theme parks, video games, television and news fall into a few basic categories.
The product, no longer able to offer satisfaction on its own ground (“a potato chip is a chip is a chip”), instead offers the consumer a chance to be part of a certain ‘crowd’ or ‘scene.’ They belong to a cool “product tribe,” revelling in the image and sensibility that the product somehow mystically confers – the fetishism of commodities. More and more people are being sold style, image, and celebrity, since there is no substance or material satisfaction to the product-in-itself. Concealed within the jump-cut flash of post-modern advertising is a simple code: consumption is a mode of transcendence, a way to take part in something larger than yourself, the “Pepsi Generation.” Today, ads are filled with a strange sort of rugged selfishness, misanthropy, and mean-spirit people (“touch my Doritos and die.”) A person is told sternly to buy as much as they can of the product but never to share with friends. “Get your own,” they’re told. Latest ads on TV have that narrative that goes on and on and takes the form of a mini soap or a series of short cinematic films. The product is like a movie star. The product has taken the stand of the character in the commercial. It has become another simulation for audiences. Small Nokia phones that are given a character play a different role in each different Nokia commercial.
Digital technology has given designers the ability to make real characters and models that we see in everyday TV. The big entities spend millions of pounds in one 60 second commercial. The commercial has the production company behind it; director, actors and the whole set that would normally be used in film production.
Many television commercials thus give us another variation on Umberto Eco’s absolute fakes; they are false promises that make everything seem better than it is. Like theme parks, they make mundane realities look like transcendent utopias.
All cultures place people inside invented worlds, so that in itself, isn’t what is new about all this. The human world is by nature full of fictionalization and metaphor and drenched in stories and metaphysical assumptions, much of it contrived by conscious and unconscious design to support the claims of those in power. But never before has a culture been scientifically invented in this way, using the tools of rationalization – including marketing studies and computers – to sell products and a way of life. These tools of rationality extract the essence of our own irrationality – our fantasies, imbued with fears and desires – and give them back to us in the form of their invented worlds. Real experiences and things have been replaced with simulacra – copies without an original. Due to the power of mass media advertising, our relationship to the signifier has changed. Now it hides the absence of a signified: conceals the inability to deliver real satisfaction by cleverly simulating it. Part of our hyper-real lives is the fact that our simulations are more real than real.