The following is an excerpt from a press release I received today. As a travel writer, I get these all the time, however this one so effectively illustrated commodified thinking, that it compelled me to make a few notes.
I’ve omitted the company name (which seems irrelevant), and added footnotes:
Spring into action1 and enjoy a holiday in America, where you can actively2 save while travelling around. ______, the lowest price of any national chain3 is offering fantastic deals on warm weather breaks in areas such as Texas, Florida and California. So instead of spending your hard earned cash on accommodation, save at _____ and spend it on what you really want4 – seeing the States in style.
Sunshine and blue skies are affordable5 at _____, where prices for a room, which sleeps a family of four start at around £30 in Austin, Texas; £33 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and under £50 in Santa Barbara, California. And you can save even more if you book online 6 . . .
____________________________
Notes:
1. Besides overlaying a temporal /seasonal pun on top of a familiar platitude [which specifically leverages the reader's sense of being "empowered"--the underlying tactic throughout the writing] the opening phrase is an example of the “Second Person Casual.” Most marketing and ad copy is based on Second Person Casual because it allows the narrator to “disappear,” the idea being that the reader (most likely distracted and desensitized), will “absorb” the language and information as if by osmosis. In “ideal” cases, the Second Person Casual would produce a sense in the reader that she “thought of it herself.”
2. The use of “actively” continues to leverage the reader’s sense of being “in power” or “in control” of his/her situation.
3. Incorrect grammar, but most likely this was done deliberately. The subject of the sentence, _______ (hotel name) is what’s actually “offering fantastic deals,” however, the phrase “the lowest price of any national chain” is placed in such a way so that it works like a tagline. The reader then juxtaposes the name of the hotel and the phrase “lowest price of any national chain.” This works works almost subliminally.
4. Again, leveraging the reader’s sense of wish-fulfillment or power, while also exploiting the fact that most people, in concrete reality, do not actually know what they want.
5. Commodified thinking. This construction assumes the reader views the natural world in terms of commodity or salable “items.”
6. The “power” of this press release culminates in the “option to book online,” effectively taking all the persuasion / leveraging of the reader’s sense of power and condensing into a “chance to act.”
Overall, I feel as if this is a very effective piece of persuasive writing (for desensitized / distracted readers).
I also feel that this “effectiveness” is anti-stoke. It creates negative consequences in reality because it essentially promotes:
- expectations of “the world” in concrete reality (via travel and place) which are predicated on the reader’s abstract sense of power or wish-fulfillment as opposed to his or her actual concrete reality and / or ability to experience “the world” without expectations
- a mindset wherein the natural world is reduced to marketable and salable “resources”
So many people seem to look at things almost exclusively in the context of their perceived value as commodity or resource.
For example, they’ll say things like “Siesta Key is considered one of the 5 most beautiful beaches in the US.”
This is something my mom has said often.
She doesn’t say “I love Siesta Key,” or anything else that reveals her emotions about the place, but just repeats “Siesta Key is considered one of the 5 most beautiful beaches in the world,” like an advertisement.
[I almost wrote, "She doesn't say 'I love Siesta Key,' or anything else that reveals her relationship with the place," but I feel like the way she says that actually does reveal her "relationship." As opposed to demonstrating an emotional dependence developed over time (my own simplified definition of a relationship) it shows that "how she feels" about the place is more a mental construct "frozen in time," created out of her motivation for moving there and her need for social reinforcement that moving there was a good choice.]
I often do the same thing.
When I lived in Seattle, oftentimes I told people more or less “Seattle is good because you have easy access to the mountains.”
Like the way my mom talks about Siesta Key, by focusing on “access to the mountains,” I was effectively obscuring my actual relationship to the place, reducing it to a single abstraction.
Here’s another example:
In one of Lola Akinmade’s recent posts, a woman said: “I’ve just been back from The Gambia. . .Desperately poor country. Desperate. . .But they’ve got 500 species of birds!”
All three of these cases show how people tend to think about things in the context of their value, or their perceived value, even if they are abstractions, such as the “beauty” of a beach or the “proximity” of a wilderness area, or in terms of their resources such as “500 species of birds.”
I feel like all of this represents a kind of “commodified” thinking similar to the commodification described in Marxist economic theory: “economic value is assigned to something not previously considered in economic terms; for example, an idea, identity or gender. . . ”
I feel like commodified thinking leads to negative situations.
These negative situations are created out of the following cause / effect pattern:
1. Commodified thinker isolates whatever is being “valued” from its temporal, historical, and cultural, and environmental context.
2. The thinker then knowing or unknowingly overlooks or ignores potentially fundamental relationships between what is being “valued” or looked at as a resource and those things’ (a) existence vis-à-vis their “place” or “role” in the environment, (b) their evolution over time, and (c) their potential development / destruction in the future.
I feel like commodified thinking is a way of insulating yourself from certain realities.
It is also seems like a way of “framing” reality or shaping it for your own purpose / advantage.
Commodified thinking is a byproduct of (a) growing up in a society that has traditionally viewed the natural world in terms of resources or something to be “managed,” combined with (b) attempting to do what is in one’s self-interest as it applies to that society.
Commodified thinking has origins in Western thought, leading back to Reductionism, beginning in Ancient Greece.
I believe in juxtapositions, perhaps a mindset you could call ‘juxtapositionism’, as an alternative.