 Hello there. It's Thursday at noon. I know it is. Do you remember our arrangement? Thursdays at noon on CFUV. Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called First Person Plural. You make it sound excessively attractive. That's what I have in mind. In 1988, Michael Weis wrote a book that should have changed the way that sociologists approached issues of class. It didn't, but it should have. The clustering of America shared the dirty little secret about how Americans defy themselves into groups. Traditional sociology examined socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity as determinants of the kinds of lifestyles Americans led. The truth is, according to Weis and the advertising execs upon whose work Weis based his book, what Americans have most in common with their neighbors is what they consume. Yes, buying habits are predictable according to where Americans choose and or are able to live. Almost since the inception of zip codes and postal codes in North America, advertising executives have targeted markets on the basis of one social rank, two mobility, three race and ethnicity, four family life stage, and five housing style. They have connected these characteristics to specific zip or postal codes. One of the most widely used systems, Claritas's Prism, has produced 62 clusters that represent groups with a specific combination of characteristics and these characteristics predict consumption. Advertising agencies pay big bucks to have access to these 62 clusters and they design their marketing strategies to reflect the assumption that where people chose to live predicts uniquely well what people will buy. Clustering concludes that similar individuals live near each other and pursues this conclusion aggressively. This may be common sense, at least on the surface. While we can afford to rent or buy the architecture of the buildings in which we live, the characteristics of the neighborhood most certainly would reflect our ability to pay for things and our tastes. But a deeper contemplation of these clusters may reveal some things that should not just be taken for granted. The empirical grounding of clustering, not withstanding. First, there is the implication of having 62 categories. Instead of the three, four, or nine categories, often cited as indicators of socioeconomic level in general social surveys conducted by social scientists. 62 categories indicate a greater fragmentation of lifestyles than most researchers care to acknowledge. It also indicates a complexity that disinforms parsimonious approaches to questions of class, race, and ethnicity. Second, there is the implication of assumed predictability. Marketers often model their approaches to markets as if they were linear. The 62 clusters are meant to tell the marketers the needs of the market, and the marketers consequently respond to those needs. Another reading, however, might be that marketers then train those markets to want certain products. Rather than a linear model, one can imagine a spiral effect with people choosing a neighborhood because of certain tastes, and then being educated about what those tastes mean through their mail, telemarketing, billboards, and so on. They see their neighbors purchasing many of the same things, which they then purchase in an effort to be a part of the neighborhood, and then more advertising responds to those purchases, shoring up the desire to be loyal to those products and their competitors. The push-pull of the spiral effect escalates from there. Is this predictable? Or is it constructed? No one quite knows who is the chicken and who is the egg, and which came first. Finally, there is the implication that neighbors are keeping up with each other's consumption, even in neighborhoods where neighbors rarely speak to each other. These patterns seem to emerge even if there is not real cohesion among the population. This similarity in consumption cannot be explained easily and offers a fertile ground of study of the ways in which consumption offers cultural resources to people to demonstrate their identity as well as reflect their taste. These implications, and we are sure there are many others, suggest that to understand society and culture in the United States, Canada, and Europe, one must study consumption. A growing number of people outside the advertising industry are beginning to understand that consumption has become the key battleground for the hearts and minds of people. Understanding why we consume and what ways we respond to calls for consumption and how we construct ourselves in relationship to what we consume will help us understand how contemporary Western society works. The understanding could also help break the spell of consumption as a sustainable approach to economics and reveal the ways in which uncharted consumption is leading to a world of haves and have-nots and ecological disasters. A Vancouver artist and activist named Ted Dave became concerned about consumption in 1992 and conceived of a day each year when people would simply not buy anything. Originally called No Shopping Day and celebrated on September 24th, this idea has taken on a life of its own. Over the past decade, this simple idea has evolved into International Buy Nothing Day, now falling in most countries on the day after American Thanksgiving because of its relation to Christmas consumption. It is celebrated on every continent, with activists creating local celebrations that include scavenger hunts, potluck dinners, posturing at malls and shopping centers, bartering bazaars, the exchange of quality time coupons in lieu of Christmas gifts and other creative endeavors. Many people choose to celebrate the day simply by buying nothing, refusing to purchase anything on at least that one day of the year. Buy Nothing Day offers an interruption in the consumer rhetoric that stands both as a public political action and a personal reflection. Consider how difficult it is to conceive of a day where you would buy nothing. It may be harder to contemplate and execute than it seems at first. Is the only way to accomplish the task to stay at home? Can you spend time with friends without consumption? Does watching television count? How about cable or satellite television? Does using electricity count? Does driving count? Am I consuming if I use the cable connection to the internet? Check my email? Use my telephone? The whole concept of spending a day not consuming, not purchasing anything becomes much more complex than one might imagine at first. It serves to curtail consumption for a day as a reminder to the world of the rate at which we consume and it serves as a reminder to ourselves about our own spending habits. Of course the hope is that such a reminder will curb spending on other days as well. The Buy Nothing Day campaign in Seattle distributed a checklist for consumers to consult before making a purchase. Do I need it? How many do I already have? How much will I use it? How long will it last? Can I borrow it from a friend or family member? Can I do without it? Am I able to clean, lubricate, and maintain it myself? Am I willing to? Will I be able to repair it? Have I researched it to get the best quality for the best price? How will I dispose of it when I'm done using it? Are the resources that went into a renewable or non-renewable? Is it made of recycled materials and is it recyclable? Is there anything I already own that I could substitute for it? We found this list interesting because it seemed like exactly the kind of list one would make if one were in a free market, a market where buyers assessed their needs and purchased according to value. You know, the kind market capitalism is supposed to produce. The irony is that the sellers in this market would like the buyers to forget the self-examination and to believe that they want the particular product they are being sold. Desire becomes a manipulated emotion rather than a rational assessment of the advertising market. On today's show, we talk with a local man named Pema Doma. Developed by Nothing Day, Pema is a musician and activist and someone who espouses the values promoted by By Nothing Day in his everyday life. He is not a star in the activist circles. He is simply one person trying to do his part. We also discuss this manipulation of desire and contemplate our own consumption footprint on the earth. In an episode we call The Desire to Buy Nothing Day. How did you get interested in By Nothing Day? The answer to that question goes way back to high school in grade 11 when I actually figured out what the heck high school was all about, what school was all about. I'd always hated it. I'd never understood school. I was listening to this radio program on CBC and this guy in there was saying that the whole point of the education system wasn't actually to educate people but it was to turn them into consumers so that they would participate in consumer culture. And then I got interested in things like adbusters and stuff like that because I started to see this other level of media that was not part of the advertising machine that was part of an actual communication between people about stuff that mattered instead of what Michael Jackson was doing on his bad hair days. So then I heard about By Nothing Day through adbusters just by reading magazines. And have you done anything for By Nothing Day in the past? I think the last By Nothing Day, I think I was sick so I didn't buy anything and that was great. I stayed at home and didn't watch any TV and didn't buy anything and that was my By Nothing Day. That's sort of how By Nothing Day looks for a lot of people like the first time they do it, it's just not participating. So that's kind of their slogan is like you participate by not participating. When I started reading adbusters it was in grade 12 so that would have been around 2K. And by Nothing Day 2K I didn't really do anything because I wasn't really into it yet. I wasn't really sure about any of the whole adbusters thing. I mean I'd heard so much subversive shtick that had been just totally like made no sense to me at all and later found out that that was actually another part of the monoculture thing, subverting subversion. We have a number of names for that, the designated opposition being one of them. What's the book on the queue right now? We've got a reading list that we call the queue. The one with the chapter in it about approved, commodify your dissent. Oh yeah, commodify your dissent. That's the baffler. Yeah, it's like protest is a system of participation and the system involves all sorts of dissent. Drug use is another really good example. It's like doing drugs, it's like automatically you're a rebel and you're also consuming at the same time and you're supporting the same structures that you're supposedly rebelling against. It's a particularly awesome way of turning people into the kind of people that when they rebel they're still participating, they're still in the box. They're still in the game. So how does by Nothing not be part of that? How does that differ from the in the box kinds of deviants? Consumption is the lifeblood of monoculture. It's like the whole, it's what keeps it going. If you take consumption out of the modern situation you really, it's like taking guns away from an army. If you take consumption away from monoculture it just becomes completely defunct because it's all based on the whole idea that my wants and my needs are more important than anything else in my life. And it's not just more important than other people. It's like more important than what I actually should be doing with my life. So satisfying my particular, you know, the puneist and the most useless of my desires on a daily basis takes precedent. When you celebrate by Nothing Day by Buying Nothing you realize how much normally spend on useless crap and then what kind of impact it has on your life. And you start to realize, you know, I'm not even like the worst of it. I know people who like are just part of the whole thing and make money to spend money. And it's just brutal. So you start to, you know, take a look at your life and realize how much of a part of what you're against you really are. That's interesting. So it has two-fold aspect to it. One is you actually are not contributing to the system for the day. But the other is you actually get to do self-examination and kind of understand how much you are a part of. Oh yeah, the 29th is the busiest consumer day of the year. And so Buying Nothing Day isn't just about cutting a chunk out of that. It's also about, you know, on the busiest day of the year getting us to kind of take a look at what the busiest day of the year is all about. It's about over consumption. Now I have a question for you since you mentioned it. Now I understand why it's the busiest day of the year in the U.S. and why they picked the day after U.S. Thanksgiving. Has that been true in Canada as well? I don't have any look at the picture of Canadian economics versus American economics. But I mean, see as how the monoculture has been developed pretty well out of America and penetrated, you know, all the aspects of Canadian culture and a lot of European culture and certainly Asian culture. I mean, I wouldn't suspect that it would be any different. You know, it might be a day or two off or something, but... It's still the big weekend to start your Christmas shopping. Yeah, that's huge. Have you been active in any other way in these subversive efforts besides Buying Nothing Day? Or purposefully inactive. Yeah, it's all about choosing your activity or anti-activity, really. I think I've been active in a lot of it in that I've just been... I've been examining my own life for several years and on this, you know, before you can try to change other people and other people's lives and try to make a difference with external stuff, you have to take a look at what's happening internally, what's happening in your head. And so, I mean, I've been doing that since I was, you know, a little kid. I think everybody does that and it's just, you get taught to ignore it. You get taught to be distracted from it. But... So, that's how I've been mostly involved. I've also been involved with just, you know, protests. The free-to-bet protest I was really involved in and a protest a while ago against Campbell's cuts to education I was involved in because I'm not a student right now myself, but so many of my friends are. And one of the reasons I'm not a student is because I just can't afford it. So, I was really into that. You talked about on the Adbusters website that you were offering your band. Tell me a little bit about your band and how music might be a part of protesting. We don't do protest music per se. I have a lot of favorite bands that are specifically protest bands. I really like Rage Against the Machine. I still stand with them as being a pretty cool protest band. Whatever label they're associated with. Also, Radiohead, I really like them. Their music has always had that message. Not just that sound and not just that flavor, but the actual message, the spirit of protest. So, although our band is electronic, we don't use lyrics. It's me and my friend Mike on laptops. I do synthesizers. He does percussion and Andy on kit drums. And we just do funky electronic stuff. But I think that that could be part of a celebration, like part of a street party instead of going to the theater and seeing a cheesy movie. You could come out and party with us and it would be completely free. The whole point is you're not spending money to have fun. You're having fun to have fun. Have you managed... You were hoping to connect with other people in Victoria. We're recording this on the Monday before, so you still have time to connect with people in Victoria. Yeah, I have actually. Good. Thank you to tell me a little bit about how that process has worked because here you are kind of starting out, trying to find a way to get involved, connect with other people who want to be involved. You've used the internet. Yeah. That's how we found you. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about that process. Like if somebody else were thinking, hey, I'd like to get involved, but I don't know anybody. I don't know how to kind of speak to that. When you get involved in anything for the first time, you don't know where to start. You don't know what to do at first, like who you contact. And I figured going on the net would be a good first step. And I saw on an ad buster site, there was nobody else in Victoria, I think, or maybe there's one other person, but I went to the Montreal section. It was like two pages long. And Victoria is sort of like that, just because we're on an island. We're a small, fairly conservative town. But the way that I've been finding people is, I mean, after posting that, a few people have contacted me, including you guys. And also just friends. You talk with friends on the street. You see if they're interested, if they know anybody. And then through you and through also a friend of mine, I heard about Viper. And that's a good site to reference, because they've got something going on by nothing, do you think? So as with everything in Victoria, you tend to find stuff through friends before you find stuff through the web or other official sources. It's like, you don't really dial up, you know, the by nothing day committee and the yellow pages. Yeah. You're listening to First Person Plural on CFUV, Victoria's Public Radio, 101.9 FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet, cfub.uvig.ca. Giving sociology an edge! I don't think there's any considerable pressure on people to buy things if they simply don't want to. Television suggests quite a few things to us, but it never tells us what to do. I don't know about that. I think we're educated as to what we want. You know what I mean? It's like, you don't go to the mall and have someone come and tell you, okay, you need to buy this because, you know, like, you need to buy it. It's, when you grow up, you're told, you know, in many different ways what you want and how you should gain happiness. It's like, happiness depends on certain external circumstances, as long as those circumstances are set up properly and you're always responsible for setting them up for yourself, then your needs, as an individual, will be met. So, I don't know that we're told, you know, what to buy, but we're definitely told that to be happy, you need to set up these circumstances and setting up these circumstances includes getting lots of cool stuff. There's also a sense that, there's also the idea that, you know, your only option to get food is to go to a grocery store. So, you have to go to a grocery store. You have to put up with the BS at the grocery store. It's like, if a group of grocery stores has a monopoly on getting food, they can sort of dictate however they want and that's just part of commerce. But, what people, you know, never realize is that when you want to get, like, good food, you can get organic produce for half the price, and it's way more fresh at, like, your local farmer, and they're usually quite friendly. But nobody realizes that. So, the whole commerce thing doesn't actually work because the whole sense of it is that, like, it's all about consumers making informed decisions based on price and quality and stuff like that, and people don't really do that, you know, on the whole. People don't really go around and shop around and do that kind of thing. They just sort of go, okay, whatever. I'll stand in this line and be fine. The extent to which I've had to dig, dig, dig to remain an informed consumer baffles me in the quote, information age, close quote. And especially with the availability of information on the Internet. The links to which I have to go to find a non-corporate, non-oligopolistic source for goods and services baffles me. It's part of the transaction cost, or at least you can itemize it as such, which is another argument against classical economics. I think the whole idea of classical economics hasn't been realized, too. It's like we're supposed to be working on a capitalist system, but we're really not because, you know, the whole ideas of capitalism don't even really happen anymore. You know, and the whole ideas of democracy have never been reached. So that brings up a whole other aspect, though, of whether or not this kind of dropping out and not participating. How, there's like another aspect that needs to, another chunk of it, I guess, that isn't getting done. And that is how do the alternatives communicate with each other? How do you find them out and about? Well, that's the piece of the puzzle that really like every generation has to rediscover for themselves, because the whole situation is always changing. I mean, I'm part of a generation that doesn't feel like they have a place in the universe, doesn't feel like they have, you know, a alternative to living in a city, having a terrible job, and spending all their money on stuff they don't need. But there really is a way to live in a city and, you know, have your cake and eat it, too. Like, I mean, when you buy something secondhand, that's a radical act of protest, because you're, you know, you can go to like, you know, the Sallianne and get a Gap shirt, and the Gap doesn't see any of that money. This shirt was given to me, these pants are 12 bucks. This shirt, I got at the Sallianne. Oh, see, now you have to brag on your $1 microwave at this point. Sallianne is actually a little expensive for my taste. Oh, man! He's getting me. I hit garage sales and I hit them hard when it's in season. I come home with much, but I'm extraordinarily picky, and I usually wind up with some reasonable quality stuff. One or two items each day that I go out. We even did a show about it. I was bragging about my $1 microwave and my $2 CD player and that kind of thing. But yeah, buying stuff secondhand, buying stuff, you know, like instead of going to the grocery store, go to your local grocery store. Me and my mom did that and it was great. Instead of going to grocery store and spending three hours in hell buying terrible food at really high prices, you go and spend four hours or five hours shopping and two hours just talking and hanging out at a farmers market where you're walking around. I walked away with three bags of huge grocery bags of really beautiful organic produce. All of it was fresh and it was oh wow, and it was crazy. I was just like, oh my god why is no one I know doing this? And it's just because of a monopoly. You can have your cake and eat it too. You can live in a city and have stuff and have a job, and then when you buy stuff none of the international huge corporations that we all hate are seeing any of that money. The cap doesn't see any money, the WTO doesn't see any money. Also, you're encouraging companies to, instead of buying secondhand, you're demanding a longer life out of what you're using, and so you're encouraging companies to make stuff that lasts longer instead of stuff that lasts for a set period of time that dies because everybody's been brainwashed to buy new. So, you buy stuff that has a higher resale value. And I think that's a way to make capitalism work for your advantage. Change the system around. That's one of the things I did when I was a more active musician than I am now. When I went guitar shopping, I made sure I got something that these are resale value. If you buy a guitar for $400 and resell it for $375 five years later, you just paid $5 a year for the use of that guitar. That's a counter-time value of money. Yeah, it's the same with my stereo equipment too. I went way back in the day, my first stereo system. I got it at the Sony store and it was $400 and we got it for Christmas. We probably got it on like, you know, the 30th or whatever, right around this is like, owned it for a year and the CD player broke down and we got it fixed and whatever. And now, we tried to sell it and it's worth about $30. No, it's worth $30. Meanwhile, I decided I wanted a better stereo system. So, I went with like an old 70's system an amp, a couple huge speakers and a tape player and spent $300 for it. Now, like when I spent $300 for this, this is about three times as good as the system that I got before in terms of you know, what it was, how long it would last and stuff like that. Now, I could sell it for $200 and it's still working for me and it was secondhand. When I got it from this guy who I like, it was recommended to me by my uncle the guy Andrew there actually educated me about why you know, why it's better. Why it's actually going on inside the machine and I've come back there several times and I've always been happy. It's cool. Well, let's end this with a confessional part. What are your guilty pleasures here? What do you still indulge in? What do you personally consume? What do you buy new and high end and shamelessly? Computers. You can't really go out and get computers secondhand and get your money's worth and you know, get something good like that. You know, I'm very pleased with what I'm doing but my most guilty pleasure I probably spent more money on freaking KitKat bars than computers. I've got this little thing I go into like, I'm going downtown and I've got two bucks in my pocket and by the end of the day I've got two KitKat bars in my stomach I have no clue why and it's pissing me off. That's like the only big deal for me. Thanks for showing up today. No problem. A quote attributed to Ted Dave, the Vancouver man who is widely credited with starting by nothing day in 1992. It struck a chord with me because it reminded me of this theory I have about advertising and its place in capitalism. So if you'll indulge me and read the quote and then I'm going to tell you my theory. Are you game? Sure, let's hear it. I'd love to hear it. Okay, the quote by nothing day is the brainchild of Vancouver, BC artist slash activist Ted Dave. He started it as a quote, gesture of protest for those of us who feel as if our lives and dreams have been marketed back to us. And I like that quote because I do believe that it is very difficult for people who live in this culture to know what they really want. Here's my theory on why. It is widely thought that Adam Smith, the writer of the wealth of nations, coined the term capitalism and Karl Marx, the father of communism coined the term the labor theory of value. The truth is the opposite. The labor theory of value was proposed by Adam Smith and Karl Marx coined the term capitalism. Karl Marx played off of Adam Smith's idea about value being added to natural resources through human labor and he suggested that what capitalists do is take the surplus of that value for themselves rather than leaving it with the laborer. After Karl Marx wrote about this, a group of economists came up with an idea called the marginal theory of value. This took it out of the realm of labor and put the value that we have under the auspices of what we desire. They basically said that something is valuable up until the point at which we no longer want it. If we don't want it, it's not valuable. If we do want it, it is valuable. After this theory was proposed, the golden age of advertising began and it became paramount for people who were selling things to figure out a way to convince people who were buying things that they wanted it, that they continually wanted it, that they wanted more of it and that is the purpose of advertising to teach you to want things and they have gotten better and better at it. Alright, how is your theory distinct from the theory that says the purpose quote, purpose close quote of advertising is to create needs because that's the theory that I've heard elsewhere and it's an attractive theory if there's no distinction between your theory and this one then your theory is hardly original. Where's the subtlety? The subtlety is in the idea of desire. We think that what we want we want because we want it. We think it comes from inside of us. To be convinced that we need something is a rational process. It begins with telling you the purpose of the item, what it can do for you, what life would be better and so forth. It's a rational actor idea. But desire is emotional. Desire is supposedly something that happens inside a person. It's part of their identity. When we think of taste, when we think of desire, when we think of love, when we think of these different kinds of emotions, we brussel at the thought that somebody put it inside of us. That comes from within, not from without. I think advertising does more than teach you what you need. It teaches you what to want. It makes you think it was your idea in the first place. Oh I get it. So you get a bunch of people who will fight to protect their feelings, their ideals, but the sad fact of it if your theory is valid is that these things have been instilled or installed depending on how you feel about it by external forces. This is one example thereof. And it makes a farce of rational actor theory. If the communication is unidirectional then there's one group of people that tells everybody, perhaps even themselves what to want and indeed what to act on. So they do act upon it. It isn't. I don't want to use the unidirectional thing too fully. I recognize the fact that advertising plays off of basic human desires. I don't think that we're taught to want sex. I don't think that we're taught to want acceptance. I don't think that we're taught to want food. And so these basic appetites, this need for human contact, this desire for a partner in life or a partner in bed anyway and this need for sustenance are all real needs and they do not necessarily originate from others. In part originate from ourselves. So it's a more complex picture than the one I'm painting with this theory. Having said all of that advertising plays off of those human desires. So you want a partner in bed, you want to have sex, have good breath, drive the right car, drink the correct wine. You mentioned bad breath. I heard a story that Listerine brought in a consultant to create a need for Listerine. They weren't sure that they were selling it as aggressively as they could be. They brought in a scientific geek who began discussing the matter with them and as soon as he used the word halitosis, which they had never heard before, somebody on the staff asked him, what is that word? What does it mean? The scientific geek responded, it's the clinical name for bad breath. And at that point they said, thank you, ushered out of the office and got to work with a vengeance. It became the medicinal mouthwash. Yeah, halitosis became a condition. Yeah, in fact, medicalization is a good example of what I'm talking about. If we perceive something as being good for our health, then we perceive it as something that we should desire. We're told that a hell of a lot of things are good for our health that are kind of questionable. I mean, everybody talks about breakfast being the most important meal of the day. Now take a guess, who first discovered this about our nutritional needs? Kellogg. Kellogg, yes. Kellogg had an institute that studied human health and lo and behold, he decided at this, through his studies, we'll put that in quote, that breakfast turned out to be the key to good health and no conflict of interest there and that kind of research. Nope, nope, none at all. And now it's just an accepted thing. I mean, there is really not a whole lot of medical evidence in one direction or another. There are plenty of cultures that in fact do not have meals at the beginning of the day, the way Westerners do, and then seem to be in fairly good health, certainly comparable good health to Westerners. It's just a cultural icon, but we accept it as if it were, you know, medically sound advice and it actually is just really good marketing. But that's still grounding it in something. That's grounding it in science or at least the rhetoric of science. Sure. I'm suggesting that it manipulates desire, not necessarily creates it. It manipulates you into believing that it takes a basic thing that you do believe and manipulates it into something else. So I understand what scientificalization is if I may coin a term. I understand that having Kellogg's fun of study on breakfast is a wee bit biased, although I've had professors, yes university professors who have suggested the opposite that if research is well funded it is ifs-a-facto unbiased and that if it's not well funded it is ifs-a-facto biased. I get the impression you want to get at a larger picture here, something more about communication than about Objectivism or the illusion of Objectivism. Sure. This is just one kind of rhetoric that advertisers use to tap into our desires and manipulate our desires. Certainly sex is another one. I mean I have a theory that every commercial can be reduced down to sex and I used to tell my sociology classes this and challenge them to come up with one that I couldn't turn into a sexual innuendo and they failed. It doesn't really matter if everything reduces to sex. What matters is sex is one thing you can use to sell. Yes. And they use it x percent of the time maybe they'll increase the percentage next year maybe they'll decrease it whatever. They'll handle that on a case basis. And I would even go so far as to say that probably if my class had thought very long they could have come up with ads that didn't have sex in them but the ones they remembered had sex in them. The ones that they could think of on the spur of the moment. Like if I had sent them home to watch TV and they had paid attention to ads that they normally don't pay attention to they probably could have come back with examples but because I made them try to think of one off the top of their heads in the middle of the class they had a hard time doing it. And I think that's because sex is memorable. And I use sex as only one example in which commercials try to tap into some sort of emotional response. I mean sex is an obvious one but laughter is another one. I mean you just mentioned the commercial about the guys who bump heads and fall down and so forth. Humorous commercials abound in spite of the fact that many times the funniest commercials tell you the least about the product and the product becomes the least memorable. If they were just merely trying to sell you a particular product and not a particular kind of desire many of the commercials that create laughter wouldn't work on that criteria. You can remember the punchline, you can't remember the product. Listening to First Person Plural your source for soothing sounds of sociological so gaseousness. The police state is using its phallocentric organ the corporate media to control ordinary people like you and me. Decide a book from the Q Naomi Klein's thesis and no logo seems to be that advertisers during the 1990s gave up on any description of the product and concentrated on making the brand a memorable one. Exactly. And that would support your it's immaterial whether you learn about the product what's material is that you remember what to call it and if the product attached to that should happen to change from spot to spot from time to time so much the better for the advertiser. I would even argue that you don't remember what to call the product as much as you remember your good feelings about the brand name. What they are really trying to get you to do is associate for instance Nike our favorite target with the swoosh you associate the swoosh with the kind of coolness the kind of acceptability a kind of being on the end whether or not it's on a tissue a t-shirt a cap or whatever now there's a backlash to that right now because of the critiques that are going on and there's a certain coolness with not wearing the swoosh but nonetheless you're associating emotions with the swoosh symbol and an understanding that that's Nike. Sure, love it or hate it, you aren't ignoring it. Yeah, I think Pema mentioned I'm not sure if he mentioned it on the air or to us later about a kid in the ghetto just painting the swoosh on a pair of tennis shoes because he couldn't afford the cool Nike tennis shoes and that's obviously well overdoing it to put it bluntly but the question becomes if you attack these proprietary marks are you reifying them or are you really poisoning them as the culture hackers are attempting to do? Yeah and the culture hackers are depending upon the same mechanisms that the advertisers are depending upon the whole accident that a number of these are ex-ad-ex acts. Well that may be inevitable regardless of quote whose side you're on close quote, you're going to avoid strategies that just won't work and that's not about whether you're ideologically pure or not it just means that you've got enough sense not to take a running jump off a pier in the middle of January. Well I'd go you on further I think that the approach that advertisers have taken to manipulate people into desiring this or that or the other is a sound pedagogical approach I think that people remember things, learn things better if it involves as many of your senses as possible if you see it, taste it hear it, touch it smell it you will remember it better than if you just see it or if you just hear it sure and we can't outlaw pedagogy that's the catch 22 we can't outlaw communication so inevitably the hackers wind up using the culture hackers wind up using a lot of the same tools if we define the tools very broadly if we define them as multimedia communication and mass reproduction of information mass communication that sort of thing then yes they're both using the tools that doesn't make the two sides identical no it doesn't the content has a superficial similarity and one is deliberately constructed to show similarity but I would take it a step further and say not only is it a superficial similarity or one that they're trying to do but that they have tapped into the very same thing that the advertisers have tapped into and that is human learning in other words I'm suggesting that classrooms rather than complaining about how kids are becoming little consumers who see advertisements all the time and how do you compete with I mean short attention span is one that comes up a lot everybody talks about how the 30 second spot is the way that kids learn now that somehow they've been trained to the 30 second spot and that may very well be true but I don't think that's the problem I think the problem is classrooms have traditionally not paid attention to all of your senses I think the advertisers have better pedagogy than the classroom and that's why the advertisers are winning well that's simple that's because the educators so called don't give a damn if you learn the material or not and the advertisers care plenty if you learn it I don't know I don't buy that I don't think it's just that I think there are lots of educators who really want to try I think the culture of education comes from a rationalist culture that makes reason and the mind primary over the body and that thinking about learning through senses is a very body oriented view of education and I'd go a step further and say that the taxonomy itself is all informed well yeah but that taxonomy nonetheless exists in education traditional education has separated the mind from the body and has controlled I mean we're doing Foucault here now and has regulated the body in nice neat little rows in nice neat little lines in nice neat little classrooms in little boxes I mean there's a lot of containment of the physical in traditional classrooms and that containment and the physical is based upon this assumption a very long standing you know several hundred years anyway assumption that what we think is more important than what we do that training the mind somehow controls the body and of course kids break out of this all of the time because that's not the way they learn and advertisers have tapped into something a little bit different they're not they in fact are counting on us to not be rational if we were rational we would consider products in very clinical terms and you know assess our need and so forth I mean the well this is exactly why I have a problem with the word rational because it's not uniquely defined not in theory, not in practice but we'll skip my issues and continue with yours for the moment okay but I think that you're right I think that it is their definition of rationality and it in in fact holds them back because it would be if the goal of education is to teach lessons to children to get across the message then espousing this body based just to take the taxonomy where it really doesn't need to go but this body based version of education in which there's a recognition that we need all of our senses in order to learn that would happen a long time ago but the purpose of education has been lost in this sea of rationality of this version of rationality and so it becomes beneath the educator to train more than the mind and it becomes worrisome as classes have gotten larger and you know we can rail on big corporations now and upon them we can talk about the manifest purpose of education versus the latent purpose which is to create conformists people who are willing to get up in the morning and go to the same job every day at the same time do the same things, leave work at the same time every day public education in North America has been training little worker bees for a long time now so all of that is against a view of education of pedagogy that the advertisers have tapped into if education really were about its manifest purpose then they would be going in the direction of the advertisers and in fact some people are I mean there are plenty of multimedia presentations in education now there are plenty of ways in which educators are beginning at the very least to give you sound and pictures and tactile experiences and so forth but it is often regarded as a lower form of pedagogy and there's a lot of discussion out there about how we're acquiescing to the consumer society by doing this and I think that that misses the point before we go I want to ask you real quick do you think it's going to be that easy nothing do you think it's going to be that easy in my case it probably is I can see myself shutting off the television shutting off the computer staying home I do a lot of that anyway I geared down my spending habits in the 90s when I didn't have any money and it's funny once you break the habit you don't miss it that much when you become a little more aware of how you spend it sort of breaks the spell you can even look at money as a habit forming drug more than anything else the more of it you have the more of it you need although that's a little optimistic I don't want to believe that I'm actually better off than the rich I don't think I am sure but I think that the possibility that these addictive qualities manifest themselves makes the difference a little easier to bear