Part 14 (1/2)

Along with the sense of permanency, humans lose a sense of the exceptional as this applies to their products and the way they constitute theh their work

Literacy and the transient

When a product is offered with a lifetioes bankrupt within months fro to ethics, misrepresentation, and advertisement are usually asked Such incidents, to which no one is immune, cannot be discarded since the experience of market transactions is an experience in human values, no matter how relative these are Honesty, respect for truth, respect for the given word, written or not, belong to the civilization of literacy and are expressed in its books The civilization of illiteracy renders these and all other books senseless But it would be wrong to suggest thatand that, instead of confirnificance Markets do sorate expectations into their own mechanisms In short, they have to live up to expectations not because these ritten down, but because markets would otherwise not succeed How this takes place is a longer story, starting with the exaiven: What happens to a lifetioes bankrupt?

The prage through the use of the powerful rowth The means of production facilitated in this framework are endoith qualities, physical, first of all, that guarantee permanency The industrial model is an extension of the model of creation deeply rooted in literacy-do They, as well as the products they turned out, lasted eneration of people who use the in the complex circumstances that made the Industrial Revolution possible, literacy was sti, as or oil la other activities Books were printed faster and more cheaply because paper was produced faster and er engines More time was available for study because industrial society discovered that a qualified workforce was more productive once ainst the background of an obsession with permanency reflected also in the structure of the ricultural products, subject to weather and tin tool here since transactions becaeneous, and the institution of credit more powerful due to the disparity between production and consumption cycles The scale of the industrial market corresponded to the scale of industrial economy Industrial markets are optimally served by the sequential nature of literacy and the linearity inherent in its structure Production cycles are long, and one cycle follows the other, like seasons, like letters in a word

Remember when new model autoe manufacturer embodied permanence and so did its product In this framework, a lifetime warranty reflects a product's pro this perforer the case in the civilization of illiteracy

Fron of the product, to theis meant to last beyond a cycle of optimal efficiency It is not a moral decision, neither is it a devious plan Different expectations are embodied in our products Their life cycle reflects the dyna to the new scale of human self-constitution, and the obsession with efficiency Products become transient because the cycles of relative uniformity of our self-constitution are shorter

We know that life expectancy has increased, and it may well be that people past the peak of their productive capability will soon represent the majority of the population Nonetheless, the increased level of productivity facilitated by er life e (which translates into other changes, such as in education and training, faeneous life becomes a succession of shorter periods, some only loosely connected In comparison to centuries of slow, incree testifies to a new human condition

Where once literacy was necessary to coordinate the variety of contributions from many people-who projected as much permanency in their products, even if the individuals were -new forration are now in place The corresponding pragmatics is characterized by intension and distribution, and the products capture the projected sense of change that dominates all human experiences Thus conditions were created for enious artifacts is promised, because the lifetime meant is as short as the cycle of the entire line The fact that thesince the structural characteristics of the obsession with efficiency results in(or as short) as the need for their product, or as long as the functional characteristics of the product satisfy rated in h rated in the product, it is clear why, together with the exhausted lifetime warranty, we throay not only manufactured items, but also the literacy (and literacies) embodied in thematics that transforan

Market, advertisement, literacy

First, the indictment: ”If I were asked to nale greatest source of its waning ” These words belong to a commentator of the ill-reputed supply side econoned by ia: ”The historians and archaeologists will one day discover that ads of our times are the richest and most faithful daily reflections that any society ever e of activities” McLuhan's words, as fa The issue is not to take sides Whether adnored or enjoyed, advertisement occupies an inordinately ih the history of advertisement, it becomes obvious that the scale of this activity, which is indeed part of the ed radically

It used to be true that only 50 to 60 percent of the investher sales or brand recognition

Today, the 50 to 60 percent has shrunk to less than 2 percent

But of the 2 percent that i the entire expense of advertisement Such levels of efficiency-and waste, one should add, in full awareness that the notion is relative-are possible only in the civilization of illiteracy The figures (subject to controversy and multiple interpretation) point to efficiency as much as to the various aspects of the market Our concern with advertisement is not only with how literate (or illiterate) advertisement is, but also with how appropriate literacy ical, ethical, and rational (or irrational) aspects of h the centuries is significant to the role of literacy in society and in the world of ns outside a business reflect the literacy levels of an age of small-scale market transactions The advertise of the 20th century exemplify the levels of literacy and the efficiency expected fro in the context and scale of that tie and address reason azine and newspaper, advertisers relied on the power of verbal persuasion Honesty or value was not the issue here, only its appearance The word committed to paper, black on white, had to be simple and true

In Europe, advertisement took a different style at this tied n their ads Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, El Lissitzky, and Herbert Bayer are ahly literate but more artistically inclined Europeans of the time, such ads for upscale products and events weretheir cue froe advertising after World War II, and graphic design took off in the USA With the advent of more powerful visualization y to support its effectiveness, the ie can be interpreted, its efficiency in advertising was confirures

In the rare cases when literacy is used today, it is usually for its visual impact In an attempt to relate to the qualities of the black-on-white advertisement of earlier times, Mobil started a series of ads in the mid-1980's To those not se to the reader's reason Literacy rediviva! To people attuned to semiotics, the ad was a powerful visual device The simple tombstone style evoked relations between literacy and values such as simplicity, honesty, the permanence of the idea, the doer than the literacy element, used as an alibi in these ads

Indeed, the people who hand out the Clio awards for advertising were so taken in as to award Mobil a first prize for these ads

Markets are far fro simple causal phenomena A market's easy switch from a well structured, rational interpretation and ethical conduit, to irrationality and misrepresentation is revealed in the new forms markets take, as well as in their new techniques for transactions and the associated advertisement The term irrationality describes a contradiction of co the the 1980's, this occurred in the oil market, the art market, the market for adoptable children, and in new stock s

The literate discourse of theories or of an advertiseest explanations

There are schools of a, the phases of theadvice, trying to render understandable econoe-like explanations and advice are part of advertising, part ofmany captive to it But even the most literate participant cannot stop the process since the literacy involved in what some perceive as an aberration is different from the literacy embodied in the product traded or in its advertisement

Irrational elements are present in the market, as in life, at all tie of the market reflects hysteria (as on Black Monday in 1987 on the New York Stock Exchange) or si of the intimate sphere of our lives, but ad ourselves in the space and ti power that thehow close the relation between the two aspects is Literacy was once a protective medium and entailed rules of discretion and decency Illiteracy makes us fear; it allows us to become more efficient, but at the same time we become subject to intrusion by all thepurchases on-line will not hesitate to write down their personal data and credit card nu in a sense of privacy that is part of the code of literate behavior Of all people, the computer-literate should realize the power of the Net for searching, retrieving, and sorting such inforinable

In the civilization of illiteracy, advertiserative device that addresses a non-differentiated market but a device that addresses powerful distinctions that can capture sroups, even the individual ”Tell me what you want to buy or sell and I'll tell you who you are,” is a concise way of declaring how market semiosis X-rays its participants

The enor efforts associated with a new brand of cereal, software, a political can, a role in a movie, or a sports event result in advertisee in itself, with its own vocabulary and grae so fast ”Tellshots of all of us are taken continuously, by extreital devices, while the o Products now buy us

Advertising in the civilization of illiteracy is no longer com activity, bizarre at times, extremely innovative in the ability to cross reference infore to the individual Automatic analysis of data is coht of words in order to fit the addressee In the reality of theto art, education, ideology, sexuality, are integrated at a high level of sophistication in the infinite series ofis e of e are One can risk stating that brokers of information about each of us will probably fare best in thispartial literacies