What happens to civilization when its main source of knowledge is ads?

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Note From A Worldwatcher

In the last issue, I ended this column by recalling a TV commercial I had seen, in which it was suggested to us that eating fast food while watching solitary TV is a good way to "get on with your life." I commented that I thought that ad was "criminal." In retrospect, I think maybe my use of that term was too impulsive. The commercial I described probably didn't break any laws. When you're paying $2 million for 30 seconds (the price of advertising on that broadcast), you make sure to have your lawyers check out what you're saying.

But as I think about it, that's just the problem: that legalistically speaking, an ad like the one for "Chili's baby-back ribs" is not criminal--yet it really ought to be. To encourage 90 million people to do something that could make them even more sedentary, fat, and socially isolated than they already are, is to grease the way for even more obesity, heart failure, and hostility than we already have. But what really is not the fast food itself, so much as the implied message that goes with it--the message that to "get on with your life" is something you can accomplish through passive consumption. That message, if not exactly criminal, is pathologically disingenuous.

Ironically, our assurance that lawyers check every detail these days may actually make us more vulnerable to being deceived by ads than we once were. We can be fairly confident now that major advertisers won't actually lie the way they did a century ago. Most of us have seen those antique medicine-bottle labels that claimed to cure everything from malaise to malaria, and we can laugh at how gullible people must have been then. But that may lull us into overlooking the newer ways advertisers have learned to manipulate us. Lies are only one kind of deception, perhaps the easiest kind to legislate against. But other kinds of dishonest messages are now all around us, in every medium--and I think getting worse.

Lest this preoccupation with advertising seem a marginal issue for a magazine focused on the larger questions of sustainability, please consider that advertising is now arguably the most pervasive and multifarious form of communication from which the modern public gets its beliefs about what makes life healthy, satisfying, and sustainable in the long run:

* More people now get their impressions about what prescription medicines they need from magazine or TV ads than from their doctors. Notice all those ads for Claritan or Nexium or Lipitor, which largely drown out the advice of your doctor. It's you and your doctor who should be the deciding what medicine you need, not you and a drug pusher.

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