Part 4 ~ A Culture Obsessed with Appearances

“Advertising is not about catering to existing needs, but creating new desires.  Not only desires, but insecurities as well, because we cannot desire without feeling we lack something”(Raoul, 2019)

In the 1930s, Edward Berneys (who is often referred to as “the father of Public Relations”) ensured that our culture “shift[ed][…] from a needs to a desires culture”(Rosenberg, n.d.) and ever since, the instinctual human need for validation - which has evolved within us as a survival instinct - has been preyed upon and exploited by the media.

To ensure that we want to buy what they are selling, advertisers create “new desires” and “insecurities” within the public.  This is because, when we feel insecure, we are more susceptible to advertiser’s false promises that their products will fulfil our feeling of “lack” and our need for validation.  But of course, these promises are false; if our desires were fulfilled by a product, there would be no need to buy any more, and that would completely defeat the objective of the advertisements; to keep us buying.  Therefore, the consumer is never fulfilled and the feelings of lacking, insecurity, and the need for validation, are ever-present.  In this way, “the alienation of the spectator is to the profit of the contemplated object”(Debord, 2014, p.10)

“The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having - human fulfilment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed.  The present stage[…] is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing - all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances”(Debord, 2014, p.5)

Surely these words of Debord’s can never have been more relevant than they are today.  We, the “atomised and manipulated masses”(Debord, 2014, p.117), try to satisfy our needs for validation by constructing our appearances on social media.  Importance is placed on who we appear to be to others, rather than with who we are in reality (our being).

If our social media account is popular enough/ has enough followers then we can profit from it.  An increased sphere of influence can be utilised as a customer base for our own business endeavours.  Meanwhile, other companies recognise the benefits of our audience and pay us to advertise their products/services.  The larger the audience (or the higher the number of followers) the more the company will value the influence and the more they will pay.  In this way, attention is a commodity, while the amount of followers and likes a person has is the currency.

In order to gain a following and reap the rewards of a large audience’s attention, we must apply the sentiment of Benjamin Franklin’s wise words: “if you want to get ahead[…] make yourself pleasing to others”(Deresiewicz, 2011).  Through constructing our appearances online, “we use social media to create a product - create a brand - and the product is us”(Deresiewicz, 2011).  If our brand is “pleasing to others”, it is more likely that we will have a higher following, a greater influence and more potential to profit financially.

Consequently, our culture favours appearances even more.  But a lot of these appearances are constructed with the purpose of being “pleasing to others” in order to fulfil our validation needs and fill our bank accounts.  This results in a tendency to only upload the good parts of our lives onto social media, filtering out the negative and glamourising the mundane.  As a result, the curated digital versions of our lives (and other’s lives) are not a reflection of reality.  Instead, they are “fragmented views of reality that regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world” which presents itself back to us as “superior to [us]”(Debord, 2014, p.117).  We become “acting subject[s]” whose appearances become “the gestures of someone else who represents them” back to us.  This “alienation of the spectator”(Debord, 2014, p.10) reinforces the feelings of inadequacy and need for validation that were at the very root of the process, causing us to continue to seek validation through the curation of appearances.  In this manner, “the “growth” generated by an economy developing for its own sake can be nothing other than a growth of the very alienation that was at its origin”(Debord, 2014, p.11).