Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture

In the article, “Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture,” the author, Sut Jhally starts off with an example of how society and consumer culture affects our actions.  By pointing out that a diamond ring is “considered a necessity” to validate an engagement, we are able to see just how much consumer culture affects the general population (Jhally 1990).  The world was not always this encapsulated in consumer society though.  There was a time where family, community, religion, and other factors were the primary “creators of the cultural forms” (Jhally 1990).  However, figuring out exactly when and how our culture became this way is not exactly straightforward.  It was not simply one year where the media teemed with images in an attempt to sell certain products.  Instead it was a whole decade, the 1920s, that gave us the image-based media culture we know today.  The 1920s represent a novel, industrial time in the U.S. and can be referred to as the turning point in creating an “image-saturated society” (Jhally 1990).  During this time, the consumers were not only being bombarded with commercial messages, but were also taught how to interpret them.  With this information, Jhally moves to say that “advertising is ubiquitous- it is the air that we breathe as we live our daily lives” (Jhally 1990).

Advertisers work to sell the consumer a product, and do so by playing on his or her emotions.  What is even more interesting, is that some people have equated advertising as a religious system, where “people construct their identities through the commodity form” (Jhally 1990).  The advertising culture is perpetually going to convince us to buy products on the basis that they will result in happiness.  They used to do this with only audio or visual advertisements, but the combined methods are especially powerful.  Video makers and song writers now work together with this “vital marketing tool in mind” (Jhally 1990).  These videos have become increasingly shorter and shorter in length.  For example, commercials have gone from being 30 seconds, to 15, and soon they will become even shorter.  The need for commercials to stand out to the viewer though has increased dramatically, due to the universality of TV commercials.  In order to make a commercial stand out in a crowd of others, advertisers often use “intensely pleasurable images,” often including sexual ones (Jhally 1990).  In addition to this, commercials have evolved to invoke feeling in its viewers, to leave a lasting impression.