First, the indictment: "If I were asked to name the deadliest
subversive force within capitalism-the single greatest source of
its waning morality-I should without hesitation name
advertising." These words belong to a commentator of the
ill-reputed supply side economics, Robert L. Heilbroner, but
could have been signed by many sharing in this definition. Now
comes the apologia: "The historians and archaeologists will one
day discover that ads of our times are the richest and most
faithful daily reflections that any society ever made of its
entire range of activities." McLuhan's words, as familiar as
they are, bear the imprint of his original thinking. The issue is
not to take sides. Whether admired or despised, ignored or
enjoyed, advertisement occupies an inordinately important place
in our life today. For anyone who went through the history of
advertisement, it becomes obvious that the scale of this
activity, which is indeed part of the market, has changed
radically.
It used to be true that only 50 to 60 percent of the investment
in advertisement resulted in higher sales or brand recognition.
Today, the 50 to 60 percent has shrunk to less than 2 percent.
But of the 2 percent that impacts the market, 2 percent (or less)
results in covering the entire expense of advertisement. Such
levels of efficiency-and waste, one should add, in full
awareness that the notion is relative-are possible only in the
civilization of illiteracy. The figures (subject to controversy
and multiple interpretation) point to efficiency as much as to
the various aspects of the market. Our concern with
advertisement is not only with how literate (or illiterate)
advertisement is, but also with how appropriate literacy means
can be to address psychological, ethical, and rational (or
irrational) aspects of market transactions.
A look at advertisements through the centuries is significant to
the role of literacy in society and in the world of
merchandising. Word-of-mouth advertising and hanging signs
outside a business reflect the literacy levels of an age of
small-scale market transactions. The advertisements of the end
of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century exemplify the
levels of literacy and the efficiency expected from it for
merchandising in the context and scale of that time. The ads
contain more text than image and address reason more than the
senses. In the age of the magazine and newspaper, advertisers
relied on the power of verbal persuasion. Honesty or value was
not the issue here, only its appearance. The word committed to
paper, black on white, had to be simple and true.
In Europe, advertisement took a different style at this time, but
still reflected value. Manufacturers engaged many well known
artists of the time to design their ads. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec,
El Lissitzky, and Herbert Bayer are among the best known. To the
highly literate but more artistically inclined Europeans of the
time, such ads for upscale products and events were more
appealing. Probably taking their cue from Europe, American
designers experimented with image advertising after World War II,
and graphic design took off in the USA. With the advent of more
powerful visualization media, and based on data from psychology
to support its effectiveness, the image began to dominate
advertising. As ambiguously as an image can be interpreted, its
efficiency in advertising was confirmed in rising sales figures.
In the rare cases when literacy is used today, it is usually for
its visual impact. In an attempt to relate to the qualities of
the black-on-white advertisement of earlier times, Mobil
started a series of ads in the mid-1980's. To those not
semiotically aware, the ad was simply text appealing to the
reader's reason. Literacy rediviva! To people attuned to
semiotics, the ad was a powerful visual device. The simple
tombstone style evoked relations between literacy and values
such as simplicity, honesty, the permanence of the idea, the
dominance of reason. The visual convention was actually stronger
than the literacy element, used as an alibi in these ads.
Indeed, the people who hand out the Clio awards for advertising
were so taken in as to award Mobil a first prize for these ads.
Markets are far from being simple causal phenomena. A market's
easy switch from a well structured, rational interpretation and
ethical conduit, to irrationality and misrepresentation is
revealed in the new forms markets take, as well as in their new
techniques for transactions and the associated advertisement. The
term irrationality describes a contradiction of common sense
rules (or economic theories setting them forth) of exchange of
goods. During the 1980's, this occurred in the oil market, the
art market, the market for adoptable children, and in new stock
market offerings.
The literate discourse of theories or of an advertisement can
only acknowledge the irrationality and suggest explanations.
There are schools of market analysis based on game theory,
psychodrama, cyclical modeling, the phases of the moon, etc.,
etc., each producing newsletters, giving advice, trying to
render understandable economic and financial phenomena difficult
to predict. Language-like explanations and advice are part of
advertising, part of market language, forming its own literacy
and keeping many captive to it. But even the most literate
participant cannot stop the process since the literacy involved
in what some perceive as an aberration is different from the
literacy embodied in the product traded or in its advertisement.
Irrational elements are present in the market, as in life, at
all times, but not to the extent to which the language of the
market reflects hysteria (as on Black Monday in 1987 on the New
York Stock Exchange) or simply ceases its pragmatic function.
We all deplore the continuous shrinking of the intimate sphere
of our lives, but admit, in the act of constituting ourselves in
the space and time of market transactions, the integrating power
that the market exercises, ignoring how close the relation
between the two aspects is. Literacy was once a protective
medium and entailed rules of discretion and decency. Illiteracy
makes us fear; it allows us to become more efficient, but at the
same time we become subject to intrusion by all the means that
capture our identity. People making purchases on-line will not
hesitate to write down their personal data and credit card
numbers, trusting in a sense of privacy that is part of the code
of literate behavior. Of all people, the computer-literate
should realize the power of the Net for searching, retrieving,
and sorting such information for all types of uses imaginable.
In the civilization of illiteracy, advertisement is no longer an
integrative device that addresses a non-differentiated market
but a device that addresses powerful distinctions that can
capture smaller groups, even the individual. "Tell me what you
want to buy or sell and I'll tell you who you are," is a concise
way of declaring how market semiosis X-rays its participants.
The enormous marketing efforts associated with a new brand of
cereal, software, a political campaign, a role in a movie, or a
sports event result in advertisement's becoming a language in
itself, with its own vocabulary and grammar. These are subject
to rapid change because the pragmatics of the activities they
represent change so fast. "Tell me what you buy and I'll tell you
who you are"-mug shots of all of us are taken continuously, by
extremely inventive digital devices, while the market fine-tunes
us. Buying products ended long ago. Products now buy us.
Advertising in the civilization of illiteracy is no longer
communication or illustration. It is an information processing
activity, bizarre at times, extremely innovative in the ability
to cross reference information and fine-tune the message to the
individual. Automatic analysis of data is complemented by
refinement methods that adjust the weight of words in order to
fit the addressee. In the reality of the market and its
attendant advertising, languages pertaining to art, education,
ideology, sexuality, are integrated at a high level of
sophistication in the infinite series of mediations that
constitute the pragmatic framework of human existence. Nothing is
more valuable than the knowledge of who we are. One can risk
stating that brokers of information about each of us will
probably fare best in this market of many competing partial
literacies.
When markets rely more and more on mediations, and market cycles
become faster and faster, when the global nature of transactions
requires mechanisms of differentiation and integration far
beyond the scope of language, literacy ceases to play a
dominating role. The literate message assumed that the human
being is the optimal source of information and the ideal
receiver. The illiterate message can send itself automatically,
as image or as speech, as video or as Internet spamming, whatever
best hits its human target, to people's addresses. Whether we
like it or not, face-to-face negotiations have already become
fax-to-fax and are bound to be converted into
program-to-program dealings. The implications are so far-reaching
that emotional reactions, such as enthusiasm or disgust, are not
really the best answer to this prospect.
Market pragmatics in our civilization is defined by the need to
continuously expand surplus to meet a dominant desire and
expectation driven exchange of goods and services. These desires
and expectations correspond to the global scale of human
interaction for which a dominant literacy is poorly suited.
Hundreds of literacies, representing hundreds of forms of human
self-constitution around the world, are integrated in the
supersign known as the market.
The market-in its narrow sense as transaction, and as a sign
process joining structure and dynamics-focuses all that pertains
to the relation between the individual and the social
environment: language, customs, mores, knowledge, technology,
images, sounds, odors, etc. Through the market, economies are
ascertained or subjected to painful restructuring. Recent years
brought with them turmoil and economic opportunity as an
expression of new pragmatic characteristics. Competition,
specialization, cooperation, were all intensified. An exciting
but just as often disconcerting growth path of economic activity
generated markets of high performance. Just-in-time,
point-of-sale, and electronic interchanges came into being
because the human pragmatic made them necessary.
This is why it is difficult to accept views, regardless of their
public acclaim, that explain the dynamics of economic life
through technological change. The increased speeds of economic
cycles are not parallel but related to the new practical
experiences of human self-constitution. Cognitive resources
became the main commodity for economic experiences. And the
market fully confirms this through mechanisms for accelerated
transactions and through sign processes of a complexity that
technology has really never reached. New algorithms inspired by
dynamic systems, intelligent agent models, and better ways to
handle the issues of opportunity and prediction are the
expression of cognitive resources brought to fruition in a
context requiring freedom from hierarchy, centralism,
sequentiality, and determinism. As exciting as the model of the
economy as ecosystem is (I refer to Rothschild's bionomics), it
remains an essentially deterministic view.
No semiosis triggers forces of economic change. But sign
processes, in the form of elaborate transactions, reflect the
change in the pragmatic condition of the human being. All those
new companies, from fast food chains to microchip makers and
robot providers that convert human knowledge into the new goods
and services, are the expression of the necessity of this
pragmatic change. Diversity and abundance might be related to
competition and cooperation, but what drives economic life,
market included, is the objective need to achieve levels of
efficiency corresponding to the global scale human activity has
reached. Central planning, like any other centralized structure,
including that of businesses, does not come to an end because of
technological progress, but in view of the fact that it prevents
efficient practical experiences.
Markets of the civilization of illiteracy, like the economy for
which they stand, are more and more mediated. They go through
faster cycles, their swings wilder, their interdependency deeper
than ever. The literate experience of the market assumed that
the individual was the optimal source of information and the
ideal receiver. Decision- making was an exclusively human
experience. The illiterate message of complex data processing
and evaluation can send itself automatically and reach whatever
has to be reached in a given context: producers of raw
materials, energy providers, manufacturers, a point-of-sale
unit. As shoppers start scanning their purchases by themselves,
information regarding their buying patterns makes it quickly into
programs in charge of delivery, production, and marketing.
Face-to-face negotiations, many times replaced by fax-to-fax or
e-mail-to-e-mail transactions, are converted into more
program-to-program dealings. Instead of mass markets, we
experience point-cast markets. Their pragmatics is defined by
the need to continuously meet desire and expectation instead of
need. Their dynamics, expressed in nuclei of self-organization,
is in the last instance not at all different from that of the
human beings self-constituted in their reality.