experience matters

“Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter.”

So said 20th-century psychoanalyst and philosopher Eric Fromm.

To a degree, I think I know where he’s coming from. I can’t help but feel apathy towards most of the thousands of one-way commercial messages that I’m exposed to on any given day. And, both advertising and political propaganda have certainly made me feel insignificant.

When I was younger and convinced I could change the world, I moved to Hanoi, Vietnam for a year-long stint as a World University Service of Canada volunteer. Hanoi’s a great city, and it was a fantastic place for a 23-year-old to grow up a bit.

It was also my first exposure to Communist propaganda in its most obvious form: loud speakers blasting the Vietnamese government‘s news of the day from the street corners. It was one-way, intrusive and loud: the worst spam imaginable.

Every morning at 5 a.m. the loud speaker outside my bedroom window would commence with a high whistle. The announcer would blast through the news as I fumbled around in my mosquito net for a pillow to put over my head. This was the only spam filter I could find.

It was an upsetting start to any given day. As a volunteer editor of the English news at the Voice of Vietnam radio station, I knew very well what the government-approved version of world happenings was.

A sample: “The US-led NATO attack on Yugoslavia is nothing but a dark and sinister plot to take over the world!” I circled that particular sentence in red and wrote: “Guys, this is a bit much…”. I also recommended that they remove the exclamation mark.

Before taking out our neo-McCarthyist sticks, I want to be clear that these weren’t malicious grey-clad thought police laughing maniacally as they wrote the news. They were young, educated, professional journalists doing what they could to get by. They certainly couldn’t say what they wanted to. I imagine it’s a bit like working for Fox News.

After about a month in Hanoi though, I started to sleep through the 5 a.m. broadcasts. They stopped waking me up. It was like deleting Viagra spam from my inbox: I didn’t even have to think about it.

One afternoon I was walking through the market with a Vietnamese friend and the speakers kicked into gear. When asked what he thought, he told me he tuned them out: “I know they’re government controlled…I don’t even notice them.”

The carefully-crafted, exclamatory-filled government message was falling on deaf ears.

This isn’t meant to be a parable on democracy and journalism. I am, however, trying to speak to our basic social instinct to question our messengers. We’re social beings: we want to have dialogue. We don’t want to be unwilling recipients of a broadcast. As Fromm attests, this applies to advertising and politics.

The good news is that we all now have the tools and channels to hold companies and governments more accountable. Digital communications <or, insert your preferred Web 2.0 buzzword here> is democratizing information in ways Fromm could only imagine.

Companies that will succeed in this new world recognize that consumers can very easily make their voices heard, and are providing channels for them to create content, weigh in on products and services, and even to complain if it’s warranted.

Unsuccessful companies will continue to write lengthy and unreadable “About Us” sections on monolithic websites and launch one-way campaigns telling you what they think you should think about their brand.

They could save themselves a lot of trouble by investing in some loud speakers.