This is so awesome, (and hilarious,) I'm in tears over it; This is perhaps the electroshock treatment version of "inspiring others."

I'm still trying to figure out:  "How can the message of inspiration and self-fulfillment be connected with the spirit of service to all life?"

How can the zeal and felicity of the New Age community be connected with the selflessness and service of the Christian community, in a way that's more Divine than mere "balancing"?

Oh man, this really ruled!!! Voltron, Pokemon, Star Wars AND Mariah Scary...!! Spreading the word of intergalactic revolution and the advent of the next level of human consciousness through zany FUN is such an awesome break from oh-so-serious posts about the  "end" of the world as we know it...

Once TiVo and the innernets are a part of every television set there will no longer be a need for commercials that are distinct from the television show. Advertising will equal product placement and embedded information about the food, clothes, cars and gadgets that appear on shows. Hopefully, coinciding with this evolution will be new "commercials" created for the spirit, such as Ido talks about and gives an amazing example of in this post.

Rawk on!!

jp

Great article!
I found these commercials, or they found me, awhile back - it's great to attend these master's courses again!

Cory Doctorow recently blogged about Clay Shirky's book "Here Comes Everybody" and a recent talk by Shirky that's related to all this.

-

from the article:

Death of the sitcom frees up 2,000 Wikipedias worth of cognitive capacity

... And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into ... an architecture of participation.

Nice connection, Morgan...I've started in on Shirky's book and it definitely ties in nicely to many themes on this site. Here's a link to the entire talk from Shirky that Morgan cites above:

http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html

peace

jp

I'm not too sure how many of you have read this, but in the book there is a group that creates consciousness changing commercials through the study of art and psyche. Most of the commercials are ridiculous to the point that they cause reactions similar to epileptic fits so I doubt they'd ever make it on "television" as it is today... but let's neverunderstimate the power of art..

All bridges can be rebuilt.

I know that, personally speaking, my way of life has been changed by various movies, including such oldies & goodies as Labyrinth, The Never Ending Story, and, ... more embarrassingly, more recently, by way of my daughter, Shark Boy & Lava Girl in 3-D.

{;)}=

And then there's "Network," urging people to turn off their TVs.

Did Network alter consciousness?  Did it cause anybody to turn off their TVs?

I think the effects of these things can't be recognized immediately.  But I do think the movie Network did change consciousness.

In my personal experience, I change my behavior later, after an idea has had time to percolate.

If that applies to others as well, then I'm afraid we don't have an easy way of determining if these media actions influence people or not.

Like many other films, Network becomes part of the great underground pressures shifting our culture tectonic plates of consciousness.

To my mind, there seems to be no question that media influences consciousness: whether it be psychedelic drugs, computer software or TV programming. All these things give us tools with which to think and perceive, and thus shape our model of reality.

Even if we can't always see the influence of media in the short term (you could measure blood pressure and pulse and brain waves after watching an hour of commercials, and after watching a Godfrey Reggio film - I am sure they would be completely different) I would say that you can see the clear effect on media when looking at societies. Seems to me that the American society and for me the Israeli one, are really a reflection of the media they consume, especially if you compare them to traditional societies which consume completely different sorts of media (sacral chanting, religious music and writing, psychedelic drugs etc.) Understanding Media [as McLuhan calls it] (the different forms of media which influence different forms of consciousness) is the first step.

The second step is to try to create media which will create certain paths for man and his consciousness. This is what Joyce and McKenna called, man becoming dirigible - McLuhan thought about that too. We have to become conscious about the media spaces in which we exist, and transform them (and ourselves) in a dirigible way. A way which will sustain wholeness, brotherliness and the sense of the divine. peace, Ido

Propaganda Anonymous I

'm diggin on the theory Ido.

Adverts as art...

Pop Art as Spiritual.

Bringing back what was lost to the reproduction process. The practical side of this though could just be that the Medium of the Advert itself could be The Art form. The cut and paste structure that holds keys to cultural evolution.

That's why I am a fan of subtle irony

If you wanna approach topics such as universal feelings of brother and sister hood I wonder how a 'hot' appearance might go over.

The commercial, at times, seemed like it could appeal to the kid. The pokeman, the super bright colors

If you went a little farther with the bright colors you could find yourself a hipster audience.

I like the subtitles.

However, the overt calls to distress seem to try to trigger those same parts of modern commercials that Rushkoff criticizes in his book COERCION, as something that we should try to avoid. Those sales techniques seem to be part of the problem, and by repeating the appeals to people's fear emotions we might be filling the shoes of those we wish to discard.

I commend the effort though.

At least attempting a revision of cultural meta-programs is something I think is cool.

Maybe at one time, commercials were an art-form, but at this point in time, commercials are not even pablum, they are poisons and worse than "Chinese water torture". In the US, we regularly are forced to ignore the same ads as re-runs concomittantly. They don't even intersperse them with other ads, they run as repeats one after the same ad. And next worse, one after another bad ad. I guess the programmers thought we might have missed it while we left the room, and so, were safe to "stick it to" us.

Commercials as vehicles of "higher consciousness"????

I'm sorry, Ito, but I must say: vain hope. Even as a kid in the 50s, I was amazed to hear of tv in France, in which entertainment was uninterrupted by ads, but ads were not ignored: they were given in blocs of time that was watched eagerly as an artform and entertainment too. I couldn't believe it. How nice, if so.

Commercialism is a form of cancer. You may not mind a little pimple-sized bump that disappears after a couple of days, but if it persists and grows larger with time, you are going to be pissed off about that.

Nowadays, we have 1000's of channels to "tune into". But even in these paid-for channels, you have large blocs of time devoted to "paid-for-programming". Huh!?? I thought I already paid for the programming, and didn't think it should entail having to go through all these perambulations with my remote to avoid them! But no! Well, more money for them, less value for us.

And in "free tv", meaning, regular stations like ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS, I STILL have to deal with 'ADS', and these ads are so prolific that shows like STAR TREK, the original series, cannot be viewed en toto, but segments are cut to accomodate the greater number of commercials (to say nothing about the bastardization of these original shows with cgi modifications or "fancying up" by making those art forms seem more glitzy. This is even worse than the "colorization" of original black-and-white movies because it alters the work of those whose job it was to "animate" those primitive works. Well, "jobs" for cgi-whores).

I presume you know what "concision" means. It is the amount of time you have to create something before it has to stop in order to make room for a commercial. A Zen Buddhist would say it is the amount of time you have to focus you mind before you absolutely have to get up and take a piss or before you get kicked out of the place for stinking like a wet cat. For the modern kid, it is the amount of time you can hold his or her attention before they expect an ad or some form of interruption, and you can see where I'm going....right? I'm not saying kill your tv, I'm advocating kill your sheepish acceptance of the imposition of ads and of ad-men's ideas into your mind! God-forbid that ad-men take over the higher-consciousness movement!!! Are you kidding!????

I'd like to say I'm insulted that this paper by Ido Hartogsohn was even considered, except I think it is an important paper insofar as it allows me to say: consciousness modification by some form of messaging, whether overt or subliminal is just dastardly. How can you possibly think it might be a good thing? I'm astounded, I mean, literally astounded you could even suggest it. I thought RS was a medium for changes by conscious, intelligent, self-informed individuals with an aim at self-effort and willingness to change the world by means of honesty and fairness and motivated by a loving-kind heart. To resort to subtle insidious methods that typify the commercial mind-set for this end, is just a way to attach the ideal of being good to some purchase, something entirely external to the ideal of liberation to materialism.

Or where you talking about expanding the long-defunct and admirable concept of the PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT? You are aware, that such are no longer funded by tax dollars, but only by commercial interests? Or, maybe not. And where did you grow up?

I think, in fact, you are playing devil's advocate there. I think you wanted to elicit such a rebuke. I cannot con- ceive that you really believe what you wrote, because if you did, you would be inviting me to say your ideas are as bad as your grammar. Let me reiterate the sub-text of my statement: we want creative writing, we don't need the ads to help us enjoy such. We don't need ads to help us think giving our families the goods of technology.

This is something really very sad about television: they think we are stupid because we haven't boycotted their stupid methods heretofore. But, and here's a tip to a "developer", if a station should ever exist that put on a half hour, an hour or more of acting and left commercial subsidization markers to the end, even if it lasted half an hour, it would provoke real gratitude and promote product support like nothing they've ever seen.

As such, promoters would be seen as sincere founders of Art, rather than as parasites of it. We would see a change in the way writers are attributed and thanked for their work. As it stands, we are only just beginning to see how they are thanked due to the recent writer's strike.

Maybe you haven't noticed it, but there has been a real glut of very poor and shoddy material showing up on tv since then. You are seeing the result of a "compromise" and the work of scabs. It is the purely commercial interest, the monitary, profit oriented "altering of consciousness" that has produced this ill effect. It is "developerism" writ large, the same kind of mentality that wants to make space exploration a matter of "tourism" rather than sincere scientific and humanitarian interest.

I'm sorry Ito, I find your hopes of advertizing vain and worse than worthless. It is an abomination. Our aim should be that we support artists and art with no desire for some return than the art itself.

===========

:Letter writing is still the most potent way to raise the consciousness of elected representatives: it's a record they cannot ignore and cannot say they were unaware.

The ad-men are well aware that everyone has some level of obsessive-compulsiveness that only needs a little nudge to become useful to the ends they seek and which seems to have raised the effect into a disorder in many of our kids. I think it is even conceivable that the spike in autism we're seeing is partly due to television delivered "overwhelm". In urban centers you can't walk a block without seeing the subtle imagery of ads, and the mind is collecting this information whose ostensible over-all message is: you lack something, here it is.

Autism is practically unknown in primitive societies and rural environs. All "messaging" is from nature or some other living being and is interpersonal. When messages begin to infiltrate our awareness, we are basically engaged in an abstract business of interpreting and living as if in a "symbolic" world, an "autistic" state involving only the inidividual.

Your reference to a "panic" attack might be symptomatic of general trend of our highly non-interpersonal oriented society that lives by means of one way messaging: ads, and this is just another form of serfdom: our ruler tells us what we want, what we need, and we don't really talk back, we don't really exchange meaningfully, we receive, we obey. Maybe you sense this lack of concern, and you logically, or somatically respond: I have no friends here. Then you try to rationalize this unacceptible state of affairs by seeing SOMETHING good in it, but I think the "alchemy" you speak of is only rationalizing a bad thing as something "good". It is isn't good.

I just searched in google with these terms: "absense of autism in primitive society" and got one interesting URL that talks about this, but whose real thesis is hard for me to interpret as of yet. It seems to agree with my own, but the terms of the dichotomy I'm talking about are pretty well laid out:

http://mises.org/story/2849

Being engaged with others doesn't have to involve "tricks" or slight-of-hand. Everything that happens in living nature is a matter of "economy" or the exchanges that take place between two motivating centers with advantages in the sum. When flow of information is one way, this sum can be over-balanced in favor of the communicator. Your buying a product or trying to take meaning from the way the product is being impelled into your consciousness, is an over-balanced and mostly debt-favor exchange. In the boycott, the refusal to be moved, is perhaps less "positive" but it can be a means to empower your objection to this form of "social contract" so obviously not benign. It seeks to promote "unconsiousness". =========== Letter writing is still the most potent way to raise the consciousness of elected representatives: it's a record they cannot ignore and cannot say they were unawar

Advertising is art, in the same sense that brainwashing and psychic/cultural butchery is art, too.

Advertising is not my culture, and i don't care what an American said in the '60s. Perhaps McLuhan's ranting is proof that advertising works as a brainwashing tool. If you repeat something for long enough, especialy when your subjects are children, you can make it second nature.

Unfortunately Mr Hartogsohn shoots himself in the leg by explaining his subversive art, thereby diminishing its effectiveness.

The whole exercise belies a tragically crass approach to multimedia, communication, humour and spiritual growth. You can make people stupid with advertising, but you'll never get them to wake up this way.  Waking up is profoundly disturbing, and it tends to destroy the comfortable trance states induced by passive consumption of multimedia junk food. 

Of course the even more tragic and ironic part is that anyone shouting "wake up", and not joking, must earnestly believe they are awake themselves. The idea of "waking people up" is noble, but the devil is in the details of its execution. In almost all cases the opposite result is achieved, as in the case of Jesus.

Video is fun, anyway!