Brainwashing 101: Start 'em young!

Yea, good point. I forgot about that film, [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me]Super Size Me.[/url] I guess it takes strong advertising, early in life when our brains are underdeveloped and we're more vulnerable, to get us to engage in such life-threatening activities as smoking and eating at fast food restaurants.

I haven't been to any of the big fast-food places myself in a very long time. My body tends to go into some kind of digestive shock as it tries to expel the alien intruder. It's not a pretty sight.

That's one of the benefits of not owning a car, I think. Less toxins in the environment and less toxins in me. Ha ha. Then again, I could be making a virtue out of necessity. A car is way too expensive a luxury for me to maintain right now.

[url=http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun04/protecting.html]APA: Protecting children from advertising[/url]

quote:

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The advertising industry spends $12 billion per year on ads targeted to children, bombarding young audiences with persuasive messages through media such as television and the Internet. The average child is exposed to more than 40,000 TV commercials a year, according to studies. And ads are reaching children through new media technologies and even in schools--with corporate-sponsored educational materials and product placements in students' textbooks.

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Here are some key points:

quote:

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"Is it fair to allow advertising to an audience that is too young to recognize commercial messages are biased and have a persuasive intent?"

[b]Advertising effects[/b]

Certainly the messages' power of persuasion is compelling, the task force found. Studies cited in the report have shown that [b]after just one exposure to a commercial, children can recall the ad's content and have a desire for the product.[/b]

Some messages may influence children's behavior too, says Brian Wilcox, PhD, chair of the task force, which formed in 2000 to conduct an extensive literature review of advertising's effects on children. For example, [b]research has shown that child-directed ads for healthy foods can lose their effectiveness when children view ads for snack foods in the same sitting.[/b]

Indeed, [b]some researchers speculate that advertising geared to children[/b]--which largely consists of ads for sugary cereals, candy and fast-food restaurants--[b]may be contributing to the increase in childhood obesity by promoting unhealthy foods. Plus, studies suggest that eating habits formed during childhood can persist throughout life,[/b] according to the report.

[b]Also of concern is the "privatization" in children's media consumption,[/b] with a growing number of young children using the Internet and watching televisions in their bedrooms, where no one is present to explain what they are viewing or reading, according to the report.

[b]That lack of adult interpretation is a concern because young children tend to accept ads as fair, accurate, balanced and truthful,[/b] Kunkel says. "They don't see the exaggeration or the bias that underlies the claims," he says. "To young children, advertising is just as credible as Dan Rather reading the evening news is to an adult."

For children to critically process ads, they must be able to discriminate between commercial and noncommercial content and identify advertising's persuasive intent, the report notes.

[b]Particularly alarming to the task force is that commercials also often use psychological research to make their messages more powerful. For example, they draw from developmental psychology principles to build campaigns that persuade children they need a product and to nag their parents to buy it.[/b] In addition, advertisers often use characters and celebrities--such as from shows like "SpongeBob SquarePants" or "Blues Clues"--or premium gimmicks to reel in children.

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What to do? Here's an example from Auz ...

[url=http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/bill/pcfjfab2006466/]Protecting Children from junk food advertising in Australia[/url]

It's not clear to me whether the Bill was passed or not.

[ 07 August 2007: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

Heh he. My own views may have been formed at an early age. My boyhood ski trips included a stop over at McDonald's in Nanaimo on the way to Green Mountain, Forbidden Plateau or even Whistler. In those days, that was the nearest McDonald's. However, the Nanaimo McDonald's had been charged with serving horse meat, on more than one ocassion I think, and that, shall we say, coloured my views of that esteemed restarant. Snerk.

Targeting tots could build brand recognition later in life, study says

Quote:

Reporting in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, researchers say exposure to brands at a younger age significantly increases familiarity later in life - often, with people more quickly recognizing defunct brands to which they were exposed as kids than existing brands introduced to them as adults.

And, therefore, "This can be done through advertising in children's programs or through product placement."

Quote:

The study is the latest entry in a growing body of research that, controversially, empowers marketers to court children, and even infants. For example, knowing that young people are 350 per cent more responsive to the five senses than adults, cartoon-emblazoned scented diapers were introduced to boost recall among so-called "crib consumers."

"Children are requesting brands as soon as they can speak," says Susan Linn, director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. "I've talked to plenty of parents whose child's first word was Coke or Elmo or Nemo."

The average 10-year-old is thought to be familiar with approximately 400 brands. The average kindergarten student can recognize some 300 logos. And at just six weeks, a baby can form mental images of corporate logos and mascots.

That's capitalism for ya. Brainwashing the kids, brainwashing the parents, brainwashing, brainwashing.

Yes, I looked for that thread, couldn't find it, and, happily, found my old one instead.

The positive feeling is counterbalanced by the knowledge that many, even most, of the thousands of babble entries I've made are gone forever. But, yea, it IS like a little present.

Without the trillion dollar, or more, marketing and advertising sectors in North America, capitalism as we know it would collapse. The whole thing hinges, at least in part,  on the creation of demand as firms "compete" in the areas of market share - by advertising and marketing - and lowest payout to workers - by prolonged class warfare over the last few decades. There is no real competition in the area of price for many products whose sale is dominated by the monopoly-like or oligopolistic firms.

There are, of course, political consequences in turning the population into Matrix-like victims and consumers. And that is what "the left" and those who advocate an alternative are up against.

I don't think the left makes full or proper use of all the efforts made by marketers and advertisers. Of course, what is useful and important for the left is going to be different from what is useful and important to those marketers and advertisers. In some sense, the propagandists for advertising and marketing know the working class better than many on the left who put that class at the centre of social life in a new society. I think the baby gets thrown out with the bath water here, as it were, the idea being, I suppose, that nothing useful can come from the study of such harmful activity.

In any case, brainwashing children has got nothing to do with what the left stands for; we stand for the protection of childhood, and the classroom,  from commercial propaganda. Capitalism, OTOH,  wishes to invade the classroom and turn it into a means of ever more profits ... the well being of children be damned. So we have a kind of ethical or spiritual denunciation against such practices.

However, I don't agree with your thumbnail summary. It is not simply a question of who sells better. Our spiritual and economic values, at least for socialists like myself, include a future with a vastly reduced marketing and advertising torrent of propaganda. Those efforts need to be turned towards more socially useful activity. Less brainwashing and more education is what we're about. So it is not simply who sells better, although there's an element of truth there. Capitalist advertising and marketing, on the whole, teachers social passivity and inertness. It takes the political energies of people and turns it into demoralization, nihilism, isolated individualism, and a generalized anger that can be easily directed at targets like women, visible minorities, immigrants, etc. Capitalism is the great Moloch, the great Satan, the great deceiver.

The ideal "consumer", from the capitalist point of view, is a drone who makes themselves available to the advertising torrent hurled at them - on television and in the media generally - and dutifully plays their role in keeping the "economy" going. Such drones never stop to consider what sort of economy they are helping to perpetuate. And so on.

We stand for citizens, not consumers.  We don't want to preach messages that lead to demoralized passivity. It is our aim to energize people, to MOVE them. When people move their consciousness changes. And so on.

So, it is not just a selling job, even of a vision. My two bits.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I agree with the necessity of having a vision by political leaders - or those who aspire to political leadership - but it is very difficult to bring people around to agreeing with "a vision" as opposed to getting people active on a particular issue that is near and dear to them. It really sounds like the making of obstacles rather than mobilizing people.

How did you (or I) come to have the vision you have now? Wasn't it a combination of involvement in particular issues, over time, some independent work on your part, and so on, that led you to where you are today? Did you form your views, all at once, by being convinced by a particular vision? Don't forget, we are talkng about masses of people who have been, as it were, innoculated against socialist ideas, demoralized and demobilized by the advertising and marketing blitzkreig, and so on.

What's that about?

Advertising to children who are ill-equiped to distinguish true from false claims, whose intellectual, social and emotional development is far from complete IS brainwashing.It's precisely the right term to describe the harmful effect, and intent, of advertisers. How else would you describe cigarette advertising and Joe Kool and candy-flavoured cigarettes aimed at kids? Give your head a frakking shake.

I will give you that there are many factors why, e.g., people eat junk food - I know, for example, that pop and sugar water drinks are cheaper than either milk or juice in poor Northern Manitoba FN communities - but that just shows that advertising and marketing have a context.