COMMUNICATION ABOUT AND THROUGH COMMODITIES ¹²

How do we communicate with each other? This is as much a question about commercialism as it is about discourse. Whether public or private, our communications are infused with the objects, the symbols, and the ideology of commercialism. We talk about commodities, we refer to ideas and feelings given symbolic form and meaning by commodities, and we express the cultural values embodied in our commodified social system. But how does that system work?

The Ways of Advertising: From Information to Lifestyle

The history of modern advertising is the story of the general movement from product­information to image and lifestyle advertising. Spanning the period from the advent of the Industrial Revolution to the present, modern advertising has changed its primary direction and focus. Once largely a utilitarian vehicle for informing the consumer about the construction, operation, and benefits of goods or services, the advertisement has become more of a "transformative" vehicle. Mass advertising now typically encodes goods and services with symbolic meanings independent of their functional values.

Of course, advertising has been a staple of commerce in economies since ancient times. In primarily oral cultures, street merchants "shouted out the advantages of their pottery, fabrics, cattle, and even their slaves ...." ¹³ The oldest known written advertisement is a 3000­year­old Babylonian tablet requesting the return of a slave. ¹⁴ Centuries later, Gutenberg's invention of moveable type ushered in a new age of commercial communication. The first printed advertisement in English appeared in 1477, announcing the sale of Easter rule books published by William Caxton. ¹⁵ Shop signs and broadsides nailed to public buildings were common advertising devices prior to newspapers. ¹⁶ By the middle of the seventeenth century, British newspapers, known as "mercuries," spread a variety of notices, ranging from merchant shipping tables to patent medicine advertisements. ¹⁷ In the American colonies, as many as ten of sixteen newspaper columns were set aside for advertising in the first daily newspaper. ¹⁸ Prior to the Civil War, most newspaper advertising consisted of merchants offering goods and services to customers in their own locales. ¹⁹ The styles and objectives of early newspaper ads became the models for the first period of the modern era of advertising. As America became more industrialized from the 1880s to the 1920s, mass­appeal advertising paralleled the mass production of goods. ²⁰ Nationwide advertising directed the public's attention to the increasing variety and quantity of products distributed on a nationwide basis. ²¹ The primary focus of most advertising design and copy during this period was the product itself­its construction, its performance, its uses, its price, and its advantages. ²² Product­information advertising aimed both to familiarize the newspaper reader with the national brand and to introduce new products and educate the consumer as to their purposes. When Daimler's and Benz's automobiles first appeared in 1885, when Eastman Kodak's cameras were first produced in 1888, and when Marconi's radio was first heard in 1896, manufacturers turned to advertising to explain the products to prospective consumers and to rationalize their purchases. ²³