Watch More! Do Less!

When last I watched something on Hulu, I was treated to an advertisement for Hulu Plus, which almost seemed like a thematic sequel to the commercial with Will Arnett that ran during the Super Bowl. I didn’t mention that one in my post reviewing the Super Bowl ads, but I remember now just how puzzled I was by the message that it presented. Arnett played a space alien who presented himself as a member of a vast conspiracy among people in entertainment and broadcasting, observing with malicious glee all of the people around him who remained glued to television programs on their mobile devices while they sat in cafes or just walked down the street.

Obviously, the ad was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but to simply watch it, it’s hard to see any acknowledgement of the joke. I would expect that an absurdist portrayal of the would-be criticisms of a brand would show the salutary kernel of truth under the surface, but I don’t see that in the Will Arnett Super Bowl ad. Instead, it presents the criticisms of television viewing habits in an over-the-top way, but it also presents those actual habits in an over-the-top and markedly negative way. Arnett explains the evil plot that is modern television, and everyone around him sits in utter obliviousness, staring obsessively, vacantly into their screens. There is no point of contrast; there’s nothing that encourages viewers to both laugh at the absurdity and recognize the appeal of the product.

With the new commercial that I’ve seen run on Hulu itself, the company seems to have stripped the joke out of the equation altogether, leaving only a negative portrayal of their own product. I’m not sure what’s going on here. Either Hulu is engaged in some bizarre campaign of parodying itself, or my values are so hugely out of step with those of much of the culture that these advertisers see certain images as edifying while I see instead as disturbing.

That dichotomy is seen in the images of the new commercial alone, but it’s really driven home by Hulu Plus’ latest tagline: “Make the most of everything.” The ad shows a man on what I presume to be a Stair Master at a gym. I can only guess at the machine he’s using, because we don’t see it. The shot remains tight on this face and upper body, perhaps deliberately restricting our visual awareness of the fact that he is even doing anything. The man holds the handle of the machine with one hand while holding a mobile device in front of his face with the other. And as the camera lingers on the image of his distracted, staring expression, the voiceover says, “Make the most of your workout.”

How? I assume he means by doing the exact opposite of what this man is doing, seeing as he doesn’t appear to be aware of the fact that he’s working out at all. Now, I’m no fitness expert, but I’m pretty sure that if you don’t feel anything and you don’t have to concentrate on your exercise in any measure, you’re doing something wrong. The visual presentation really doesn’t give me the impression that he’s making the most out of his workout by adding television to it. It gives me the impression that he’s not getting much out of either activity.

“Make the most out of your lunch break,” the voiceover says next, at the same time that the scene changes to an image of a woman in business attire sitting on a bench outside and staring at an iPad on which she is watching an episode of Lost. The expression on the actresses face is marvelously discomforting, and it can’t be unintentional on the part of the advertisers. I wonder what the director said to her. Perhaps, “Try to look as if you’ve just dropped acid and you’re watching a dragon tenderly make love to a unicorn on a bed of rainbows.” They even have her raise a fast food beverage cup into frame and clumsily place the straw in her mouth without so much as moving her eyes. It’s an exceptionally unsophisticated image.

Nobody should look as rapturously mindless while watching television as Hulu has the subjects of its ads look. This is doubly true if the person is outside at the time. With the professional woman as with the man at the gym, the camera stays pretty close, but by all appearances it is a nice day outside. And yet Hulu’s concept of making the most of a lunch break on that day is to focus completely on an escapist fantasy and to never, ever glance for a moment at the sun. There’s no joke behind this as with the alien conspiracy ad; they’re actually saying that.

When I started to notice the popularity of watching television on DVD, I thought that there was something very positive about the changes to the way we consume media. At the same time that I miss the unifying experience of knowing that the rest of the country is watching the same thing at the same time, I considered it a worthy trade off, knowing that programs themselves were coming to be seen more as things to be sold directly, rather than just as means of delivering advertisements, and thus as things to be controlled by them. I liked the idea that Mad Men could make money because it was appreciated by its audience, and not just because it sold products. I realize, though, that that idea isn’t entirely accurate; the advertising is still primary, and it still affects the progress and direction of shows.

Now, not only does secondary advertising still hold sway over good media, the idea of entertainment as a product unto itself has proven to have a dark side. With companies now profiting not just from the consumption of their media but from the consumption of media in general, there are advertisers whose jobs have come to be to sell us on the very idea of watching television and movies, and to try to convince us that it’s better for us if we consume more, even as much as possible.

It’s only natural that a company tries to present its product as eminently beneficial to the consumer, especially in contrast to its competitors. It’s just less familiar, and quite unfortunate that in the cases of products like Hulu Plus, the major competitor is the entire outside world. Consequently the vision of such products’ ultimate benefit to your life is a situation in which you no longer have a life at all. “Make the most of everything” is a powerfully, and dangerously disingenuous slogan. With the haunting images of media addiction presented by such products as Hulu Plus and Digital Copy, about which I’ve written before, a far more fitting tagline would be, “You may as well not leave the couch.”

Poverty in Politics - Either Used or Forgotten

I originally wrote this piece to be posted elsewhere, so the comments and events it refers to are a week or so old now. I still thought it worthwhile to post it here.

I think it’s honest of me to identify myself as coming solidly from the left with all of my political writing. But I certainly don’t make a conscious effort to fit myself into a particular camp, so even while I acknowledge my liberal tendencies, I won’t hesitate to begin an editorial with my own criticisms of fellow liberals or the Democratic Party. One party obviously contradicts my ideals more often than the other, but I have no love for political parties in general. And there is plenty of common ground on which I think both Democrats and Republicans routinely fail to serve the country’s interests.

It’s cheap politics for the DNC to utilize Mitt Romney’s remark that he’s “not concerned about the very poor” and to make a campaign ad out of it. In that ad, the quotation is very conspicuously cut off, and anyone who views such things objectively ought to immediately recognize that it both mischaracterizes Romney’s remarks and allows the Democratic Party to dodge the need to present a clear distinction between their policies and his. Taken out of context, Mitt Romney’s comment sure does portray him as callously out of touch. And indeed, I believe he is just that. But he didn’t say what he’s being accused of saying.

What Mitt Romney really said was, “I’m not concerned about the very poor; we have a safety net there, and if it needs repair, I’ll fix it.” That’s quite different from simply declaring that you don’t care one bit about a particular segment of the population. Romney’s not saying that society has no responsibility for the poor; he’s saying that we already do enough for them. I don’t think one needs to twist that argument in order to criticize it. It would be cartoonishly villainous for a presidential candidate to say, “I don’t care if the poor starve to death,” but it’s not exactly saintly to say, “as long as the poor don’t starve to death, I’m satisfied.” It worries me that the Democratic Party feels the need to mischaracterize Romney’s remarks so they sound like the former statement, because that implies that they don’t see the latter as being sufficiently divergent from their more liberal views.

It says something about the alienation of liberalism in modern American society that commentators like Rush Limbaugh unabashedly deride Romney for defending the very existence of the social safety net while Democrats merely pretend that he doesn’t defend it and make that the focus of their criticism. If liberalism were genuinely at home in American politics, somebody would be quoting Romney’s words exactly as he said them and using them to express indignation at the idea that the poor are sufficiently taken care of. Not only is no prominent politician or commentator saying that in this case, no one ever says it.

After his misleadingly shocking sound bite, Romney went on to say, “We will hear from the Democrat Party: ‘the plight of the poor.’” But will we? Honestly, I can’t think of any Democrat who has reliably expressed lofty ideals about ending the epidemic of homelessness or providing assistance to the poor that goes beyond food stamps and unemployment insurance and that attacks the actual system that keeps people poor, by providing public works employment, for instance.

“You can choose where to focus,” Romney said, ostensibly differentiating his campaign from that of Democrats and other Republicans. “You can focus on the rich – that’s not my focus. You can focus on the very poor – that’s not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans.” I don’t believe him when he says that his focus isn’t on the rich, but that aside, I find that everyone in politics today pronounces their focus to be entirely on the middle class. And that’s easy to understand, since not many votes are found on either extreme of the income scale. In fact, given how broad and flexible different people’s conceptions are of “middle-income,” that’s where all of the votes are. Frequently, Americans, whether sitting comfortably within the top five percent of income earners or walking the poverty line like a tightrope, view themselves as middle class. So when a politician talks about defending middle class Americans or putting his political focus on their interests, citizens will tend to think that he’s talking about them. And there’s little doubt that politicians know this.

President Obama’s comments at the National Prayer Breakfast regarding the Christian obligation to help the poor were striking precisely because they are so anomalous in mainstream politics. The sentiment seemed earnest and was well-placed at the event, but the fact that the DNC ad was released on the same day compels me to view it with a great deal of cynicism. The ad is a transparent attempt to score points by leaping on an easy way of portraying the Democratic Party, fairly or unfairly, as having more compassion for the poor than their opponents. I can only hope that the prayer breakfast speech was genuine, and not a more subtle example of the same – a quick response to Romney’s ostensible gaffe the day before.

If it was intended as a response, that illustrates the very problem with political treatments of the issue of poverty and economic disparity. The best that the Democratic Party can do most of the time is wait for a Republican to say something objectionable, and then issue a response that says, “We’re not like that; we care about everybody.” I’d be far more convinced if they took the lead, if they actually demonstrated their commitment to solving society’s ills from the bottom up, rather than from the middle out. As it is, the commitment to helping the poor is only something that is claimed, and rarely something that decides policy.

The DNC ad was framed entirely as part of a negative campaign. It cites nothing that Democrats have done or plan to do in order to eradicate poverty, homelessness, or hunger. It points out the initiatives that Romney would likely undertake that would hurt the poor, and it is right to do so, but a preponderance of negative campaigns risks miring us in negative government, wherein the avoidance of harm is considered a good unto itself. I trust the Democratic Party to avoid willingly making life worse for the nation’s poorest citizens, but I do not trust them to undertake truly original initiatives to mend what is broken within American society.

So long as I have reason to believe that the choice in American politics is between the party that doesn’t care about the poor and the party that cares about them only enough to make themselves look good, I won’t be much inclined to take empty pronouncements on the topic seriously, not matter which side they come from.

Super Bowl Ads

Last night’s Super Bowl provided a nice opportunity for me to visit with family and watch the game, but I must admit that the better share of my motivation was to watch the commercials and keep a critical eye upon them. Despite that, when I made my way to my father’s house, I forgot to take along my notebook, so any comments that I have to make will have to be by memory. I suppose that’s appropriate, considering the intended roles of advertising. Also, I like to assess both the good and the bad, so I think I’ll pair my reflections so that I give one bit of praise and one bit of criticism on the same topic.

The Cola Wars

Pepsi was one of the first companies to run an ad once the game had started, and its style was eminently recognizable from previous years. There seems to be no plan behind high-profile Pepsi advertisements other than to pour money into acquiring odd collections of whatever celebrity guest stars they can get to sign a contract, and then piling them on top of one another in some display of spectacle without substance, in hopes that every member of the audience will see somebody they recognize well enough to stare at for up to sixty seconds.

I wondered aloud on seeing last night’s Elton John-centered absurdity, is this strategy really working for them? I guess either Pepsi has to reach a breaking point in its patience with its advertising agency, or I’ve got to reach a breaking point in my expectations of the television audience. It would be sad to think that the modern consumer brain runs on nothing but facial-recognition. I think they’re still capable of reflecting, thinking rationally, and grasping themes.

Of course, on that latter point, I suppose Pepsi’s advertisers are in agreement, as they did try to build some reference to the Zeitgeist into the bizarre scene that they crafted for their commercial. It concludes (at least prior to Flavor Flav putting his uniquely discomforting punctuation mark on it) with Melanie Amaro refusing King Elton John’s begrudging offer of “Pepsi for you,” and insisting instead, “Pepsi for all.”

It is arguably clever to try to tap into far-reaching frustrations over upper-class greed, but hinting at a socio-economic revolution doesn’t really seem to serve any purpose in a Pepsi commercial. It’s not as though Pepsi can somehow be viewed as a commodity that is cruelly withheld from the poor. It’s just a carbonated soft drink, and it’s already familiar to all of us, rich and poor – poor especially. Adding the class conflict dimension to a Pepsi commercial just adds another level to the acid nightmare that makes up their advertising.

On the other hand, Coca-Cola advertisements have been genuinely satisfying for years. This year in particular, their Super Bowl spots clearly aimed for continuity while Pepsi continued to deliberately eschew just that. Rather than focusing their expenditures on celebrity endorsements, Coca-Cola widely spread out two or three million dollars among a few timeslots throughout the event, so as to retain the audience’s attention with a series of installments of the same campaign, as opposed to just grapping the audience’s attention with one swift, bewildering slap in the face.

And Coca-Cola’s continuity curves around a tagline, and thus an overall theme, that is simple and effective: open happiness. That is precisely the sort of concept one should seek to attach to a soft drink. It should conjure the idea of refreshment, or leisure, or camaraderie, or enjoyment. And Coca-Cola makes a plain declaration of enjoyment, and then backs it up by making their Polar Bear commercials thoroughly enjoyable.

Nostalgia

If there’s one unique social trend amongst my generation, it is an unprecedented obsession with nostalgia. Budweiser’s ads utilized this fact delicately and artistically, while Samsung did so in a clumsy way that highlighted the worst aspects of our delight at remembering the past.

Budweiser is an absolute champion among Super Bowl advertisers, and a pair of their commercials this year were quite ambitions in connecting their brand to a long and romanticized past. First, their Clydesdale commercial depicted the end of Prohibition, and thus both allowed a young audience’s imagination to recede into an historical moment and connected that imagery to a larger theme of the end of hard times, which was no doubt expected to resonate with people throughout the country in the midst of this persistently difficult economy. Indeed, the same basic concept was repeated frequently by the American car companies and others.

Later in the game, Budweiser ran another commercial that effectively continued from where the Prohibition spot left off, tracing the presence of their brand throughout the twentieth century in America. It was a distinctly ambitious advertisement, and it theoretically made that impulse towards nostalgia accessible to everyone between the ages of twenty-one and seventy. I don’t know whether it was among the most effective commercials of the game, but it was certainly among the most affective. No one who was paying attention would have failed to find something that they could relate to, either experientially or imaginatively.

Interestingly, Samsung went in quite the opposite direction, which may in fact be appropriate given that their target demographic is certainly young, and comprised mostly of young urban professionals or current students, for whom cutting edge technology is of paramount importance, but for whom nostalgia is as strong a pull as it is for anyone else.

I do not understand why the singer from the band The Darkness appeared in the middle of that commercial. And while I recognize that many people roughly my age probably responded to it, I don’t understand why that would be. The bizarre thing about the increasingly strong nostalgic tendency in American society is that it’s also increasingly close. Thus, Samsung saw fit to make the hook for their ad a rock song that was unreasonably popular for a while seven years ago – not recent enough to be at all fresh, but not old enough to be what you might call a blast from the past.

I’m not saying that it was a poor move; I’m just saying that I can’t comprehend the appeal. I’d rather there hadn’t been such a commercial to remind me of the irrationality of certain young social trends.

Sex Sells

I love the Fiat commercial all the more because I hated it for the first several seconds. As I watched it, I started wondering if there was something wrong with me, given that such male fantasies as it depicted just tend to confuse me. It made for another instance where I had to remind myself to divorce myself from the target audience and recognize that that sort of overblown sexuality does have an influence on many potential consumers. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that what I was watching was just ridiculously over-the-top. Then, lo and behold, the hilarious turn reveals that that was exactly the point. I’m guessing the advertisers read the study from about a year ago that indicated that men’s brains do indeed respond the same way to cars as they do to women. Even if one thinks that comparison is hyperbole, though, Fiat’s utilization of the parallel was hilarious. It may very well have been my favorite commercial of the night, though admittedly the competition was quite slim.

By contrast, the sex-focused ad campaign for Go Daddy wore thin years ago and it just keeps getting more obnoxious, so those were probably my least favorite commercials. If the company thinks that the suggestion of nudity is helping to sell their domain hosting, I think somebody should urge them towards the breaking point of realizing that the reason why their sales figures are good is that they have essentially no competition. The Super Bowl commercial could consist of nothing but fifteen seconds of their web address flashing on the screen and they would probably still get a spike in traffic. Pretending that there’s a naked woman off camera does nothing to sell the service. The men to whom it might appeal can imagine nudity without Go Daddy’s help, and probably already were.

Supernatural

Audi’s vampire party commercial came on early and was so satisfying I was worried I wouldn’t have room for anything else once it concluded. Headlights are an odd feature on which to focus your sales pitch, but it probably is the sort of arcane status symbol that purchasers of high-end car brands would want to be aware of.

The entire structure of the commercial parallels that focus on – if I may call it this without sound pejorative – snobbishness. It grabs the attention of anyone who is aware of current popular culture, and lets them wonder what direction it’s going. I feel as though when vampires are put on screen in front of a diverse audience, one portion of people lean in and hope people start fucking, and the rest of us lean in and hope that people get massacred. It was those of us who are completely annoyed by the modern vampire obsession who were satisfied, in part because it came at the expense of the rest. Right now, someone who feels very good about himself because of both his taste in literature and his taste in consumer goods is seriously considering purchasing an Audi.

On the bad side of usage of the supernatural in Super Bowl commercials, there’s Cars.com. I appreciate the shades of John Carpenter’s The Thing, but really, what the hell were they thinking? “Haunting” is not necessarily a negative label. You can make your message haunt your audience in a good way. This was not an example of that.

I think the above constitute a pretty good cross-sample of last night’s advertisements. I hope this is far more thought than the rest of you put into it. After all, very few of the ads were especially impressive this year, whereas the actual game was terrific. Nevertheless, it is more fun to analyze social trends and consumer manipulation than offensive rushing statistics.

Life, Googled

I saw a television advertisement for Google yesterday. Not for any particular service offered by Google, just for the Google brand as a whole. I find it kind of strange that a powerful company with virtually no competition for its major services would run advertisements in the popular media simply promoting its own name. But I suppose it’s aimed not at encouraging people to use Google, but at encouraging them to use Google for everything. I’m taking the fact that they’ve seen fit to run the ad as a good sign that Google does still have competition and people are not yet flocking to it for all their worldly desires.

Yet the style and content of the ad does give the impression that that’s precisely what they are promoting. It consists of a lengthy montage of web searches, e-mail messages, videos, status updates, and so forth, and clearly the main idea is that every facet of life can be served by a Google application. It’s a familiar style of advertising – one that tries to saturate the viewer with beautiful or inspiring imagery to make them desire a more intimate connection with the world being depicted on the screen. And the consumer is meant to come away from it thinking that the given brand will help them to obtain that closeness.

I have two pieces of commentary to bring to bear on Google’s application of this advertising style. One observation is general to the commercial, and one is specific to a brief part of it that I find objectionable.

My general criticism is that the advertisement as a whole falls flat in its effort to inspire me with a barrage of imagery, drawn from disparate corners of human experience. It’s a type of content that I’ve considered effective elsewhere, for instance in the 2008-9 Discovery Channel “I Love the World” campaign. There’s a straightforward reason why I consider the Google ad to fail where that one succeeded. Google’s montage presents every scene as being two steps removed, rather than just one.

The images included in its montage are fairly familiar, on the whole. They are simply of people talking, or of significant but commonplace daily events like a child’s first bike ride. These things are perfectly accessible without a technological medium, and yet when I see them on the television screen, it is perfectly clear that they are being channeled through something external to both me and the person being depicted. Where the visual is of a Google+ chat session or the like, I find myself looking at a screen upon a screen, and that leaves me quite far from the reality of another person’s life. And where the scene is not affixed to a separate little box, it is a poor quality image, shaking as someone films the event on a handheld video camera.

The Discovery Channel ad was similar in basic intent to the Google ad, in that it was offering a mode of access to other events, experiences, and parts of the world through an intermediary, whether television media or computers. But two things differentiated the Discovery Channel visuals: They were professionally produced and they depicted experiences that were clearly remote and uncommon. Thus, I enjoyed crisp, almost lifelike views of African tribal ceremonies, and skydiving, and undersea exploration, and I got the impression that the Discovery Channel was capable of bringing me closer to things that I could not easily or quickly access on my own.

By contrast, the Google ad reminds me that the use of some of their services might actually put additional barriers between me and the people or circumstances I wish to access. And if what I’m trying to access is just people roughly like me and experiences similar to those that I’ve had, I can step out my front door and gain access to something of the same kind without Google’s help. And personally, I think I would be better off doing so in many cases. As so often happens, I worry that I’m practically alone in that thinking. I worry that most Americans have eschewed any breaking point on this subject, and that they think it’s actually preferable to use a technological middle man for everything they used to do for themselves.

That brings me to my particular gripe with the scenes depicted in the Google ad. At one point it shows someone Googling the phrase, “How to be a better dad.” Have we really come to a point where we think that even that is the sort of question that Google can resolve for us. I know some people think that widespread access to the internet means it’s no longer necessary to memorize any factual information whatsoever. Are we now at the point that retaining ethereal information, standards of personal behavior, and methods of character development are also considered obsolete?

There are some things that you don’t Google. I don’t care how sophisticated their algorithm becomes; no information that can be posted to the web takes the place of experience, practice, and acquired wisdom. Anyone who would Google the phrase “How to be a better dad” has no business being a dad. After all, he seems to be under the shockingly erroneous impression that effective parenthood is easy, and that the problem of child-rearing can be resolved with the click of a mouse, as opposed to, say, rigorous study and earnest commitment.

It troubles me to think that Google is encouraging people to lean on their brand to resolve fundamental human questions for them. Just so that I can beat them to the punch, I would like to recommend against Googling the following phrases, in case their next ad suggests that a web search will provide the answer to any of them:

“How to live my life.”

“How to believe in the one true faith.”

“Why do bad things happen to good people?”

“Should I commit suicide?”

“Do I have a soul?”

“What is justice, Polemarchus?”

If at any time you have Googled one or more of these phrases, go outside and talk to somebody.

Kindle Ads

While I was at my mother’s home on Thanksgiving, I caught a new Kindle advertisement on television. In previous weeks, I’d seen the other installments in the same campaign, where a man holding a Kindle passive-aggressively debates its merit over paper books with a woman whom we are evidently supposed to think is stuck in the dark ages because she still reads things that take up physical space. Each commercial ended with the woman tacitly acknowledging that the Kindle owner was right to ridicule her, even though I as a viewer never found his explanation of the equivalence between books and e-books to be persuasive.

In the latest entry into the campaign, the dinosaur lady has evidently accepted the superiority of e-book readers completely, and she now appears as a fellow Kindle owner, sloughing off the last of her reluctance to the change. I am guessing that this development means that the advertisers are confident that e-book readers have handily won the competition, and that no further convincing is necessary. Perhaps they’re right; perhaps people like me will never be convinced, but everyone else has already gone over. It doesn’t quite seem fair, though. It’s not as though a coalition of print publishers and booksellers have been running ads in favor of the other side.

I earnestly wish that there was such creative competition going on. Whenever I saw those advertisements, I was fascinated by how ineffective they were for me personally, and it repeatedly occurred to me that the difference between an argument for and against physical books is just a matter of different interpretations of the same information. For instance, one of the Kindle commercials began with the Kindle owner commenting on the size of the shoulder bad that the woman was carrying. Beaming, she explained how many books and magazines it was capable of holding. When the man responds by pointing out that his Kindle holds 3,500 books and only weighs eight and a half ounces, we see the physical equivalent of that much literature piling up in the space around them.

I recall thinking when I originally saw that ad, “wait, are we supposed to take it for granted that having that much literature in one device is preferable to having it in the form of books?” From my perspective, the ad was presenting two distinct alternatives and essentially inviting me to choose the one that the advertisers are competing against. Given the choice between an eight and a half ounce piece of plastic and circuitry, and a personal library in my home lined with 3,500 individual volumes, there’s absolutely no contest. I would much rather have an array of books that I can keep on display, take down off a shelf when I need them, lend out to curious friends, and generally appreciate. That seems like the obvious choice to me, but I’m sure that there are a great many consumers who don’t think that much about it, and do accept the assumptions of advertisers. So I really wish I had the means to run advertisements disseminating the opposite angle on the same scene.

Another thing to consider is why holding 3,500 books in one place is considered an advantage for the consumer. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t read nearly as much as I would like to or should, but are other people typically plowing through 3,500 books in a year? If not, why the hell would they need to carry that many with them on a daily basis? Again, if one owns that much literature, it seems to me that it’s far better off in a personal library. The only reason I can see why a person would own thousands of books, unless he was an antiquarian, is because he has been collecting them over the course of a lifetime. And of course people do just that with their paper books. But how many people hold onto and use the same piece of technology for decades? What, then, is the point of trapping decades’ worth of books in a single electronic device? Considerations like this leave me with the impression that if anyone is impressed with the fact that a Kindle holds 3,500 books, it’s purely because it’s a big number, not because of any practical advantage of that feature. Unfortunately, it would probably take a snappy television ad to make that fact known.

Another of the Kindle ads consists of the man smugly showing the woman that a Kindle can be read just like a real book, being unaffected by glare from the sun, and saving one’s place in the text just as well as one would save her place in a book by folding down the page. She feebly protests that he doesn’t get “the rewarding feeling of actually folding down the page,” then demonstrates, realizes that’s a ridiculous advantage for books, as asks to see the Kindle. This one strikes me as straightforwardly disingenuous. The woman starts by saying that she only reads real books, and the man casually responds that he is reading a real book. At that point I wish I could chime in and tell him, “shut up, douchebag, you know what she meant.”

I don’t think anybody who maintains a preference for physical, paper books does so on the basis of some misconception that you can’t read the words on a Kindle screen, or that you have to go to night school in order to navigate one. But there is a distinct, obvious difference between reading a physical book and reading an e-book. There really isn’t any argument to be made against that. Each individual is free to decide which one they experientially prefer, but to say that they’re the same and that technological convenience is therefore the only consideration is just demonstrably false.

I don’t dog-ear the pages of my books. In fact, I like to try to keep them in as pristine condition as possible. So I don’t get any rewarding feeling from actually folding down the page of a paper book. But I do like the fact that books are capable of acquiring personal character in that way. Again, there’s a place for a contrary advertisement here, emphasizing that there is an advantage to being able to manipulate and even manhandle your physical books. Every dog-eared page might remind a person of a time and place, or mark off personally meaningful passages so that they are more easily accessible than they ever could be while lost in the binary code of countless other passages in three thousand other books on an e-book reader.

And indeed, real books will take much more abuse than mere folded-down pages. If there was a market for advertisements promoting the simple practice of reading physical books, I would like to design one that depicts a single book being dropped and an entire library shelf shattering. The scene would ask the audience if such a thing has ever happened to them, and remind them that if they store all of their books on one sensitive piece of technology, it just might.

But unfortunately, there’s no one to present an alternative ad campaign, no unified front against the advance of unnecessary technological replacements. The fact that the Kindle has been selling itself by striving to undercut not its competitor e-book readers, but the actual concept of physical books strikes me as fairly unprecedented. It is as if internet service providers had run ads championing the obsolescence of television, or television manufacturers had produced commercials prompting people to throw out their radios once and for all. But if either of those things had happened, one would assume that television networks or radio broadcasters would push back against it.

Presumably, in the case of books, large publishers and distributers would stand to profit more from the sales of electronic downloads, given low overhead. Barnes and Noble seems to have no interest in safeguarding the future of its physical stores, seeing as every time I go into one, I am confronted with a kiosk promoting their own e-book reader just inside the door. It almost seems to implore people to walk in, avoid the bookshelves altogether, walk out, and do all their future shopping from home.

Meanwhile, small print publishers and local bookshops have no resources with which to try to change the public perception of the divide between e-books and print books. I think that if there was not such an imbalance of resources, people could be swayed in either direction. It may be selfish of me, but I lament the fact that media pressure pushes people in favor of the high-tech alternative, as I know that if the trend moves quickly enough in that direction, it will eventually mean the virtual extinction of print publishing, and with it the beauty of constantly evolving personal and public libraries, and an entire category of human experience. I can’t accept that future.

As it stands, there’s no relying on commercial media to counteract dominant trends, so I have to merely hope for enough people to reach breaking points in their experience of the negative aspects of e-readers or in their understanding of the irrelevance of their ostensible advantages, so that this relentless advertising, which targets physical media and unique identity as competitors, loses some of its power.