not to help students become effective marketers of some product but to become discerning users of mass media.  Since mass media—newspapers, books, radio, television, and (the just emerging) computer services, etc.—filled  much of the world our students lived in, we (the English Department of West Michigan Christian High School) believed that they should understand how media worked and how it worked on them—informing, persuading, inspiring, manipulating, and seducing them.  In that context I used Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders and became convinced of its significance.

Recently I picked it up again, a ripped and tattered paperback with lots of underlining and folded corners of pages, and was again convinced of its significance. As I read it, I wondered if anyone today is worried about the moral issues inherent in so much advertising.  Do Christian high schools and colleges struggle with concepts like the permissible lie, exploitation of sexual/psychological sensitivities, caveat emptor, and psychological obsolescence as they are used in media?  Are they concerned with the way advertising objectifies humans as consumers so that we are no longer homo sapiens (thinking persons but what Erich Fromm called homo consumens (consuming persons)?

Reformed Christians believe that humans are made in the image of God and they often develop Christian schools in an attempt to educate the minds and hearts of their children to desire biblical truth and beauty and justice. But how can that happen if simultaneously they allow media to shape them into consumers?

I suppose one can assert, as George Will does (see previous blog), that advertising does not really have much effect on our desires.  But virtually all businesses seem to believe the opposite.  Or one could assert that it is an essential part of human nature, a part of the image of God in us, to constantly want new and different things. But there’s no biblical evidence for that but is evidence  to the contrary.

In America today, consuming stuff is considered a patriotic duty.  Whenever people buy more stuff (houses, durable goods, Christmas presents) than they have been buying, the media tells us this is wonderful news.  If people buy more stuff, then more workers are needed and unemployment goes down and our standard of living goes up and, we are in effect told, all’s right with the world.  But is it?  Does our stuff bring contentment?  Does the manipulation worked upon us by marketers bring us nearer to God?  Does the degradation of creation that comes with excessive production please God?

As I said at the top, I wonder if Christian schools—grade schools, high schools, colleges—concern themselves with these questions in their curricula.