Distracted by Shoes

The following is a guest post from Daniel H. Welcome back, Dan!

In a recent NY Times column, David Brooks describes a deterioration in American culture over the past century, noting that “America once had a culture of thrift…but over the past decades, that unspoken code has been silently eroded,” and now we exist in a “culture of debt.”

He partially blames the effects of a rapidly growing economy, noting how some luxury items which were once unaffordable for the middle class suddenly came within financial reach (especially within the reach of creditors if not within the reach of one’s own cash). He also blames the deterioration of the norm of personal responsibility, and claims that those who fell victim to marketing schemes were also furthering the deterioration of a norm of thriftiness, in themselves and in those around them.

I thought it was a good opinion piece, really. But the whole time I was reading the article, I kept getting distracted by shoes.

Lots of shoes.

The whole top and side of the internet page on the New York Times website was full of shoe advertisements, which of course, exist because the Times wants to collect on extra revenue whenever possible and because advertisers are willing to pay prime dollar for space on a site viewed by perhaps millions of people per day. And so as I was challenged by Brooks’ thoughts on how we, as Americans, should seek to be wiser consumers, I also felt that this change cannot and will not happen if I do not seek to monitor the ways in which I take in information, most especially on the web, but anywhere for that matter. If Americans truly desire to become wiser spenders, we must question our acceptance of the commercial advertising industry and its self-imposition into our day-to-day lives.

While I don’t think internet advertising is wrong at all, it might be helpful, as technology and the internet becomes more and more central to our means of gathering information, to ask several questions: First, what space is sacred? What space or information should not be corrupted with advertisements? At what point, if any, is the value of information corrupted or degraded by advertisements? Would we put corporate sponsors on our holy scriptures or governmental documents? What about on websites that contain this kind of information? What about good literature? The unspoken reality here is that corporate sponsors help keep quite a bit of the internet free and available to all, which I tend to find is a good thing. I only wonder where we go from here?

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user bcjordan.

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Ashish 3 months ago 1 point
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Big questions!

I think a lot of this is inextricably bound up with the extent to which we view consumption as a form of expression. The people who waited in line to make sure they were among the first to get an iPhone, for instance, were making a statement about who they were as much as they were making one about the exciting novelty of the iPhone. I think it's a good thing that our wealth has allowed us the luxury of devoting so much energy to these pursuits--I'm sure many East Germans burst into tears the first time they stepped inside a West German store--but I think it's easy to lose sight of the boundary between using our shopping choices to augment our growth and using those choices to fill in for our normal processes of maturation.

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Daniel 3 months ago 1 point
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I agree that this is true. It's troubling to me, though, that even as we consume, we do not often question how advertising can affect us morally or spiritually. While we may have the freedom to express ourselves in many ways as consumers, we also should question our needs vs. wants and ask ourselves how advertising addresses these. I feel that advertising primarily addresses our wants rather than our needs, and it seems that, in general, the marketing process does not build us up as humans but instead appeals into our deepest flaws of greed and insecurity. I guess I just wish businesses and advertising as whole cultures would spend more time figuring out how to help us become better humans, instead of being satisfied when we become worse ones.

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