Vanilla Advertising

A seemingly trivial event just happened to me that, as usual, I am about to blow out of all proportion.

I was sitting in a fine establishment waiting for a fine friend of mine. Arriving first, I took a seat at a table and absently watched the nearby television. There was a sporting event on it that I took little notice of and at the finishing of the match, a usual generic series of advertisements began playing. At some point during these advertisements, the sound to the television was remotely turned off and music began playing instead. I did not even notice this change until into the second advertisement. The music so perfectly fit the visuals that the change was negligible until overt.

My initial thought was that the song was just one of those pieces of music that you would expect to hear during an advertisement. It was light, had some inoffensive lyrics and was of a tempo that either matched up well with an advertisement, or served as a suitable contrast to the action of an advertisement. I just assumed that this song was an ideal candidate as an accompaniment to advertisements.

This is probably a harsh judgement on the musician. The more I heard the song the more forgiving I was. In the end, I have to conclude that this little instances makes more of a statement in relation to the advertisements rather than the song. These broadcasts were so generic, so utterly forgettable that I was not even able to discern a difference between them when the same sound was played throughout. I title this piece "Vanilla Advertising" not just because of the implication that all of the broadcasts were essentially the same. I like the taste of vanilla and the effect that this music had on my viewing was also relatively pleasurable. I was able to view them as a whole piece, not containing a contrived agenda and overall, not having any real effect on me.

It is remarkable how small events like this can truly threaten the pull of the advertising world.

-The English Student

Consuming Consumption

Why do we try to get products and commodities physically inside of ourselves?

I have been mulling this idea over for a little while now and the more I think about it the more examples come to mind. When is the last time that you physically hugged an inanimate product? I have done it recently to a much-treasured new item that I bought and it did not strike me as strange. Absolutely, I was doing it mostly in jest to show people how much I appreciated the product: I hardly believed it was a real item. But the very manner of that hug is striking. Products do not actually get mentally or spiritually closer to you with a hug, as might happen with another living being. Instead, they just get closer to physically being inside you.

Another example is a common trope in narrative and also one that I noticed just last night. Instead of trying to 'ingest' commodities, we do the same thing with the money we would use to buy them. A friend of my jokingly kissed a coin last night, some celebrities are said to sleep in piles of money, while the influential Scrooge McDuck swam in it. If we were presented with a bowl of currency and spoon would we delve into it with relish?

Perhaps all of this is just a pose. It is possibly something that we do playfully and in the process, highlight the inanimate nature of the objects through the contrast with conscious beings. There does however seem to be something slightly more sinister in the pattern. It seems that to an extent, we apply sexual desire to commodities in order to prolong our ownership of them. In the same way that we continue our genes, we also continue our possession.

As usual this is just conjecture, yet I will embrace commodities with far more reserve in future.

-The English Student

Cheap Respect

There is a huge amount of respect flowing between myself, my co-workers and my bosses these days.

However, it has become very obvious, very quickly that this respect is cheap and hollow. It is all well and good to shower praise on someone in an effort to make them feel wanted and respected. Converting this into something tangible seems to be nigh on impossible for a capitalist corporation like the one that I am temporarily working for. When it comes down to it, how much do they respect us if they do not back it up with something real.

Perhaps I am doing a gross disservice to head office. After all, what kind of person or worker would I be if I was only looking for tangible rewards for my efforts? For that to be acceptable, we would need to live in an economic society that has put a tangible value on all products and services, forcing people to gain this value by sacrificing their time. So capitalism then.

But even putting aside my anti-capitalism angst there is a very simple equation going on here. If someone or a group of people put value on something (e.g. money, time, words) then it seems only right that they show their appreciation using the same 'currency'. Otherwise it is just hollow pandering that has absolutely no meaning whatsoever.

Until our economy runs on words, they can keep their hypocritical nonsense.

-The English Student

Frugality

I have never been able to spend money with the reckless abandon of some of my peers.

There always seems to be some reason to save money rather than spend it. Over the many jobs that I have had, I have compulsively saved. In my current job (lucky that I am to have one) I am saving approximately 90% of what I am earning. This has gotten to the point that it feels like I am working for no actual reward. A bank balance becomes a meaningless number that rises and has no real consequence.

Why do I constantly avoid spending money? While the cliché of saving for a rainy day may ring true for me, I think it is a more complex process. Abstract rainy days are easily ignorable. What is not so easy to shrug off is predictable events in ones life that will require money. There is always something on the horizon that may need funds. This is even beyond recessionary scaremongering. We always find a reason to save.

Sometimes this frugality seems like an excellent idea. It is a practical application of forward planning and thinking. Yet at the same time, working and using up precious time for no real reward, or an imaginary one in the future is more than problematic. Money controls us in this way and we cannot escape its grasp while we allow it to dictate our lives. Money is simply a medium. When we earn it we should spend it and make those imaginary numbers mean something.

I am not saying that we should all drive ourselves into poverty with excess, simply that we should enjoy ourselves more while retaining our forward thinking.

-The English Student

Social Grotesque II

This week the grotesque was obvious from the international news to the streets.

Chinese etiquette and social niceties came under international scrutiny as a policeman died from alcohol poisoning while negotiating with local business people. Politeness demanded that the policeman equal his companions levels of alcohol consumption and this resulted in his death. It has also become international knowledge that many companies employ people that are greater capable of drinking in these occasions in China. Value it seems, is given to those that can consume the most. This consumption is overt, obvious and disgusting.

The streets of many major cities have been mimicking this pattern in the past week. The 'Christmas Rush' has begun, with thousands flocking to consumer centres. An absurd amount of money is being spent during every opening hour of every opening day, with many shops extending their hours in an effort to encourage the insane flurry of spending. The streets are literally jammed with people and there is no sign of this abating until at least the end of the year. The level of consumption again is overt, obvious and disgusting.

Each of these situations highlights more aspects of this social grotesque. While they may be in an effort to impress and help each other, the luxury of these situations is getting to a sickening level. We are glutting ourselves in the consumerist temples that we have created. It is becoming obvious that this consumption simply cannot be sustained. I have heard the theory that humans are one of the only animals on the planet that will stop eating or drinking when they are full, rather than say, dogs that will keep eating so long as their is food. Perhaps we can resist this urge on a personal level. But we are truly failing on a social level.

Which brings us to the major example of social grotesque this week: the failure of Copenhagen makes our failure all the more inevitable.

-The English Student

Forcing Christmas Spirit Down Our Throats

One of the major shopping streets in our city has begun to force Christmas spirit down our throats.

I happen to work on this street at the moment and as such have to walk past the offending area every day. The loud Christmas music blaring from the building is bearable. Even the ridiculously dramatic Christmas advertisements that are shown from adjacent buildings onto the street can be ignored. But the fake snow that is blasting from the roof of the building throughout the street I simply despise.

It tastes disgusting and clings awfully to clothes. More than this, it is a completely hollow attempt to create some sort of a Christmas feeling throughout the city. I previously explained my unease around this season and while I do encourage everyone to enjoy the holiday time I myself still struggle with it. While the lights and decorations are artificial, they are mainly inoffensive. This powdery nonsense is an inescapable reminder of the coming Christmas.

It is artificial and so is the sentiment that the store is trying to create. It almost never snows around Christmas in this area. The weather is far more likely to take that turn in late winter or early spring. So not only is this fake snow an attempt to create an early commercial frenzy of spending, it is one that does not have any real context in this country. The capitalist extremes that are always bubbling under the surface at this time are increasingly overt.

Never has it been more obvious than this artificial, unintelligible gimmick.

-The English Student

Behind the Scenes of the Service Sector

Working in the service sector has shown me two different types of consumer-company relationships.

In my first service related job I saw a very common company attitude. The organisation puts up a front to its costumers and pretends to care about their opinions and lifestyles. In actuality, they do not care. Working behind these apparently benevolent scenes highlights the hollowness of the whole process. Management does not care about the public, it cares about money. Management also does not care about employees, it cares about their ability to increase profits.

My second service related job highlighted a more subtle and altogether more sinister approach. In this case, the company really did seem to care. Behind the altruistic scenes of high customer satisfaction was an effort to create an environment of high employee satisfaction. Profit really did not seem to be the overriding principle of the company. Of course, this cannot be true. On some level, almost entirely unseen, the cold and calculating basis of business lurked in the recesses of the building.

But this taint was never fully embodied by any employee. Granted, the overall manager was more concerned with income than any other person in the organisation but even this person seemed to value profit for its ability to keep his staff employed and to help provide an excellent consumer experience. Maybe someone beyond this manager is to blame. The image of an overseeing tyrant at the base of these companies is a comforting one as it places the blame on an individual person. We could blame this person for greed and theorise that they lost their way in a capitalist system designed to help create an equatable world. I fear that there is a much more harrowing alternative. Organisations like this one seem to have developed traits that are no longer represented by its staff and are completely beyond their control. There is no shrouded master controlling the cogs of the machine.

In actuality, the machine we created is controlling us and in the process, our humanity is being consumed.

-The English Student