JANUARY 2004 IN
RICK ASTER’S WORLD
“Get your head out of that tube!” It’s something you might have heard your mother say if you grew up in the second half of the twentieth century and sat much too close to the television. The tube in question is the cathode ray tube (CRT) used in most televisions and video displays made before 2003. Folk wisdom held that sitting too close to the front of the tube, where the picture was displayed, could damage your eyesight. Science didn’t definitively establish this effect, but there are dangers in CRTs. Their radiation and magnetic fields were found to affect the brain functioning of people who spent too much time near them. Then there is the sound of the CRT, a video scanning frequency hum, a sound related to the number of dots displayed on the screen. Some say this sound is hypersonic, a sound that dogs can hear but people cannot. But people do hear it. Even with your eyes closed and the television sound off, you know when someone is turning a CRT television on or off because you can hear it.
The sound of the CRT could, over time, diminish your ability to hear high-frequency sounds, but the more immediate concern is its hypnotic effect that can make you pay attention to things that otherwise wouldn’t be of interest. Once you start watching, the CRT sound can hypnotize you into continuing to watch the mostly dubious programming that can be found on television, even the commercial breaks, 2- to 5-minute spans of paid messages that, rationally, you should ignore. It makes no rational sense to pay attention to commercials on television. There is no realistic belief that commercials will have enough benefit to make them worthwhile. But most viewers do pay attention at least a third of the time, and the commercial messages have invaded our collective thinking far more than we would like to admit. Even when we’re not watching, our heads are still in the tube.
This continues in spite of the changes in television technology. Many people have replaced their old CRT televisions with newer flat-screen models, and these don’t have the same hypnotic effect. Current CRTs have substantially less video scanning frequency noise than those of the 1960s and 1970s, so the hypnotic effect might be less. Current digital video recorders offer a variety of features for skipping commercials. As a result of these and other changes, many people are no longer seeing or paying attention to television commercials. But the commercial mindset continues for a time even as the equipment that created it is gone. Even if you threw that old tube away a year or two ago, your head might still be in the tube. But you can change that. You can get your head out of the tube, stop thinking the commercial thoughts that it planted in your head, and start thinking your own thoughts.
Making this transition is both easier and harder than it sounds: easier, because as soon as you recognize the source of an idea, you can choose to think differently; harder, because the commercial mindset has formed habits and patterns of thoughts that may generate most of the thoughts that run through your head — and the heads of everyone you know — all day long. All this year, I’ll be writing about things you can do to stop thinking tube thoughts and start thinking your own thoughts. I’ll start here by trying to illustrate the different directions of the two kinds of ideas so that you can start to recognize which of your thoughts are your own natural thoughts and which are tube thoughts that advertisers paid to have planted in your mind.
Sometimes the reach of a commercial jingle, slogan, or catch phrase is obvious. A phrase like “Where’s the beef?” is still instantly recognizable to most people more than 20 years after its brief run on the airwaves. This kind of phrase can seem almost meaningless, but as it implies that searching for beef is a worthwhile activity — a dubious thesis, if you stop and think about it — it subtly reinforces the advertiser’s idea that beef is something of value.
The jokes of commercials also carry subtle messages, and the funnier the joke is, the more likely it is that the hidden message will stick. As I chuckle at the humorous slogan “Make 7 Up yours,” I may be influenced by what it is suggesting to me, which is that I find a way to express myself using a commercial product.
In these commercials, the commercial agenda is easy to find, but it is present even when it is not so obvious. Commercials all try to distract you from the things that are important to you, to make you pay attention to other things, and they all succeed to an extent.
Has it really been three years have gone by since the “Whassup?!” campaign was on the air? This series of commercial messages made a big splash with its group of colorful characters who were so laughable because their conversation somehow never got much farther than their stylized greeting and the subject of beer. On the surface, it seemed like harmless nonsense. Of course, the product they were promoting was beer, and the idea you were supposed to get was that drinking beer was so much fun and so relaxing that details like having something to say, or even something to do with your life, wouldn’t matter — and that is not an entirely harmless idea.
This kind of message invites critical thinking, though — or to quote another recent catch phrase, “What’s up with that?” Specifically, why don’t these beer drinkers seem to have anything to say? As soon as you put the question that way, it is easy to imagine other possible reasons that are less favorable to the product. Maybe they can’t think of anything to say because drinking too much beer has dulled their brains. Or maybe they drink beer to try to avoid or escape the fact that they are as dull as they are. Part of the reason television programming is designed to put you, the viewer, in a passive position is to keep you from asking questions like this.
Several times a year, commercial culture gets so out of kilter that people start to describe it as a kind of psychosis. We must have lost our collective minds, we say, if we believe (to take two examples from a generation ago — somehow these things are easier to see in retrospect) that pet rocks will bring companionship into our lives or that the Bay City Rollers are the outstanding musicians of our time. But even when commercial culture is not so obviously amiss, it still represents something like a psychosis in the way it separates us from reality. This state is not really a psychosis, but I call it the commercial psychosis to emphasize that it is an entire frame of mind that will not be corrected easily or all at once — especially considering that we will need to work our way out from the inside.
The road back to reality can start from anywhere, because you’re on the right track any time you focus on your own perceptions and your own preferences. If you see what you really see and want what you really want, you can go from there. To return your focus to what’s real for you, you might ask yourself questions like these:
At first, questions like these can seem difficult, even impossible. Keep asking them, though, and you’ll get answers. The reason commercials repeat so many times is that the repetition forces you to pay attention to the commercial agenda. Now you can use repetition to return your attention to your own agenda. Pretend these questions are a commercial, and you’re the advertiser. You get to decide how many times you want to run the commercial. Run it at least as many times as that Taco Bell commercial you’ve been seeing for the last four months, and you’ll find that your focus has started to shift from tacos and the other things that advertisers want you to think about to more important matters, namely, the things that you want to think about. Of course, since you’re the advertiser, you can change the message if you like by choosing different questions or a different approach. You’re in control — what a concept!
Aided by the hypnotic CRT sound and reinforced by other media, television commercials have planted a vast number of commercial thoughts in your head. You can get beyond these alien thoughts by recognizing them for what they are — bare expressions of the corporate desire for revenue — and replacing them with your own thoughts and your own agenda. Now that people are replacing CRTs with flat screens, the power of the commercial message is diminished, and people are slowly starting to think outside the tube — to replace commercial thoughts with their own natural thoughts. Whether you watch a CRT or not at this point, you can accelerate the movement away from tube thinking in your own life by taking action to control your focus and ask your own questions about what you want and what you should do.
Next: Inside the Corporate Mind
Fish Nation Information Station | Rick Aster’s World | Rick Aster