Four arguments for the elimination of television

I first wrote about this book some days back when i posted this. Due to heavy workload here at L (it gets insane in the last few weeks always.. very manageable still though :) ).. i took a while to finish the book. Now that i am done with it.. i thought i should quickly finish a post on the book as is the custom :) .

The book was written by Jerry Mander in 1977. If i understand the story correctly he wrote this book after working in the US ad industry of the 60s and 70s for over 15years.

Mediated environments

This is how he starts his first argument.. he talks about how his five year old son once asked him “Daddy, Who built Mount.Tamalpais” ? The question shocks the author and he replies saying “No person could build a mountain”. It is when he tries to understand the genesis of the question that he realises that most urban americans spend almost their entire lifetime in human-created environments.

“What we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, feel and understand about the world has been processed for us. Our experiences of the world can no longer be called direct, or primary. They are secondary, mediated experiences”

“We are so sorrounded by a reconstructed world that it is difficult to grasp how astonishingly different it is from the world of only one hunderd years ago, and that it bears virtually no resemblance to the world in which human beings lived for four million years before that. That this might affect the way we think, including our understanding of how our lives are connected to any nonhuman system, is rarely considered“

Very deep thoughts these. Infact, my own life in the 90s in a small town is much much different from what it is now. I wonder how some of my friends who actually spent their time in a village feel about their own lifestyle changes!

This line again is brilliant ..

“In three generations since Edison, we have become creatures of light alone”

On Advertising:

It is this part of the book that i loved the most partly because the arguments seem more authentic thanks to the author’s experience with the ad world.

This chapter titled “Inherent need to create need” (Its a 2 page pdf..can be read in a jiffy) makes some very valid arguments on the ad world. I read this chapter after i came from a presentation by a FMCG major about how they launched various variants of soaps, shampoos, biscuits etc . All the while in the presentation i was sitting there and wondering whether one really “needed” a shampoo + a conditioner+ a hair gel + a after shower gel+ a moisturiser etc to take that ideal head bath :D.

“I have never met an advertising person who sincerely believes that there is a need connected to, say, 99% of the commodities which fill the airwaves and the print media. Nor can i recall a single street demonstration one single product in all of American history“

Hehehe! .. and he doesn’t stop here ..he goes on to say..

“People do need to eat, but the food which is advertised is processed food: processed meat, sodas, sugary cereals and candies.  A food in its natural state, unprocessed, does not need to be advertised. Hungry people will find the food if it is available“

Hmm.. I dont remember seeings ads for idli, rice, sambar, chutney :P . but i do remember seeing ads for idly mix, instant noodles , sambar powder etc :P . So the “instant”-ness is then argued as the need i think. But is the instant-ness really needed? Is processed food as good as it is proclaimed? .. Those are i think deeper questions. The other day in one of the marketing presentations a friend of mine said .. the per capita biscuit consumption in US is 7.5kg and in India it is 1.5kg “only” .. so there is tremendous growth oppurtunity. But do we really “need” to eat so many biscuits ? If yes, then our hunger will automatically redirect us to biscuits :P ..  I am sure all those flashy biscuit ads wouldn’t have been there if it was not about creating “artificial needs” :)

“The goal of all advertising is discontent or, to put it in another way, an internal scarcity of contentment. This must be continually created, even at the moment when one has finally bought something. In that event, advertising has the task of creating discontent with what has just been bought, since once that act is completed, the purchase has no further benefit to the market system. The newly purchased commodity must be gotten rid of and replaced by the “need” for a new commodity as soon as possible.The ideal world for advertisers would be one in which whatever is bought is used only once and then tossed aside“

I think this is the fundamental argument of “Story of stuff” as well. Some of these are also discussed in my classes here in MBA. But the discussions are never so deep. The professor shows a video of an ad with a woman using shaving cream and asks the class .. “can advertisement help sell such a product” .. the class then says “No. The woman has no “need” to shave as she has no beard”.. then the prof concludes .. “hence, proved that advertisers can’t create a need” . I think that argument pales before this one. Especially considering the fact that the author himself got into the field smitten by the glamour of the ad world.. i think it is important to understand his argument.

I still have an academic interest in the subject as it is a lot about “influencing” people and who doesnt like to influence :P .. Wait a min.. wasn’t that the problem in the first place ;)

The trickle-down theory

(Though the pic above is about “aid” .. i think that is how trickle down economics works now :P)

This is my second most fav part of the book. Whenever i was in doubt about the business-as-usual i used to console myself saying.. someday it will all trickle-down and we will all be happy :P . This part of the book is a scathing criticism of the trickle-down theory.

The theory is first explained as follows:

“When people buy more and more commodities, they produce more profits for industry, enabling it to expand. When industry expands, more jobs result.This puts more money into circulation, enabling people to buy more commodities, expanding profits again, yielding more investments, more jobs and starting the cycle around on another turn”

And then the criticism starts

“It turned out that the pursuit of all those happy goodies didn’t produce happy people; it produced isolated, frustrated, alienated people. More important, the economic benefits didn’t trickle down to create some egalitarian democracy. The benefits trickled up“

He further criticises the trickle-up theory with some stats.In 1965 apparently 0.005% of the corporations enjoyed one-third of all  the corporate profits. I couldn’t really verify the statistics but considering the OWS protests of today i can only say that not much has changed 46 years later :P

Thanks to the book i also got to know about one other economist whose works are next on my to-read list.. “Louis Kelso” . For a simple introduction.. he is the guy who is the inventor and founder of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). This is what he said on this trickle-down theory .. i find these lines to be very very insightful :)

“As the production of goods and services changes from labor intensive to capital intensive, the way in which every person — not just a few, but every person — earns his or her income must change in the same way. You can’t do that unless two things happen: (1) you have to broaden the ownership of capital, and (2) you have to tighten up the laws of property so that the capital owners collect the wages of their capital with the same faithfulness that the labor workers now collect the wages of their labor.

At present, we do exactly the opposite. We pretend there is only one way to earn income — namely, to work. And we therefore conclude that it doesn’t really make any difference who owns the capital”

Simple No? .. All inequalities of the modern day world.. explained in one paragraph :D .. The idea is that the “owners” have access to both Capital and Wages ( Eg: Some CEOs get stocks and salaries 100s of times more than the assembly line worker) while the worker more often that not has just wages. So workers by design will remain poorer.

I now sort of understand the line of thought behind ESOPs.. when i got my ESOPs from symantec i never knew Kelso’s deep foresight was  behind the financial instrument :) . I am looking forward to my reading of Louis Kelso :)

Conclusion

I have written very little about the subject matter i.e., why television needs to be eliminated. That can’t be dealt with in a 1000 word blog posts :p .. it is the deeper arguments which make it interesting and i don’t want to dilute his arguments anymore ;) .

And this article by no means should be seen as disillusionment with MBA :P .. i think ESOPs .. Worker owned co-operatives etc are all wonderful ways of running businesses. It is just that all this parallel reading helps understand the MBA doctrine better ;)

So that is that. Signing off.