Too Much Choice?

Mass production gives us products that are barely distinguishable (Miller or Bud? Crest or Colgate?) until advertising infuses (fills) them with meaning. Grocery stores which two decades ago stocked 9,000 items now stock 30,000, Revlon makes 177 shades of lipstick, Crest comes in dozens of sizes, shapes and flavors. So billions of dollars are spent on advertising, largely to influence largely inexplicable, or at least barely rational, choices about these things. So it must be, Twitchell argues, when goods are interchangeable and in surplus (в изобилии, избытке), and consumers have enough disposable (free) time and money to consume both the ads and the products.

Twitchell has robust contempt for the intelligentsia's " downright supercilious " understanding of consumption, particularly the notion that, were it not for advertising, people would not want things. Our love of things, says Twitchell, is part of our nature; it was the cause, not the consequence, of the Industrial Revolution. Just as Orwell¹ said there are some ideas so nutty that only an intellectual can believe them, Twitchell argues that only a professoriate, housed in institutions of higher learning far from the marketplace, can entertain the hazy idea of a bygone golden age when people had pure and only natural needs.

Want a glimpse of the future? Twitchell says you've already had one if you have seen MTV, the Home Shopping Network or "informercials." Or if you have read magazines like Sony Style or Colors from Benetton that, unlike many women's magazines which blur the line between advertising and editorial content, erase (destroy) that line.

Today's sweep of advertising is the democracy of the marketplace, what Twilchell calls "the application of capitalism to culture: dollars voting." Where will it sweep next? Perhaps advertisements in books, where they once were. Twilchell recalls that in the late 1940s, Dr. Spock² fought Pocket Books to have cigarette ads removed from his baby care book. Books might remain one of the last redoubts of advertisement-free America because, Twitchell says, "the prime audience for advertisers, namely the young, is functionally illiterate." That good news about books contains the bad news: books do not have a bright future.

George F. Will

Комментарии muffins – тип кекса;

takeout = take-out food;

go bankers = to go crazy (nuts);

saturates = infuses; fills with;

barrage – вал;

assails = attacks;

Nike swoosh = the company emblem («загогулина»);

Stair Master = gym equipment in the form of moving steps;

swarms = lots of (cp. sweep);

underwriting – зд. оплаченные;

robust = healthy;

downright supercilious = totally contemptuous;

to entertain = зд. to consider (an idea);

bygone = long gone;

blur — зд. «размывают»;

prime = best (cp. prime time, «прайм тайм» ТВ).

Дата добавления: 2015-08-21