I love this! Reflection on MySpace
Well, whilst reading relentlessly for my dissertation which is about current attitudes towards advertising as an institution, I came accross the following quote which is from the view that advertising is perhaps a negative thing inducing materialistic values in society.
On first reading of this, I immediately thought of MySpace... see what you think....
'The objectification of self has been explicitly described in personality theory as a "marketing orientation", where a person is mannered for mercenary motivations and has a detatched view of self as a commodity.
'In this orientation, man experiences himself as a thing to be employed successfully on the market. He does not experience himself as an active agent, as the bearer of human powers. He is alienated from these powers. His aim is to sell himself successfully on the market... His body, his mind, and his soul are his captial, and his task in life is to invest it favourably, to make a profit of himself. Human qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into assets of the "personality package", conducive to a higher price on the personality market'."
And the most interesting thing I find about this... it was written in 1955!
Source - Fromm, 1955, p140 cited in Pollay, 1986, p25.
posted by Kate @ 6:42 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Yes - I definitely can see how it relates to MySpace. And I agree advertising can and does lead to a more materialistic society - but I certainly don't think this applies to (or ever could) human qualities such as those Fromm mentions - even if they are used as commodities.
I've only recently got into MySpace myself and was really struck by the different ways that people portray their "self" on it - the self they always wanted to be, the self they think others want them to be, the self they aspire to be, the self they think they are... which one is real?
I wrote a blog on my MySpace about it myself; it's titled "MySpace Psychology" at www.myspace.com/gemlawson and you should check it out for my more indepth analyses/ramblings. However, I came to conclude - a little less cynically, that actually the choice of language used, the tools they use to sell themselves, the way they choose to portray themselves actually makes people far more translucent than in a 3D-real-world meeting and that surely that's a good thing??
Hmmmm, I see your point Gem.
So you think MySpace is a good thing cos you get to maybe be who you really are and act in ways perhaps you can't in 'real life'.
Do you think our sense of 'real' will be eroded by these types of online interfaces then? Or, do we ever really know what's real and what isn't....?
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