Faith Venture

I have long proposed to my wife the teacher and others that a core part of the unofficial curriculum of schools should be understanding how advertising manipulates your desires and emotions in order to motivate you to buy.

Magazines were one thing, but TV ads really pushed the envelop.

Now it is the Web.

We get sites for free in return for our attention. Part of that attention is diverted to advertising. Often we don’t know what’s an ad and what is merely information. We click and the site owner gets paid.

Now we learn how the Web companies are using mind manipulation to grab our minds and keep us on site.

They grab all the information about us they can–and they can grab a lot.

They sell information about us to companies for various reasons.

They discover our hot buttons. Politics, sex, expensive toys. They manipulate what we see in order to drive up our emotions and desires. They can make us good and mad. And we repost things we don’t even know if they are true or not. But they sound good and they worked us up.

But people (companies, countries) can buy that information and do the same thing. Feed us stuff to get us upset. Stoke our fears. Manipulate us.

Discipline says that we maintain control over our emotions, desires, drives. We understand we are being used. We control our responses.

We ask, “Who’s in charge here?”

This entry was posted on September 17, 2019 at 7:43 am and is filed under Disciplines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.