Edward Bernays was referred to as the Father of Public Relations, and a strong influence to the advertising practice of the 1920’s on. He combined practices of Propaganda with psychology to great effect. His background included work with a war committee during WWI where he was able to directly experience how effective propaganda itself was.
He was responsible for the practice of establishing emotional connections to the products and services his clients offered in order to encourage to increase the likelihood of a sale made from unconscious inclinations. This was used to manage the masses through a number of pre-calculated strategies including methods still practiced today. The components originally used to encourage people to buy these many things they did not need–which may have helped to lay the groundwork for much of the over-consumption issues we face today–have been retooled to enhance communications practice in many areas that now benefit society.
In this project I’m encouraging you to be aware of these tools and to re-fashion them to assist you in your adventures. How do you establish and emotional connection without being manipulative?
Tell the truth.
If what you’re promoting is of benefit to humanity and the planet you have nothing to hide.
Tool: Market Research
Noo Territory
We have an emerging collective consciousness that will help to keep us honest in our communications. If we choose to work with that, establishing standards of truth communications and practices of celebrating these truths, discoveries and successes, we’ll be stepping into the next phase of communications, consciously.
Carl Jung & Archetypes
Carl Jung, a well-known contemporary of Freud’s took dream analysis and the findings from dreams differently than Freud. Where Freud seemed to folder his findings through his stringent philosophy and his concern for the unrecognized potential chaos of human emotion and compulsion, Jung saw aspects of the individual psyche that needed to be acknowledged, the recovery process integrated into the personality of his patients.
These various thought patterns if unintegrated would lead to splits in the psyche. In his 1957 book The Undiscovered Self, he explains the nature of human’s relationship to the world and their psychological self. He points out that an individuals life is not the sole product of their ego and its opinions or even by social opinions–which Bernays was effectively working to shift on a mass scale. His position involved the influence of a higher authority, though the ethics of such an influence didn’t determine the freedom of an individual as much as the “empirical awareness, the incontrovertible experience of an intensely personal, reciprocal relationship between man and an extramundane authority which acts as a counterpoise to the world as it’s reason.” (pg. 32-33)
He goes on to say that symbols, in reference to contemporary religion, “possess a life of their own on account of their archetypal character” though their interpretation–as they show up in therapy–is different based on the interpreter. (pg. 85)
Following this line of thought he discusses the efforts of theologians to “demythologize” the focal points of faith framing them in terms that were acceptable to the systems they were in at that time. He argued that myth was critical, an essential piece of all belief systems; excluding them from these systems severed to create a chasm between the knowledge (or collective understanding) of an individual and their belief system.
He identified this rupture as a symptom of split consciousness and related it directly to mental disorders he was working to identify in order to help his patients.
The work of advertising and mass media communications since the 1920’s has contributed to shaping how the consumers most influenced by the efforts of industry view the role of resources in their world. This shift from surviving tough times with only what was needed by an individual or group to live — to the lifestyle of leisure afforded by purchasing various products seems to have sufficiently replaced how we position ourselves in the present world.
The reliance on rigid belief systems to define acceptable behavioral patterns of self expression for instance–have successfully been replaced en masse by profitable social norms instilled at an increased rate over the past four generations. For example, a woman’s need to paint her face or “put a face on” before she goes out into the world is an act of donning a mask of any expression she chooses to exhibit. The persistent successive images that promise what an attractive version of this mask could be–conveniently located by the products involved in such a transformation–have served to program the general consciousness instilling new ideals of beauty and self-image. This lasting trend has separated the reality of natural beauty from women in Western culture by and large. What a woman actually looks like and the personality she possesses and expresses are notably different in most cases than the painted person she can don at any time.
Moving from the intellectual observation to the reality of the situation, many beauty products such as lipstick and eyeshadow are made from toxic materials such as Polyparaben which studies have shown raises concerns such as: Developmental/reproductive toxicity, Ecotoxicology, Endocrine disruption, Allergies/immunotoxicity, Miscellaneous, Use restrictions. This information is from the Skin Deep website at www.ewg.org and directly pertains to the Wet N’ Wild Mega Colors brand, in the color Captive. This is only one example of consumer culture. THe practice of self-indulgence has been a key component of industrial success that operates in direct opposition to the health of entire populations and the environments of which they are a part, in many cases. According to class material from Hillsborough Community College Jung considered these archetypal symbols to e part of a collective unconscious shared by all humans.
Campbell runs with the Archetypes
Joseph Campbell’s work with identifying archetypes in the mythology of cultures all over the world allowed him to develop a template for many of the stories he studied, which he called the Hero’s Journey or the Hero’s Path.
This symbolic template could be considered a portal through which we can discover just where we stand in relation to our physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional world, as individuals and as members of an interrelated system.
Many of these archetypes have been used to capture the attention of the mass consciousness since the adoption of television programming. No longer did people have to rely on the interoperation of their position in their world by state and religious organizations, in order to find meaning on an emotional level and even a spiritual level all they had to do was flip on the TV and find the most fitting/enticing escape for the moment of spare time they had available.
These symbols continue to motivate people to follow these stories (and thought processes) wherever they may lead. It’s time to step off that programmed path and choose our real-time adventure on this planet, now, with the people breathing, walking, talking and living among us.
Resources:
Bernays, E. (2005). Propaganda. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Ig Pub.
The Undiscovered Self
Jung, C. (1958). The undiscovered self. New York: New American Library.
http://www.hccfl.edu/media/724354/archetypesforliteraryanalysis.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_mechanisms
Frued’s Basic Principles
http://www.simplypsychology.org/unconscious-mind.html
Wikipedia – Joseph Campbell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell
Vintage Ad Browser
www.vintageadbrowser.com
Your sites really nice. I’ll probably be returning to read through more, thanks