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Stuart Ewen interview continued

Ewen: There's no question that the internet is increasingly a territory for consumption. I just talked with someone last week about how all these industries now are studying the pornography industry because pornography is the most successful business on the Internet.

SF!: Yeah, even a "family" company like AOL is making all their money off porn. They censor bad words from their "legit" conferences or whatever and then make all their money off smutty chat rooms... When you discuss things other than PR that have been transforming public life over the course of the twentieth century... well, like you talk about media consolidation, applied psychology, public opinion measurement. All these have contributed to a growing cynicism. How do you see cynicism fitting into that? Do think it contributes to the problem?
Ewen: Yes, cynicism, by whatever name you call it, is about seeing things as they are and assuming that's all they can be. Sometimes that means that you're a cynical manipulator of the stock market and sometimes that means you're somebody who feels powerless.

SF!: So you don't see it as something potentially healthy? Like a protective suspiciousness.
Ewen: I don't think being suspicious in and of itself is healthy. Being suspicious in and of itself drives you insane. Cynicism is an enemy of possibility. It's something I've had to think about a lot because, in teaching, unless you're also talking about the need to imagine other ways and to develop skills to make that imagination realizable, people just get depressed! Part of the reason I'm fairly optimistic is I fight back all the time. You know, it's important to see things as they are but it's also important to imagine things as they might be. And cynicism discourages that.

SF!: When I first started critiquing advertising, I hadn't learned how to really determined for myself what was right and wrong about advertising. It's sort of stupid to be like "advertising is bad," so I'd say "image advertising is bad." Do you think it's somehow better or more responsible to discuss shoes in an ad about shoes rather than, I dunno, "liberation."
Ewen: So you mean like talk about how shoes are made, that they fit on feet?

SF!: Yeah, I equate image advertising with stealth advertising. Ewen: Well, that's mainly what advertising is. The problem with the idea of a completely functional advertising is that no one uses products to be completely functional. I mean, who buys perfume to alter their smell?

SF!: Yeah, but wouldn't it be cool if it were like that? Then products wouldn't be so, uh, magical...
Ewen: The biggest issue for me in the magicification of products is that there's all this magic in the message and no magic in the reality. The statues that the Mayan Indians made to celebrate the moon goddess had magic to them, but they were also really grounded in people's experiences. We live in a culture where people's imaginations are being colonized all the time and that's what's going on in the ads. The problem with the ads for blue jeans is not that there's sex in them--sex is great--it's just that the blue jeans will not deliver in the way that they promise. And virtually everything is being eroticized by the advertising industry. But I'd like to assume that in an emancipatory culture, there'd still be a concept of magic. How about you?

SF!: Sure, but that puts it back on the reader to say "oh, these jeans aren't going to get me laid" or whatever. It requires everyone being literate... and I don't see how you'd even begin to go about teaching people to think critically about images if emotional appeals are more persuasive than rational ones.
Ewen: Well, one of the reasons they are more persuasive and more effective is there's nothing about our education that has ever taught us to look at this stuff critically. I don't view the power of images as something that's automatic. Images are images, an enormously wonderful way of communicating. Part of the reason it's so powerful is that our education system is so locked into a concept of literacy that was born in the nineteenth century. Learning how to read, write, and calculate numbers was extremely important is in the nineteenth century because those were the tools of power. We live in a society where added to those things is the ability to speak in a variety of other ways. Yet the educational system, in this country at least, is only at the most primitive level of starting to address media literacy. And most of what gets thought of as media literacy is totally wrong-headed.

SF!: How do you mean?
Ewen: It's taught by people who hate images and fear images, and therefore the concept of literacy is to inoculate kids against images. It's like teaching people to read just so that they'll be able to figure out the lies in the books they're reading. Now when you say it's hard to imagine what a new form of media literacy would be, I agree with you. We're at step one. My last book, All Consuming Images, is about looking at images as a social language. So I've been wrestling with it, but the reality is that the dictionary hasn't been written yet. A lot of the tools that have been developed, like semiotics and so, on are total bullshit. People learn how to speak those languages and don't learn how to look. If you read a lot of the garbage that's been written in the form of cultural analysis, it's very erudite and it says absolutely nothing.

SF!: If the answer is media literacy, though, aren't we sort of screwed? Consuming and desiring aren't rational actions. And a lot of people don't decide things rationally. My dad is a huge Rush Limbaugh fan and when you try to argue with him about the facts, he'll listen, but nothing changes his belief that "Rush is right." I gave him FAIR's Rush book for Xmas last year, which goes through Rush's arguments point by point and refutes them but all he'd say was it was boring. My mom's the same way. They often don't argue rationally.
Ewen: Well, I'm not saying media literacy is the sole answer. But I'm not so quick to discourage people's capability of reason. If people can't make critical sense of the world then we might as well give up. Unless our job then becomes one of finding more humane ways of manipulation, which I'm not in favor of.

SF!: What about taxing advertising? Don't you say something about that at the end of your book?
Ewen: I don't talk about a tax on advertising, I talk about charging rent on use of the public sphere. One of the reasons commercial forces have so much influence is they get the broadcast spectrum. Those properties are extremely valuable; they provide an instant pipeline into everybody's home. And it's important for the public to start demanding rent on that. Then that rent can then go to support media which are noncommercial or educational... You can charges taxes for anything and part of what they're used for has a lot to do with the public demand. Unless we try to insure we have an informed and active public, then you can charge rents on the public sphere until the cows come home and they'll be used to buy garbage.

But another thing I want to point out about media literacy: being literate is not just being a critical reader, it's also taking the tools and using them, contributing to what's out there. If kids were encouraged to make media and communicate ideas from day one, the variety of stuff out there would explode, and people's concept of media would be less about "the media, they do this to me" and would be more participatory.

SF!: There's the strategy of sorta fighting fire with fire, like Adbusters.
Ewen: Adbusters has a good spirit but there's a kinda puritanism about them that bothers me.

SF!: What, like the antitobacco and the antidrinking?
Ewen: Not just that, they almost seem antipleasure.

SF!: I can see that. It seems like the left has a disdain for images and symbols. You write a lot about FDR in PR!; do you think there have been other great PR people on the left since then?
Ewen: Abbie Hoffman. Jean Kilbourne . . . It's out there but what you're asking is right. There is this tendency on the left to be stodgy. There have been moments of visual radicalism, whether you're talking about surrealism or dadaism or constructivism, but there's no question that there's also an extremely conservative tendency, which is why The Nation magazine, even after its makeover, is still pretty boring. Before its makeover, not only did it avoid using anything visual because they didn't want to pander, but they wouldn't even begin each issue with page one. Your issues start with page 224. I mean, what's that about?

SF!: The left is more critical of each other, too.
Ewen: Do you think of yourself as on the left?

SF!: Yeah, I do.
Ewen: Yeah, well, insofar as it's a continuum like "do you believe all people have a right to live" or "do you believe only you have a right to live"? The common good vs. the individual good. The reality is that you need both. If everyone's need is to completely accommodate to each other, you create fascism or Soviet communism. Certainly that brand of leftism never produced a culture that was particularly attractive to people. Soviet propaganda was nowhere near as successful as capitalist propaganda in the twentieth century. One of the damages done by Frankfurt-school politics was creating this elitism about popular culture which meant there was a distrust of the image. Not only did they cleave onto the word but they cleaved onto the word that was incomprehensible. That's the irony of the history of the left. Supposedly it's the politics to speak to all people and yet it has adopted forms which speak to almost no one.

SF!: People often think of PR as value neutral; it's "showing your best side." And more and more even public interest organizations and charities use it. This issue of the zine is actually going to focus on marketing to children and one of the things we're talking about is how this perceived education crisis is driving people to turn to alternatives that are pretty messed up. Everyone's like, "Public education is bad."
Ewen: Well, the very idea that public education is bad is a part of the racism that has infused our society. Public institutions are now almost automatically associated with not just poor people but with people who aren't white. There was a time when the public was a much more inclusive idea, but we're living in a time now where the assumption is that if it has the word public before it, it's bad, it's demeaned, it's for people not like ourselves. It's very destructive because the idea of the public isn't about degradation, it's the idea that society exists for its people.

But, to get back to everyone being in PR, that's a problem because it means that everyone's involved in trying to engineer public perception and the real issue is to move toward a greater public dialogue. You need a public relations which are true relations with the public rather than a PR that is more about creating a mental scenery that will lead people toward this, that, or the other conclusion. And a lot of the "charitable PR" is PR which is using the same techniques, which is making the same assumptions about who and what the public is. And in some ways that's the tragedy of our time, it's a situation where real, meaningful public dialogue is something few people can imagine.

SF!: Maybe it's just me, but it seems like PR is helping create some really ridiculous charities. Like Artists for a Hate-Free America.
Ewen: We've regressed to being a society whose concept of the world is predicated on good and evil. Social conditions are less and less looked at. There was a period of time not long ago where if you looked at violence or you looked at hatred, the assumption was that there were circumstances that led to that and that if you could address those circumstances, you might be able to ameliorate the situation. But that's a concept that requires a commitment to social action. When you abandon those ideas, it becomes more common to look at criminal behavior as behavior of people who are intrinsically evil. Once you move into a world of good and evil, then you start creating social movements on behalf of either good or evil.

SF!: I wanted to ask you too about the Socially Responsible Business movement. How do you view that in relation to the post-WWII movement to equate business with responsibility? Ewen: One way of looking at it is as one more piece of packaging. Another is that there are people in business who say that if all you do is pursue the bottom line, then you're going to create a lot of human wreckage.

SF!: Yeah, but at the same time they'll take issues like the environment or diversity or whatever and promote them by arguing that they benefit the bottom line.
Ewen: Well, that's because the market has become so pervasive. People can't imagine a world that isn't market driven, so that's the only argument that's successful. I mean, this is what's so fucked up about our world: if something isn't profitable, it doesn't deserve to exist. There are certain things which need to exist which may not be profitable. Education, health care, should not be driven by profitability.

As long as communism was around, no matter how bankrupt it was, there was this idea that capitalism wasn't the only system that people could possibly live by. The entire world is now on this railroad toward progress, it's Darwinian, and it's completely driven by market forces. In order to even get a listen, whether you're working in a business or in a school, the main thing people want to hear is what the financial benefits will be. And the funding of education and the de-funding of education encourages people to think that way. So it's not just that people have lost their imagination, but that the very way social resources are being used forces people to conceptualize every goal in the terms of cost-benefit analysis. All I'm saying is there may be people in business who actually have social concerns but now even those social concerns have to be couched in those terms because no one listens otherwise.

SF!: Have you ever noticed how fluffy some business-to-business advertising is? Some of it's more superficial than consumer advertising.
Ewen: The profits are greater. There's more at stake.

SF!: But it seems like business people would be able to cut through the crap more than other readers.
Ewen: There's a great ad of Fonzy riding around in the Popemobile in St. Peter's Cathedral. Is that what you mean by fluff?

SF!: Well, not exactly. What I mean is how magazines like Forbes or Fortune tend to have more advertorial sections, fake editorials. Ewen: Part of the fluff is that everyone needs to be attracted. The thing that's usually being sold in business-to-business advertising is cash. If you put stuff on Nick at Nite, you'll make money. Advertising to consumers is primarily about the spiritual benefits that the purchase will get you. That's the primary distinction, I wouldn't get hung up on the form. Very few ads directed at consumers promise wealth.

SF!: Going back to what you were saying about images versus text. It seems like there's more concern over censoring images and music than text. Like Wal-mart censors music and cover art, but you can't really imagine Barnes & Noble or whoever getting away with that with books now.
Ewen: Patterns of censorship are tied to the media that the censors believe are most dangerous to the status quo they're trying to protect. No one today is worried about kids reading Catcher in the Rye; they're worried about gangsta rap or child pornography or whatever. It has to do with where we're at. The image is the primary currency of our society right now. It's the way you succeed, the way you menace other people.

Also, you're dealing with a population whose first sexual experiences were experiences with images, with pictures, films, etc. The way libidinal energies are stirred initially--that's something that touches people very deeply and therefore that kind of stuff seems really dangerous. Similarly with music: music is something that is perceived as very visceral and it is. It's very bodily . . . you're blushing!

SF!: My face turns red a lot.
Ewen: You're right, those areas which seem to be most watched and censored are those that are visual and auditory. But it's not as if the word has never been censored.

When I was in my early twenties, there was a book published here by a Catholic press designed to introduce children to sexuality. It was filled with artfully produced pictures of children touching themselves, touching each other, little boys with erections, etc. It was considered to be a book you could look at it with your children, it was considered progressive, not sleazy. Today if you had such a book in your house, the karma police would break in. There's so much anxiety about the sexual lives of children that we have these cases of sexual harassment of a five-year-old girl and boy.

It's a repressive environment right now. That goes back to the problem of the advertising culture and that is that the advertising culture is filled with the promise of pleasure and this kind of eroticism, and in just about every other arena of life the taboo has sort of taken over. So where are we?