Advertising as Capitalist Realism
Advertising, as the early agency Lord and Thomas put it, is "salesmanship in print." It is just that simple, just that complex. Understanding advertising entails understanding the difference between personal and printed or broadcast communication; the differences entailed in the "decontextualization" of thought and feeling that systems of mass communication make possible. With the invention of writing in human history, anthropologist Jack Goody observes, "Speech is no longer tied to an occasion: it becomes timeless. Nor is it attached to a person; on paper, it becomes more abstract, more depersonalized." For Goody, this opens the way to science, to the growth of criticism, and to a more tolerant attitude toward one's own frame of reference. But the same forces that enable people to see themselves as individuals independent of social and traditional contexts make people susceptible to the appeals of mass media, including advertising. This is an openness or susceptibility qualitatively different from the householder's vulnerability to the direct sales pitch. Among other things, it connects the consumer not only to an item for sale and a person selling it but to an invisible, yet present, audience of others attuned to the same item for sale and the same symbols used to promote it. The advertisement, like the sales talk, links a seller to a buyer. Unlike the sales talk, it connects the buyer to an assemblage of buyers through words and pictures available to all of them and tailored to no one of them. Advertising is part of the establishment and reflection of a common symbolic culture.
Racism and sexism in the gaming world: Reinforcing or changing stereotypes in computer games?
Advertising images reflect and shape peoples' perceptions about race and gender issues. We examined two issues surrounding how race and gender are represented in computer game print advertising. First, does imagery in computer game advertisements reinforce race and gender stereotypes? Secondly, how has stereotyping in computer game imagery changed over the last two decades? We conducted both quantitative and qualitative analyses of two major computer gaming magazines, PC Gamer from 2009 and Computer Gaming World from 1992, to test our hypotheses. We found that women and minorities are represented in gaming advertisements at rates similar to their numbers in the general population. The quality of the representation of women and minorities, however, was generally lower than males and whites. We found minorities were generally limited to stereotypical roles or excluded. Women were typically depicted in sexualized roles. Our study suggests no significant gains have been made in the past two decades in terms of how women and minorities are portrayed in gaming advertisements.
The de-definition of art
"Like the great German critic Walter Benjamin, Rosenberg is a master of dialectics whose sense of art is continuous with his sense of society, and (also like Benjamin) bears no taint of compromised, out-of-work radicalism. Instead, his radicalism is very much at work, enabling him to spot and skewer fallacies, false logic and the camouflaged nudity that is a large part of the art emperor's new wardrobe. [The De-definition of Art] detects with great sensitivity the forces that are deflecting and pressuring art in the direction of esthetic and moral nullity." Jack Kroll, "Newsweek""