The Culture of Selling

Richard Hoggart. The Uses of Literacy.

This book was first published in 1957 and was the earliest, and most effective, attempt to understand changes in British culture caused by “massification”. In it Hoggart argues that the appeals made by what he calls “the mass publicists” were made “more insistently, effectively and in a more comprehensive and centralized form today than they were earlier; that we are moving towards the creation of a mass culture, that the remnants of what was at least in part an urban culture “of the people” are being destroyed”. He examined cheap novels and magazines, popular newspapers and post war cinema and detected drift in all areas. The old, close, tightly knit working class culture was breaking up. In its place was emerging a mass culture composed of tabloid newspapers, the ascendancy of media Barons such as Rupert Murdoch, advertising, and Hollywood. These forces colonized localities and robbed them of any distinctiveness, being external to that which they dominated. His critique is not of popular culture, but of mass culture, which he distinguishes from popular culture as something that is imposed on the population from above. The value of “popular culture” is that it is self-created and so has a fundamental integrity, it is broadly sui generis, evolving according to its own laws and dictates rather than at the promptings of the mass media.

We must wonder whether, in this definition, there is any popular culture left, eliminated by the mass culture that has replaced it. In fact, all that Hoggart predicted has happened with speed and depravity. We live in an identikit world defined by the sameness of our high streets, the values we import from the media, and our patterns of behavior and relating. As mass culture develops, propelled by new technologies, the profit ethic and the push for market share, and the manipulated tastes of individuals, we must wonder where it will take us next.

How has this occurred? We might look towards the advertising industry to provide a case study that is illustrative of more widespread and general cultural factors that have created a psycho-sociological system of desire, need, and wants and an internal psychological make-up that tends towards the narcissistic. Advertising, as it is described below, should be taken to be only one of the forces that has produced our contemporary cultural climate, but it can be seen as a Weberian "ideal type", and therefore illustrative of some of the influences that have produced cultural change over the past forty years or so.

Advertising is seductive because it bases itself on the evocation of desire, and it deploys every technique and every ideology towards this end. It serves a machinery that that is rooted in capital, the market, commercialism and consumerism, and propagandizes for these ideologies in an indirect and tangential fashion that is dangerous because it is not obvious and because it bends every alternative message and ideology towards its own purposes and incorporates them within its own universe.

Marcuse thought that advertising creates a climate within which "luxuries have become necessities that men and women alike must acquire lest they lose their status, whether on the competitive market, at work or in their leisure activities. This leads to the perpetuation of existence’s given over to alienating and dehumanizing practices and the need to find jobs that propagate enslavement and its attendant system".

Advertising is all about the manipulation of human beings. It responds to people only inasmuch as they are consumers, and its relationship to its audience is based on valuing them only in so far as they are able to consume. These values and perceptions then enter the culture and influence people's day to day life, their relationships and values. There is no question that advertising is hugely successful but in a way that is not generally understood: it has made the values, and valuing, of consumption and possessing ever more and grander consumables, not necessarily with any effort, the indication of social success. Advertising emphasizes pleasure and gratification rather than restraint and repression. It has created, together with other social forces, an expectation of entitlement, and an increasing intolerance of frustration and any delayed gratification, that now pervades the culture. Thus, it values change for changes sake, superficial, surface, and showy change, rather than any deeper move towards maturity or integration. These are the traits of narcissism in the individual which can also be said to characterize a culture or society.

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