Commercialism in a Post-Commercial World
One of my all-time favorite books, and a book that has had a profound impact on my life, my career and how I see the world is Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.
In it, Postman argues that television, but more specifically television commercials, were destroying society and our ability to think critically by obliterating our attention spans and putting advertisements on equal footing with everything else on television.
Postman envisioned American consumers watching a newscast about genocide and royal weddings and elections and the deaths of legendary figures and commercials for headache medicine or the new slasher movie or brand of dog food and seeing them all as part of one big show called American Life they could passively consume in a way that actively made them dumber and less able to understand an increasingly complex and unfathomable world.
Thanks to smart phones, the internet and social media, watching an hour long newscast with sixteen minutes of commercials in one sitting now represents a triumph of concentration.
I wish I had the attention span to watch an entire hour long television show—WITH COMMERCIALS—without fast-forwarding or checking my phone several million times or getting bored.
Even more confusingly, in the decades since the publication of Amusing Ourselves to Death our attention spans have shrunk exponentially and we’re more consumption-minded than ever even though we now have the miraculous option to not experience commercials if we don’t want to.
By hitting a button we can choose the “Skip Ads” option but a lot of contemporary pop culture doesn’t even bother with ads in the first place, so there are no commercials to be skipped.
The existence of the “Skip Ads” button makes me wonder if there are people who do not automatically, instinctively choose that option every time. There must be people who see “Skip Ads” and consciously think, “No, I should watch this ad in its entirety. I might benefit from the service being advertised and/or the commercial might be entertaining, as commercials are almost inevitably designed to be.”
When I was a kid, television commercials were an inevitable part of everyday life unless you were a luddite or had strict parents. It was like late fees at Blockbuster Videos, an annoyance I naturally assumed would always be part of American life.
Now, however, when I’m watching television with my wife and we are subjected to commercials it feels weird. That’s partially because my wife and I don’t watch a lot of commercial television, so we don’t end up watching commercials.
When we do have to watch commercials for television shows like What We Do in the Shadows or Chucky, it feels fucking bizarre.
I just accepted commercials as part of the white noise of everyday life as a kid. Now, however, if I’m subjected to a commercial that I cannot skip past immediately it feels like a torment of the damned. Three minutes of unskippable commercials can frequently feel like three solid hours of torment.
Not having to watch commercials has spoiled me although there is some part of me that legitimately kind of loves commercials as an art form as well as a way of getting people to spend money on stupid crap they probably don’t need.
My sons are growing up in a world where they don’t need to watch commercials if they don’t have to yet my seven year old Declan actively chooses to watch half-hour blocks of literally every Franken Berry, Count Chocula and Boo Berry ad ever created.
He even digs those freaks Fruit Brute and Yummy Mummy. Declan loves brands like Funko and Disney Plus and Marvel and Star Wars so much that he doesn’t need to see commercials for their products to be a total and complete fanboy.
That’s the evil brilliance of capitalism and consumer society: when a ubiquitous evil like ubiquitous, unavoidable television commercials goes away something even more nefarious and evil pops up to take its place and keep the kiddies glued to the tube and addicted to the many wonders of the free market.
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