Sections offered Spring 2021:
#8095 |
CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON |
TR 4:55-6:10pm |
WEB |
CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
Above class meets 100% Online through Synchronous instruction. For more information visit https://fall2020.iu.edu/learning-modes/
Those who watch the Super Bowl may have a range of motivations for joining television’s largest audience of the year, but each of us probably knows at least one person who watches for the commercials. Advertisers certainly believe viewers value the commercials; in 2020 they spent nearly $6 million for a 30-second spot. You may admire the spirit of competition inherent in the game or the choreography of the half-time show, but the networks see the Super Bowl as a veritable license to print money. The Super Bowl is clearly more than just a marketing scheme, but the bottom line is that the television networks use football’s biggest game to capture our attention and then to sell that attention to advertisers, who target us with messages addressing us, first and foremost, as consumers. This business model – harvesting human attention through the media and reselling it to advertisers – serves as the economic foundation of all commercial media, from the tabloid newspapers of the nineteenth century to the social media platforms of the twenty-first, from The New York Sun in 1833 to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube today.
This marriage of culture and economics – using cultural experiences to capture and then sell human attention to advertisers – reached its full potential as early as the 1920s, when radio stations began offering content to listeners at no apparent cost to those listening in. Afterwards, each new medium would attain its commercial viability through the resale of what attention it could capture in exchange for its “free” content. This business model has become more deeply woven into our lives with the explosion of digital media and the internet in the 21st century, when most of us carry a smartphone that constantly find ways to commercialize the smallest particles of our time and attention
Although Facebook, Instagram and other social media are technically free for users to enjoy, these social media have adopted the same economic model as the mass media before them: they encourage us to give them our time and attention so that we might be sold to advertisers. In fact, critics of social media like to remind users that virtually nothing on the internet is actually free. If you don’t pay for a product, then you are the product. Given the almost indispensable role of social media in the everyday lives of billions of people, it is virtually impossible in the 21st century to imagine how one might live a life beyond the reach of commercial culture. Corporations make cultural participation widely accessible, but this also means that market values shape cultural values in ways that are clearly worth examining more closely.