I'm not convinced. Propaganda only works when it relies on something that people are dispositionally inclined towards. eg: hating foreigners, calls towards group unity, etc.
You can't use propaganda to trick people into becoming experts at calculus, for instance.
> You can't use propaganda to trick people into becoming experts at calculus, for instance.
Perhaps not an individual instantly. But how about settling for making a generation of parents fear that there will be no future for their kids unless they get fantastic grades, and that they have to use them to go into stem?
How would you distinguish corporation influencing consumers from corporations following consumers? One thing would be to see if there are items that are heavily advertised by corporations but that they do not succeed. You can also take items that everyone knows about, no one wants, and then launch a propaganda campaign and see what happens. Different propaganda works in different ways so one would need to try varieties. I imagine a randomly controlled trial of having various ubiquitous goods that are not heavily advertised nor heavily purchased and then randomly assigning different advertising strategies (including none). Do that in various regions, countries, ethnicities, etc, and then see what can be seen.
My guess is that advertising raises desire by a few percent in most cases. There would be some instances of a run away craze, probably with a massive rise followed by a collapse, but that most products would largely be unaffected. I assume some advertising strategies would backfire and reduce demand.
For me, I feel like most of the time it is been exposed to the existence of an item and my ability to see how it could be useful. I don't think random advertisements I come across impact me that much since most of the advertisements I see don't seem to correspond to anything I want or do or spend money on.
Humans use their imagination to figure out what choice of action leads to a future of less uncomfortability. Often times, these are choices between short term future and long term future. Advertising is a way of helping shape that argument as to what choice is to be taken, but the underlying drive is already there.
You could also look for cases where propaganda is used against consumerism and see how impactful that tends to be.
> The same logic applies to other platforms - like subway platforms or television or even restaurant menus.
this is really bad comparison
a subway platform ad doesn't dictate the way consumers use the subway.
a restaurant does not monitor the effectiveness of the ads in their menus, analyse their industry and rip off their product with an in-house brand (amazon basics)
amazon is not a marketplace, it is a surveillance platform built to allow amazon to take ownership of more and more markets
to say this is just a problem with ads is defeatist instead getting real tangible change
- Elm CSS and even then, it was on a page with I think hundreds of accordions. We had to use Css.Global to create class based states, then toggle classes.
- Loading a massive library of data and leaving it in the state to make navigation within that library's pages faster. It was a classic tradeoff of upfront vs incremental load time, and we'd just over indexed in one direction.
i've held on hope for a year, but can no longer
we're a non-unionized industry up against very powerful people who want to deskill the field
i want hope, if you have any send my way.. unfortunately things are not looking good