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”
These are unedited excerpts of recent emails from Segundo who does not want any internet ‘presence’ but who is a bro I love and miss and whose writing I just want to share anyway:
-just got back from the pueblito (now city) where my pops grew up–went with my last 2 uncles-94 and 87–the last of the 18! my cousin drove us for a trip down memoria lane–the house they grew up in is now a motorcycle shop–there was one ancient lawyer friend who we visited still at his desk on x-mas with piles of papers that got more dust on em than i dont know what— he remembered me though asked me if i had dreads last time i was there to sign papers about 8 yrs ago–went to the cemetary and but a rock on my pops grave from my medicine bag…… visited some more of my uncles friends –everyone says i look igualito a mi papa aun el pelo malo– saw some murals of the mirabel sisters(las mariposas) schoolmates of my dad—i’ve had enough city for now–families of 4 on motoconchos drinken presidentes-music blaring tight clothes dark skin and potholes…..ahhh latina america—
–so much flowen through the head—seems to happen when im down here–hangen with my dads bros–mis tios— one of em leopo who is 94 is like looking at the spitting image of my dad–down to the way his fingers curl and his nails–the way his hand feels in mine–it bugs me out–i wasnt really close to him either–he was always the quiet uncle or the”slow one” as the family used to say–no family ,no education, no job, just always lived at home and roamed the streets visiting people with his blue eyes and smile saying shit like ”yo soy el flaco flaco y tu el gordo gordo” then just laughen–like a buddha or something…he’s gonna out live everyone—i remember him walking off down the street 10years ago after my fathers funeral–he seemed so sad that the memory has always stayed with me–visiting folks today and seeing their reactions when they saw him just cracked me up–”eh leopo el flaco flaco” —its good to have the memories though and the weed i picked next to the grave and stuck in my medicine bag–i love how it grows out of the cement–just goes to show you cant stop la madre! pues…hasta la proxima ramble–
As always the point was getting off the map. This place halfway up Cerro Amigo–a rock outcrop covered in cypress and wild rose–wasn’t any more ‘special’ than a patch of grass along an I-80 exit ramp. Except of course it’s where I happened to be right then, along with a pair of Caranchos (South American hawks) who seemed, somehow, to be showing off, screeching, buzzing closer than necessary, then floating in the wind that rolled out of some Pacific cold front, blowing across Chile and over the Andes, now hitting us (and providing good lift) here on the cliffs.
I kept thinking about a phrase that occurred to me on the hike up: placefinding. There seem to be plenty of words categorizing what we are, but so few that adequately describe what we do. From the time I was a college sophomore and the 10 years of official ‘work’ that followed, my title was educator. But what I really did was search for different places (and if not search, then just ‘find’ the place, wherever it was or wherever we happened to be).
Skill-wise, I taught people how to paddle. I led people down rivers (Chattahoochee, Nantahala). I taught people how to set up no-trace camps, and camped out with both adults and kids in the Tallulah headwaters, and along the Chattooga. We explored forests from the Piedmont region in Georgia to Edisto Island, out to alpine montane in Colorado.
Then, as now, there was always some ostensible ‘mission,’ whether it was learning the local history of the region or how to identify trees or build shelters. But looking back on it, the real lessons were the places themselves.
If I was trying to teach anything, it was simply to share the act of placefinding, the feelings it gave you. That by going wherever it was with the understanding (or at least trying to understand) that the places you found, no matter how you initially perceived them, always had their own histories, connections to other times, connections to other people with their own stories–many of which had been lost–and that, if you simply spent time listening, watching, asking questions, if you simply allowed yourself to get into the flow of whatever the place or terrain was, you would keep learning and discovering more about the place and about yourself forever. It wouldn’t end.
I stood in the wind a bit longer looking at the town below. The scale of the place seemed tiny compared to the mountains. Somehow this always helped me walk back down there into it. I had a name now for what I was doing. On the way back I stopped in a windbreak and wrote it on the inside of my arm.
Got interviewed at The Accidental Expats. Here was one of the questions / answers:
Can you describe the process behind deciding to travel/ become an expat?
As far as traveling, for me it’s never a rational process. I’m not even the biggest fan of “traveling,” per se, it’s really a form of suffering. I just like exploring new terrain (and the culture, cuisine, music, language that reflects it), especially in the Americas. For the most part I’ve never had enough money to travel in any other way besides total dirt-bagging along coastal areas in Latin America where it’s uber cheap and I can camp out and surf.
I never thought of “becoming an expat” in those explicit terms and still don’t; for me I think of it as just moving to Argentina. This was definitely a conscious and rational decision though, something that my wife and I felt like was a good plan for raising our family.We recognized certain elements of this place when we visited for the first time in 2005. Although there’s a great little town and a slowly developing tourist infrastructure, it has a very strong agrarian economy (it’s the center of fine fruit production in all of Argentina). This means that the place itself, what makes it unique, its land usage and the underlying economic system is all much more sustainable than other places in Argentina (or the US for that matter).
We also recognized an unusually well-educated population exists here, a result of waves of middle class urbanites who came from Buenos Aires during the 70’s. finally, we recognized that this is a place where we could raise our daughter very freely and in a culture where we both feel very at ease.
So all of this said, it was a very rational, thought-at process as far as deciding to move here, but it’s worth noting that the original visit here seemed just like a total random flow. Still, we felt so strongly about the place that when we first saw it in 2005 we bought a small plot of land here with the intention of coming back one day and building a cabin. That’s our goal over the next year.
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