Product Bias: The End Of The Romance?
Posted by
Jonathan Rowe on Sat, 11/05/2005 - 7:41pm
You’ve heard about the new iPod video player and believe me, this is big. Now kids will be able to watch movies behind their textbooks in class. They’ll have another way to sit in the back seat and ignore their parents on family car trips. I mean, we wouldn’t want parents and kids actually to talk with one another.
The first thing they tell you in traffic school is not to take your eyes off the road. Ever. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s had close calls just taking a quick glance at the heater setting. So now the bozos out there are going to be searching for Coldplay on the screen or getting pumped as the Terminator excises his foes. Makes you feel good that your kids are out on their bikes, no?
It is no secret that new technologies have impacts like this. All it takes to be aware of them is eyes and ears. Yet the media seems oblivious. Most of the early reporting on the iPod video was of the techno-schmoochfest variety summed up in the Business Week column called (I’m not kidding) “Video iPod, I love you.”
It’s not just iPods. Cell phone video, video games, potions and pills get the same fawning treatment. Car reviews still read as though written by people with the psycho-emotional development of 17 year olds. The reporting on HDTV has been almost catatonically unaware of a most basic question: does this country really need something that will make television even more seductive to kids – and to the rest of us too, for that matter.
Far more powerful than the alleged “liberal” bias of the media is the product bias, especially when those products involve technology. This is the master narrative, the assumption that drives much of the reporting about the economy. It also crowds out other narratives, including that of the commons.
The obvious explanation is advertising. Commercial media depends upon it. Most ads are for products; and so publishers are loathe to bite the hands that feed them. The influence of advertisers is undeniable and growing. But it is not the whole story. The issue of Business Week that carried the wet kiss for video iPods didn’t have an Apple ad. (It did have another story touting new devices to plug iPod audio into home stereo systems.)
The assumption is built into the language. Products are goods, and goods cannot be bad.
These assumptions drive the master narrative. They reinforce, and provide august authority for, the cultural romance with technology and the notion that progress comes always on the wings of new things to buy. Providing a soundtrack for all this is the nation’s central measure of progress, the GDP, which embodies these assumptions to an almost comic degree, and which the media follows slavishly.
It’s going to become increasingly hard to maintain the romance of stuff in the face of intruding realities such as this. (A major problem though is the narrow fixation of the American Left on physical impacts such as cancer. Cell phones for example can be questioned only if they pose a cancer risk to users, not if they corrode the interactions in the home.)
Addiction for example has become a trademark affliction of the age. People are becoming addicted not just to tobacco, drink and drugs – the stock vices – but also to video games, cell phones, web surfing, junk food, cosmetic surgery, credit card debt, and shopping period. That’s a pretty broad swath of the economy right there.
Addiction is a phenomenon for which the conventional economic model has no answer. The “rational” consumer is the moral anchor of the narrative, and the claim to “efficiency” of the entire system. So if people increasingly buy things that are bad not just for everyone else, but for themselves as well -- and that they don’t really want to begin with -- then the whole belief system starts to go kerplooey.
http://onthecommons.org/node/731?PHPSESSID=dcf079f1833c90d6f9b6d9509502946f
