You’re scrolling on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, or even TikTok and come across an ad. If you click on the ad or even spend too long looking at it, that single ad becomes your entire feed. Have you ever experienced this before?
All of these ads tend to follow the same pattern. They normally start with a fit man or woman who looks happy and confident. Then it cuts to a surprising before-and-after picture of their jawline. The narrator of the ad will usually say something along the lines of, “No surgery, no complicated routines. Just a few minutes a day will get you these results,” making it seem as if these changes are simple and easy to achieve. Anyone reading or watching this ad would assume it is simply responding to a desire to improve one’s appearance. However, after going through this week’s readings and videos, I now realize that this desire for self-improvement may not be as simple as it seems.
The Frankfurt School was made up of German philosophers, sociologists, and political theorists who came together to develop Critical Theory. This theory was created to help us understand how social and political structures produce inequality and oppression. One common belief among members of this school was that the culture industry ultimately harms society. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer specifically argued that popular culture is not driven by the public’s needs and wants, but by what the “elites” want us to consume. They believed the culture industry affects consumers’ imaginations, leading to a distorted sense of reality. The concern is that we, as consumers, can no longer tell the difference between what we actually need and what we are being told we need. This suggests that popular culture often creates problems that may not have existed in the first place.
Looking back at the Jawzrsize example, while each influencer appears unique, the messaging is nearly identical across platforms. The advertisement quickly creates a problem by targeting self-worth and personal value, reinforcing the negative ideology that to be important, attractive, or popular, one must “fix” one's jawline.
Raymond Williams of the Birmingham School believed that popular culture was not as harmful as the Frankfurt School made it out to be. Williams argued that to resist dominant ideologies, we must first understand them. This requires stepping back and questioning what we consume. Recognizing Jawzrsize not as a neutral self-care product but as a carrier of ideology allows individuals to question whose interests are truly being served. While the culture industry remains powerful, awareness creates space for agency. The product may continue to circulate widely, but its meaning is no longer fixed or uncontested.
This leads me to ask: How do we become better consumers? I don’t mean how we can watch more videos or buy more products from influencers. Rather, how can we train ourselves to recognize when the popular culture industry produces mass communication that claims to satisfy consumers but instead works to control them?
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First off, that's a hilarious meme accompanying your post, Nate. They've got us solved already! I haven't seen the Jawzrsize ad show up in my feed, but perhaps now that I watched it in this venue it'll be following me soon. :-)
ReplyDeleteTo your question, I think awareness is half the battle. Or at least some of the battle. We're better consumers when we're equipped with some knowledge about how these algorithms operate. Perhaps that's one of the reasons I tend to favor the Birmingham approach over the Frankfurt. It calls for us to build understanding. In other words, we have some agency here. I could have skipped watching the Jawzrsize video in your post and simply taken your word for it. But alas!