As François Villon characterised the renaissance and Walt Whitman inspired the beat-generation, our age is dominated by advertising; it is the poetry of the twenty-first century. In many ways, it is impossible to avoid advertising within the western culture. While nearly every pre-school child can recite an advertising slogan of his favourite cereal brand, nobody can properly recall a verse of Shakespeare’s sonnets anymore, once a phenomenon for general public. Advertising soaked in every aspect of our society as it is depicted by Marshall MacLuhan (1964):
‘Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.’
Many people tend to have a rather ambivalent perspective on advertising. On the one hand, they refuse it and claim that it has no effect on them because they are conscious enough to realise its manipulative nature. On the other hand,......
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Approximate Word Count: 1535
Approximate Pages: 6 (260 words per double-spaced page) |