Monday, July 20, 2009

Behaviors of the Consumed


Eats. Muriel really eats. She devours tons and tons of food before anyone even realizes this inhumane behavior of hers. Behavior of the primitive, the paranoid, the obese. And then she lets go of her attire. Which is of course, a part of her act, and she smiles in glee and the audience applauds. The curtain falls.

Muriel is a stage performer. She has just performed the role of a bloating female Ogre. During the encore, she is applauded for her witty acts of eating half burnt rodent meat at incredible speed. She is 32, and weighs over 70 kilograms. They generally pay her a lot of money for her acting skills.

Regardless of who we are via Genesis, the acts and strange things which we do define us more than our Surnames. You can call it a Semiotic Perspective, the likes which would make our existence obsolete without associating ourselves with things we eat, things we drive or things we spray around. There would be a time soon when we would have Brand names instead of Surnames, which would justify our states better.

In a world full of advice, people gasp for breath against this huge tsunami of Advertisements falling every hour on our small heads. Buy this, don’t buy this, throw this, don’t throw this, each and every message coming through our senses turn out to be advices and advices. The human character is no more. We are driven everyday by someone else, or something else. I am not being cynical about this, because whatever said and done, it is all cumulating up as fun inside of us. But to think of this fact that every decision we make has so many propellers behind it, some being thrust on by people we don’t even know or care. Advertisements rule the world, Marketing has overtaken freewill.

Consumers are shoved into this Perceptive Reality called satisfaction through consumption. Each and every consumer thinks he is independent and powerful enough and is leading his life like an emperor. But the fact of the matter is that for every satisfaction we thrive for, is not inherent. It is all planted and set up by repetitive exposure of advices and temptations. Which are in turn engineered by Companies for fooling the consumers into thinking that he needs this stuff so bad that he must buy it.

The instance of Muriel as an actor shows the essence of a script, which leads a normal human being to become a voracious ugly creature, just at the instruction of the writer and director. Applying the same framework to the real life outside the stage, it’s the same jaded picture. The Advertisements and the constant AIDA algorithm replace the Direction and Script, and the everyday consumer replaces the actor.

There might be millions of counter-arguments to this post, but on careful assessment, once can evaluate every action of every individual to be inspired or instigated by something or someone. Advertisements and Marketing communication act as the instigator more than the inspirer, since there are a lot of things which a man may discard away from his everyday life, and not suffer consequences (watching a movie, for instance) at all. But the force of persuasion bestowed by the Advertising Virus has eaten it all. Eaten the independent human decision. Eaten more than what Ogre Muriel has ever eaten in her entire life. All of it...

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