themessage

The message

by Bob on October 11, 2007

The message is everywhere. Buy this, buy that, use this pill and you will be happy not sad, wear this outfit and you will be beautiful.

The flood of images and messages is all around us. Technology, especially computer technology, has made us an age of advertising labels and subliminal messages.

The messages are not always subtle.

Consider the nomenclature of stores. "Best Buy" chain stores may or may not offer the "best buy" for the consumer, but since they call themselves that, and we see it and hear it all the time, it gets into our heads. So we are made to associate a good buy in a TV with the megastore chain's name.

So we find overt manipulation of people's wills in the naming of things and messages which bombard us. Some call it formally, the psychology of consumer behaviour. Others, brainwashing. Others call it simply good advertising.

Medicines have been named this way, firstly as an aide-memoire to doctors, and secondly to impress the patients into asking for it. Thorazine (the powerful Nordic god Thor), Librium (from Latin liber- ... freeing), Valium (Latin for valor), the ill-fated pill Halcyon (from the word for happy, halcyon), Prevacid (prevent acid), Alleve (to alleviate the symptoms), and so many other.

Obviously, in naming general consumer goods, too, we see this pattern. "Easy Off" stove cleaner. Is it really easily getting the cooking film off the oven or is it just a name ? Cavet emptor as is said in Latin.

So the twisting of people arms is happening all the time. Perhaps unbeknownst to people at large. Insidious.

And Grandmaster Flash brought us a classic 1982 song in its old school hip hop genre: "The Message". Flash had a lot to say about this, in principle.

Then again, the grandfather of rap, Gil Scott-Heron, had a lot to say. His 1970 piece "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" was a brilliant poetic and musical work. And Gil did promise that the revolution will not be televised, it would be live. It has yet to happen that way.