The internet runs on ads.
Ad companies pay for all the “free” popular social media we use. Ad companies dictate to social media what their clients want their ads to be associated with, not associated with, and drive media of all kinds to push inflammatory and click-bait content that drives engagement and views. It’s why you indirectly can’t swear, talk about suicide, drugs, death, or violence. Sure, you technically can unless ToS prohibits it, but if companies tell their ad hosts they don’t want to be associated with someone talking about guns, the content discussing guns gets fewer ads, fewer ads = less revenue, low-revenue gets pushed to the bottom.
So lowbrow political rage bait, science denialism, and fake conspiracies drives people to interact and then gets pushed to the top because it gets ad revenue. Content that delves into critical thought and requires introspection or contemplation languishes.
Ads are destroying society because stupid and rage sells views.
Oh shit, I thought you said “AI” companies and was about to say “nahh, it’s the advertisers” lol.
Yes. Ads are a stain on our species and should be outlawed.
They are a waste of resources, clutter and manipulate our minds, and give a ridiculous advantage to those who already have the money to buy them.
They definitely try, but why do we let them?
Because they have everyone addicted using devilishly addictive algorithms, socio-psychological hacks and platforms designed to amplify it all. Meanwhile, we’re still stuck prescribing individual solutions to these deeply systemic structural issues.
You laid it out so well I needed time to process it, my thanks :)
Exactly. There is no systemic response to the issue
Because we’re farm animals.
This is why Josie and the Pussycats is the best movie ever.
(Join the army)
Who knew that adverts were the secret power cabal running everything all the time.
read Subprime Attention Crisis. our surviellance state was implemented to sell products. however, the products didn’t sell because online ad models being more efficient than traditional ad models has always been a lie
I think the answer always comes down to capitalism
Consumerism.
Consumerism is a symptom of capitalism. Capitalism is the illness
Capitalism does play a part, but it’s more the lack of hard rules to curb it rather than the economic method itself. You want to make an even broader claim, just say “greed.”
Couple of things that are either a definition, obvious, or directly observable in literally every capitalist nation in history:
- the defining characteristic of capitalism is the private ownership of businesses
- the ability to own a business can buy you influence on the electorate legally, through owning ad agencies, newspapers, think tanks, online influencers
- owning a business can buy you influence on politicians legally, by hiring lobbyists, by threatening to take your business elsewhere, by promising politicians cushy jobs after their tenure, by contributing to their campaign through fundraisers, PACs, etc
- this influence gives you the power to change laws and regulations to your benefit
- in particular, it allows you to shape laws to benefit you financially, making the actions in point 2 and 3 easier to do
- in particular, it allows you to get rid of laws restricting you to do the things in points 2 and 3
- it is in the best interest of politicians to deregulate the latter parts of point 3
- as such, a capitalist system where only parts or even none of point 2 and 3 are allowed, has a natural tendency towards a system where they are fully allowed
Leaving all other economic systems aside for a moment*, the idea that this is not a direct and natural consequence of capitalism doesn’t seem to hold water, both on a theoretical and an empirical level.
(*)And we do this because, analogously, arguing your right hand isn’t bleeding by saying your left hand is makes no sense. Capitalism can be studied in its own right. What’s more is that the number of alternative systems is infinite, and I’m sure lemmy has a character limit.
Yes, exactly, and if you continue in this same vein, fascism becomes inevitable, too. Capitalism really must be abolished.
This was an understandable perspective when we had those regulations in the USA, but since FDR’s New Deal, the Republicans have walked back practically every law and regulation we had to curb the greed of Capitalism. This is the natural tendency of Capitalism
That is the tendency of people. Any system is open to exploitation and greed. The restrictions on growing exploitation are only as good as the humans enforcing them, and people suck. There’s always people trying to force cracks in a system to benefit themselves, and some tribal influences that will allow them to do it.
You are 100% correct. People just want to believe that Capitalism is uniquely corrupt. When literally all of human history has seen us exploit and greedily destroy every social and economic system humans have ever engineered. Now including capitalism.
Good regulations prevent critical exploitation, which is why European capitalism is still functional and looked on positively despite still being capitalism.
Only through regulations can an economic system be maintained. US Capitalism is failing because it has been steadily deregulated for the last 40 years.
So yes, Capitalism is poison. But so is blowfish unless you cut it right. Every system we’ve ever built is also poisoned for failure unless it’s always cut down and regulated to its basics.
European capitalism is still functional and looked on positively despite still being capitalism
I’m really sorry to burst this bubble, but as a European, no. Capitalism is devouring us from the inside out. Haven’t you seen that basically every EU nation has a surging far right?
Capitalism is not uniquely capable of being exploited more than the systems which it replaced, but you’re wrong that it can be regulated. Yes, regulations can be passed, but they cannot be maintained. Capitalism will inevitably trend towards fascism as a matter of design. It is just human nature.
This is why we need a system that acknowledges the reality of human nature. That’s why I’m an anarchist. It’s the only system which really accounts for the fact that humans will abuse power for selfish reasons.
Compare Europe’s surge of Far Right to the US’s. They’re handling it a lot better and passing regulations to prevent it in the future. Even getting laws passed to regulate the total use of social media by kids.
I’m not saying capitalism is perfect in Europe, I’m saying it’s a better example of how to regulate it into something sustainable.
Respectfully, the biggest flaw in anarchism imo is that it’s not a system at all. It’s basically just tribalism and immediately devolves into the rule of whoevers strongest in those tribes.
Humans are social creatures. We have literally always made societies based on expanded family dynamics and rules, as that is literally human nature. We want family and structure, and to do that we create rules that structure needs to follow for the family to survive.
Anarchism doesn’t really work for the elderly. The sick. The disabled. Anarchism doesn’t really do anything to protect the families we create as whoever is strongest can just take what they want when they want to.
Granted, Capitalism is horrible, but literally any system we create is doomed to become horrible and fucked up if we cannot regulate it from corruption. If we can’t prevent it from being taken over by strong opinionated assholes, it will also eventually devolve into tribalism.
Literally the problem that needs solving is just our own dark nature. That some of us are born without the capacity to understand our social nature, and survive exclusively through exploiting it. Those people are the sociopaths that have destroyed every society we’ve ever had, including the earliest recorded ones that were basically anarchistic.
It is within our nature to be highly social, but the few of us born without that nature only want to take from others instead of giving.
That dual nature of humanity is something that no civilization we’ve ever built has survived.
Compare Europe’s surge of Far Right to the US’s
It just hasn’t come into power YET. You are being hugely dismissive. I am European and I follow US and European politics extremely closely and I am outright telling you that Europe is a hair away from the same shit, if not worse, than the US. Many EU nations are punishing people for protesting genocide.
Capitalism can not be reformed. It cannot be regulated. It is like a force of nature. It will always lead to fascism. It is inevitable.
You don’t know what anarchism is about, I’d encourage you to learn more about anarchism before dismissing it. I’d recommend checking out an anarchist FAQ.
This is where we disagree. What are the fundemental tenants of capitalism vs say, communism?
(Just doing a thought experiment with you, in good faith)
Respectfully I am not willing to get into this debate. If communism worked, we’d be doing it. Unfortunately so far it seems to have incredibly weak protections against authoritarian takeover despite its overall egalitarian appeal.
E: triggered .ml?
Double respectfully back, I have to agree with the other commentor. I dont think you have a good understanding of what communism is. Which is fine. Global North countries, at the behest of the powerful elite, have made it their life’s mission to destroy communism (i wonder why). They do that while pushing Neo-Liberal ideas and agendas constantly (curioussssss).
In your post, you have identified a symptom of capitalism. Not the cause of societal failures.
Also, unlike saying “humans beings are naturally greedy” (which isnt true), capitalism as an economic system reinforces and rewards any greed fhat MIGHT appear in A VANISHINGLY SMALL amount of people (true sociopaths). Whereas, under communism or socialism, those sociapaths would not only be unrewarded, their entire ideology would be forsaken from establishing a foothold in power (please extrapolate to the rest of humanity).
That said, if you dont want to talk about it, its all good baby. Thanks for listening to my Ted talk.
(Btw, this was all in good faith. Genuinely not trying to mock or tesse you. Just being silly).
Lmk if you ever feel like talking more
If communism worked, we’d be doing it.
Oh you sweet summer child.
Respectfully I am not willing to get into this debate.
And this is why you believe that. Head, meet sand.
Props for being polite about it though.
The assumption that I lack knowledge of alternate economic and governing systems and left them unconsidered is as insulting as your smug confidence that any other system is immune to corruption and disparity.
Do you think capitalism works? It very clearly works for some, but would you claim that it works in a broader sense?
There’s no curbing capitalism. The very thesis of it requires that the most successful 1, find 2, exploit 3, lobby to lock up enough, so to “pull up the ladder behind themselves”, any and all loopholes of the legal system that allows them to get ahead.
You can try regulating it but capitalism will always find a way around your rules.
I disagree. Capitalism can be curbed. The failure is greed on humanity’s part always trying to carve out more for themselves. No system of government or economy has proven otherwise over the long term. They all eventually fail.
E: Lol, downvotes seem to indicate some real confident fools here think they have an alternative all figured out that somehow eliminates what humans have been doing forever.
Capitalism can be curbed.
It can’t. It always leads to fascism. It always has. It always will.
That’s an interesting thought, and I would like to add a few things to it.
The whole idea of having ad funded things is fundamentally flawed. It has also become too dominant, and difficult to compete with. Ads are the tool used in this business model, but are they really the root cause of the problems you mentioned? I would say no.
Theoretically, you could still have ads without ruining everything. When other business models aren’t competitive enough, the whole system naturally gravitates to the mess we’re currently in.
I think cheap mobile games have showed that you can charge a small amount of money, and people will be willing to pay up. That way, everything doesn’t have to be ad funded. It’s just that this business model doesn’t appear to be appealing enough in other arenas, and that’s a real problem.
Theoretically, you could still have ads without ruining everything. When other business models aren’t competitive enough, the whole system naturally gravitates to the mess we’re currently in.
There’s no such thing as “competitive enough.” Corporate greed is literally insatiable, inherently and by design. There’s an entire series of Supreme Court decisions – not just Citizens United – that would need to be overturned to fix that.
having ad funded things
Do you remember those free “newspapers” that used to choke your mailbox once a week, or your favorite club? With like 75% ad content and a few poorly written articles? That’s how I learned about the power of advertisment. The internet just put that in hyperdrive. How much of it is driven by ads these days?
The advertisement-based business model has turned out to be highly successful, just like the newspapers have proven. However, magazines were a hybrid solution. You would pay for the magazine, but there would still be a few ads. Reminds me of modern Netflix actually.
Yeah a lot of what many think of typical internet stuff is just a new turbocharged edition of what has existed for much longer IRL.
I think cheap mobile games have showed that you can charge a small amount of money, and people will be willing to pay up.
emulation’s another thing. i was glad to toss the duckstation devs five bucks so’s i could keep it easily updated on my phone (i like the psx generation, it’s great for that screen size) and so they could hopefully afford to keep working on it. it’s been so long i can’t remember if they charged or if it was a patreon thing, but five bucks is five bucks.
I think ad funded stuff is the only way to get things done in a capitalist economy. There may be other types of economies that could get by without ads, but we’ll never know because this is the world we’ve created.
Bill Watterson tried to warn us
i still want a calvin peeing on calvin peeing on fractal sticker
Advertising is one of the most prolific environmental pollutants of economic activity, and needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
Kind of funny this has to be discussed in shower thoughts when its a central theme of our entire world at the moment.
I was thinking about this earlier today.
It’s amazing to me that in my lifetime, ads went from a thing that companies got to do as an extra once they had succes all the way to a thing that runs everything everywhere.
Nowadays if you don’t have ads in some form abusing the algorithm (which is in itself designed to be abused) then you get nowhere.
(Also holy shit this has a lot of comments, seems like people have this on their liver somewhat)
people have this on their liver somewhat
Interesting, I’ve never heard that phrase. Are you a native English speaker, or was that brought through another language? I’m reminded of how in Farsi, the liver is used in phrases that most other languages don’t use it for. Like, instead of calling someone you love your 'heart", you call them your “liver,” but it carries the same intent.
Oh yes, I hadn’t thought about that! Having something on your liver is an expression that’s native to the Dutch language (afaik).
Meaning something that’s annoying, bothering you, gnawing at your conscience, pissing you off,…
You’re right overall, but the mechanism you listed about advertising only appearing near safe content is not that big of a deal compared to other mechanisms at play:
- psychological manipulation vs competition - the way that a capitalist economy is supposed to work is that a bunch of firms compete to sell you a good or service, you pick the best one for your situation and buy it, then the firm that produces the best good or service gets more resources (money) to grow, rewarding the best product maker.
Advertising breaks this. It lets you spend money on psychological manipulation to get people to buy your product, instead of just trying to produce a better product. True conservative capitalists should fucking hate advertising for distorting the economy, and letting big companies pay advertising money to drown innovative competition, but there are very few of those left these days.
- engagement driven algorithms - because advertising operates on the basis of psychological manipulation rather than actually informing you, it means that its effectiveness always scales with volume.
i.e. I can read everything there is to learn about two different laptops, watch YouTube videos, read all the specs and reviews, and after about two hours of research I’ll know everything there is to know. A company can try and provide me with more information about their product to sway me, but at that point it’s probably ineffective because I know everything about them already. However if they bombard me with slick fun ads that evoke certain emotions in me over and over and over and over and over again, it will create an emotional bias towards one over the other.
This distinction is super important because it is what leads to most of advertising’s ills: most specifically engagement driven algorithms, which social media uses to keep you scrolling and are what are truly destroying society. The amount of human time and effort wasted to them is incalculable, the amount of languished relationships, neglected kids, over tired and angry people etc. is truly jaw droppingly damaging, and it is fundamentally because advertising is a cheap way to manipulate you into buying something, and unlike true education, it’s effectiveness keeps scaling with volume.
a bunch of firms compete to sell you a good or service, you pick the best one for your situation and buy it, then the firm that produces the best good or service gets more resources (money) to grow, rewarding the best product maker.
Advertising breaks this.
TBF, the original meaning of advertising was just that: spread the word about your product. Sure, praise it, add nice pictures, but that’s about it. People need to know that your product is out there, and what it’s like.
The systematic psychological manipulation only started in the 20th century, particularly when a relative of Sigmund Freud came to the USA (there’s an interesting documentary about it called The Century of the Self).
I largely agree with you though; algorithmic engagement is the worst incarnation so far. To put it simple: “Angry People Click More”, see more ads, and are therefore to be targeted.
TBF, the original meaning of advertising was just that: spread the word about your product. Sure, praise it, add nice pictures, but that’s about it. People need to know that your product is out there, and what it’s like.
I get that, if you’re arguing from an economic efficiency standpoint, there was an argument to be made that the spreading of new information through advertising helps to spread new innovative ideas and thus increases overall societal efficiency.
It’s just that a) in the Internet age, we have other, non-advertising ways to spread information (i.e. specs and reviews), and b) if advertising was actually still about genuine education, then it would not scale in effectiveness the way it does with volume and repetition.
I’m not generally disagreeing with your assessment of the current situation, just a little historical BTW.
in the Internet age, we have other, non-advertising ways to spread information (i.e. specs and reviews),
Interesting, I never thought of it that way.
However, most of that is still part of advertising; producers proactively strive to get reviewed.
However, most of that is still part of advertising; producers proactively strive to get reviewed.
Reaching out to reviewers is still technically advertising in the broadest definition of the word, but it is distinct from commercial advertising where companies pay to broadcast their specific messages to users.
This distinction is also reflected in the way that most companies are operated these days: reaching out to reviewers with information and offering them review units would fall under the marketing / communications / strategy department, but wouldn’t be referred to as advertising unless they were paying the reviewer for a positive review, which isn’t even legal in some places.
Yeah, I agree. People were doing an en masse boycott, using tiktok as a way to gather, and who to hit, then, bam suddenly the elites have to buy tiktok. I know they did that for other reasons too, controlling the narrative and what people see and know has been the M.O. of the evil elite, since days of old, but it just seemed like interesting timing. If we all just gather and boycott, together, as a movement, do targeted hits, I wonder if we could break their choke hold on us. I know there’s a lot of movements for boycotting, people are moving away from the more evil things. I just feel like it doesn’t get as widely spread as it should? Maybe? And I really appreciated the approach behind the other movement, they targeted one brand for one quarter, in a very calculated and planned strategy, so as not to affect anyone’s jobs.
People interested in storytelling have been obsessed with the “Hero’s Journey” for decades, which a fantastically sexist man hacked together as a concept from a poor interpretation of James Joyce and of cherry picked anthropological evidence.
What pisses me off is that the idea has taken such complete hold of artist’s imagination that it makes people only want to talk about “Narrative” with respect to storytelling, and it misses the most essential aspect of storytelling in that good stories are always inherently plural in their nature. A good story is a cacophony of potentially true narratives all vying for your soul on stage with no easy answer, not a simple list of plot points delivered to convince you of a particular belief and singular structure through which to see a set of events.
This leads to a massive learned blindspot about advertisement in that artists lose sight of the fact that Advertisement is the annihilation of Storytelling where the natural human invitation for the audience to interpret and construct their own unique Narrative is buried in an avalanche by an overwhelming reifying force that simplifies a complex reality down to a single corporate produced Narrative. People who do sports wear Nike.
Advertisement is the attempt to annihilate art, it can be seen no other way no matter how many artists the advertisement industry employs in the process.
Many people will be shocked, however, to learn that academic folklorists and scholars of ancient literature almost universally reject Campbell’s theories as nonsense—and for good reason. Campbell’s outline of the “hero’s journey” is so hopelessly vague that it is essentially useless for analyzing stories across cultures. It also displays ethnocentric, sexist, heteronormative, and cisnormative biases and it encourages people to ignore the ways in which stories are fundamentally shaped by the cultures and time periods in which they are produced.
…
Campbell starts out with the assumption that every great story must be focused on a single hero, whom he generally assumes to be a heterosexual man. According to Campbell, the “hero’s journey” begins with the hero living in a state of normality, which is disrupted by some kind of “call to adventure,” which takes the hero into the realm of the “unknown,” which “is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, super human deeds, and impossible delight.
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/
For those who disagree, can you not see how directly this imposed definition of what a Story is slots perfectly into rationalizing Advertising and focusing on it as the true purpose of an Artist?
I think you’re giving Campbell way more credit than he is generally given by the writing community at large. Yes, that is one way to write a story, but it’s certainly not the only method taught. For example, slice-of-life stories are completely acceptable, however it is harder to get some of the nuance across to new writers. The hero’s journey is an easy starting point, that’s all. And I really don’t think Campbell was trying to say that’s how everything should be. He was making observations about what he already saw in popular western media.
I don’t understand your seeming conflation of advertising and art, which seems like a separate point from your criticism of Campbell. Advertising does not control art, nor vice versa. It makes more sense to look at things through the lens of money: art can be basically free to create (writing, drawing, street art are all pretty cheap). Anyone can do it. Now, something like making a film is not cheap. It can cost millions of dollars, and not many people have enough lying around to do so without getting a return on that investment. In other words, film has to make money. They know the hero’s journey will sell because it is easy for the average Westerner to digest and enjoy. So you see a lot more hero’s journey stories on the screen than you do in the wide world of books, which can afford to be more experimental or art-driven. Someone like Banksy isn’t worried about finding a rich buyer to recoup the cost of his stencils and paint. Would you agree?
Advertising is a different beast altogether, and I’m not sure why you would criticize it for not being art. It was never supposed to be that.
They know the hero’s journey will sell because it is easy for the average Westerner to digest and enjoy. So you see a lot more hero’s journey stories on the screen than you do in the wide world of books, which can afford to be more experimental or art-driven. Someone like Banksy isn’t worried about finding a rich buyer to recoup the cost of his stencils and paint. Would you agree?
I think you see this conversation as discussing a serious of fairly innocuous individual elements whereas I see it as part of a broader, irrevocably intersectional problem that must be addressed in a wholistic fashion by integrating all pieces of it. I see advertisement as not separate from art and only harmful in its unintended collisions with it but rather an intentional as well as subconscious colonization and co-opting of the societal values around human artists that has culminated inevitably in AI wrecking havoc on what remains of our curiosity about human creativity.
Campbell’s theories therefore provide justification for white westerners to reject the interpretations that non-western peoples give for their own stories, if those interpretations don’t align with what the white westerners in question think the interpretations should be. Thus, western perspectives are portrayed as universal perspectives and non-western perspectives are dismissed.
…
Thinking about the culturally specific influences behind familiar stories is important because it reveals that many of the assumptions that exist within our own culture that we take for granted are not universal at all, but rather rooted in very culturally specific prejudices. For instance, in the Star Wars movies, darkness and the color black are both closely associated with evil. The evil side of the Force is referred to as the “dark side” and the title darth, which is used by the evil Sith Lords, literally sounds like the word dark. On top of this, Darth Vader wears a black suit and the Emperor wears a black cloak.
This association of darkness and the color black with evil is rooted in Christianity, which has been the dominant religion in the United States for most of modern history. Throughout the writings of the New Testament, darkness is repeatedly equated with evil and Satan, while light is repeatedly associated with goodness and God. For instance, in the Gospel of John 8:12, Jesus is portrayed as saying, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):
“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/
“It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light”
That’s an interesting take. Have an article or blog post or paper anywhere that gives into it more? Not sure I agree or disagree but it’s an interesting thought
That is a difficult question to answer, I am not the first person to think this by any means but finding people who put it into simple terms and connect the dots is difficult.
This is a great example of the species of brainworms I am talking about though.
People fall in love with the story arc and the characters in these hero’s journey examples because they see themselves in the “before” phase—feeling stuck, small, and unseen.
They crave a transformation.
If you want to get better at selling your product or service, you have to understand that people don’t buy products or services.
They buy transformations.
Your customer is trying to get from point A to point B, but they don’t know how to do it on their own. If you want to sell to them, make your product or service the bridge between where they are and where they want to be.
That’s why this storytelling structure works so well in marketing. Your customer is the protagonist, and your product/service is what helps them answer their call to adventure.
I’m reminded of this quote:
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” —Henry David Thoreau
https://thevectorimpact.com/heros-journey-examples/
The thought terminating logic goes good advertising is storytelling --> all good storytelling is the Hero’s Journey.
Which… I think the advertisement people are right, Hero’s Journeys are a perfect description of advertisements, they have a precise structure meant to influence you to see things a certain way. The problem is it is a suffocating regime to impose upon Storytelling as a pursuit of art and self-expression and it is killing our communal spaces at a deep level because of it. Artists are trained to only tell stories that contain the same genetic structure as advertisements because how the hell else do you earn money and respect as an artist these days but utterly optimize every aspect of your artistry to trying desperately to make some money?
Somebody watches too much Maggie Mae Fish.
Somebody doesn’t watch enough Maggie Mae Fish
I disagree. James Campbell was not a perfect man, but he did coalesce what humans like to see in a story most of the time. It’s not a perfect scenario like he claimed, but more of a guide to most cultures. If you look at boring structures of story, it’s usually because it doesn’t follow western structure (the hero’s journey). Joseph Campbell hated Noh from Japanese culture because he couldn’t follow it as a hero’s journey. Even if he didn’t speak the language, he could usually tell when they followed it. I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about when cherry picking. He’s right in that to a westerner, it will be hard to understand and may be boring. To the Japanese though, it’s been around a long time.
He’s right in that to a westerner, it will be hard to understand and may be boring.
Ok, but he is wrong in believing that says anything meaningful about Storytelling, it is just a shitty mirror to our own failings as a culture to point out this repetitive structure, encourage people to repeat it more and then idolize it as “universal” when it isn’t.
Over the last few decades, this structure has come to dominate much of popular storytelling, and Hollywood cinema in particular. With so many bestselling novels and international blockbusters using the Hero’s Journey to great success, it would seem at first glance that Campbell was right—that most or all great stories can be distilled down to a formula, which is universally applicable across time and place.
However, as we’ll be exploring in today’s blog post, Campbell’s theories aren’t always a perfect fit for the needs of storytellers in the real world. The Hero’s Journey is not as universal as Campbell would claim—and the framework is weighed down by Campbell’s own antisemetic and sexist thinking.
…
“projected Anglo-Western storytelling and cultural values onto Indigenous mythic narratives, which in fact have very different storytelling norms and serve a very different purpose to the individualistic striving for self fulfilment which he identified [as the key to all storytelling].”
In other words, Campbell cites superficial similarities between myths of different cultures as evidence for the claim that the stories of all cultures share an underlying purpose, i.e. the dramatic reenactment of the individual’s quest for self fulfillment.
In the process, he ignores overwhelming ethnographic evidence that the very idea of an atomized, individual “self” separated from clan, species, etc. is a relatively new one in the history of human thought, and that such a striving self is not a central feature in stories from many parts of the world.
https://freerange.com/blog/joseph-campbell-history-and-antisemitism-critiquing-the-heros-journey
Do I really need to explicitly connect why this broken conception of stories is advantageous to the Advertising Industry? It encapsulates the full extent of artistry within the bounds of capitalism and subsumes the work of the artist as simply the cherry on top to help a product be sold. EVERYTHING an artist can do is just a manipulation to impose a very particular narrative of a set of events into the minds of the audience.
Did you read what I said? I said the same thing as what you quoted from the blog, lol. The other formats are mostly boring to a westerner’s ear. It’s easy enough to figure out for yourself, watch movies and advertising before Star Wars. Star Wars is when the Hero’s Journey became popular and when advertising would have started to switch over too. Check for yourself if the movies followed it in America and Europe before Star Wars. Hint, the acclaimed ones mostly did.
Wait, do you think Hollywood only copies ideas that are good ideas and work well?
Wait, do you really think you’re right allllll the time? I’m not sure what chip you have on your shoulder, but you’re obviously butt hurt about something. Again, Campbell is not perfect, but he did give writers a handy guide to jump off from. You seem like you’re trolling or think you’re super duper smart or something? Smart people try to see other people’s side.
Why do you feel the need to defend Campbell so passionately? Is he your daddy or something?
Also yeah, I am the smartest person here, I am the hero so duh, obviously?
Why do you feel the need to defend Campbell so passionately? Is he your daddy or something?
Ahh, the troll shows it face. Have a wonderful day.
