Advertising's Role in Collective Cognition

It is important to recognize that advertising's avenues (i.e. newspapers, magazines, radio, television and the World Wide Web) represent not only mediums but technologies as well. As a technology, each plays the role of representing mankind's accomplishments. When advertising is placed within technology (media) it extends this representation.

Technological changes are external to our individual biological memory systems. They physically reside outside of us; they reside instead within the fabric of the culture. When we access media we access culture. Thus, advertisements placed within media are manifestations of collective memory - portals, if you will, to information stored outside of ourselves.

What is stored in our own mind is the cognitive architecture that knows what it can do internally and when it is that it needs to tap into external cognitive devices. Advertising, since it began, has always been one of those external cognitive devices. However, our dependence on it as such increases with every passing year.

I don't believe this dependence is such a bad veracity. As much as many folks hate advertising because they equate it with greed, I have quite a positive view of it. I believe that it's evolved not because of greed alone. While advertising certainly reflects that particular cultural value, it must be noted that greed is simply a reflection that advertising provides, not the central role that it plays.

The central role played by advertising is as unifier of societies. It's an embodiment of the symbols of public culture. It unifies in a manner that stimulates individuals to join in. It helps keep individuals from falling into the fray. It promises rewards for practicing adherence. It promises a gain in cultural capital.

These rewards are not necessarily found through the product being advertised; instead the reward comes when one completes internal dialogue by becoming actively involved in the external cognitive processes stored in advertising. Advertising, because it is a storage device for symbol systems, works within this process of practicing adherence.

Advertising has always played this role. It's always been a way to 'tap' into culture. It's always been both a mirror and a motivator. Advertising has always reflected as well as compelled.

Advertising's role since the mid-1800's hasn't really changed. What has changed is the presence advertising has in our lives. It once was peripheral; it's now unavoidably central.

I don't believe that's so undesirable. Advertising's role as a mirror reflects the changes in our own cognitive toolboxes. It gives us a means to measure culturally where we stand. Without advertising much of our decision-making would once again rely solely on our own internal dialogue. To do so wouldn't make sense in a world where technology represents mankind as a state of collective being. Since technology was created within the fabric of the culture, modern man has propelled himself into more and more social reliance, not less. Advertising is the natural outgrowth of that.

We rely on one another more than we ever have before. I can't think of a single thing in my life that is not socially based, whereas man 300 years ago could probably find at least one. We rely on the external symbolic storage devices that technology has given us more than we ever have before. Whether we like it or not, we rely on advertising to help us make decisions about what we like, dislike, believe and disbelieve about both ourselves and the world in which we live.

The results of this reliance are reflected in our modern cognitive architectures. We can use the analogy of the CPU of a computer (i.e. man) needing an external storage device, in this case, a link to the Internet (i.e. society). The constraints of the individual computer (man) become less important as it begins to utilize the network on a regular basis. Eventually, the knowledge of the network (society) becomes just as necessary to the CPU (man) as the properties it calls its own. Advertising fits into this example when we liken it to a means of an interface. It makes available search strategies, new storage strategies, new memory access routes, and new options in both the control of and analysis of one's own behavior.

One's own behavior has become increasingly difficult for the individual to analyze alone, especially since postmodernism appeared on the scene in the 1950's. Postmodernism resulted in a shift away from believing that there is a grand scheme to life with which an individual's behavior must be in accordance. Instead, an individual is free to choose which of the many smaller schemes in life he wishes to follow.

Since we are always referencing our culture while self-referencing, man looks to his culture to help him decide which schemes to follow. Advertising is one way that society packages up life-schemes from which an individual may choose. Furthermore, because these 'packages' are based on acceptable cultural values (acceptable by some scheme -i.e. subculture) while at the same time promising the individual cultural acceptance, they look quite attractive. Thus, advertising gift wraps this package of cultural capital for us, and a decision process that in the past would have occurred internally, now takes place both internally and externally.

Considering the important role that advertising now plays in assisting us with many of our decision-making processes, it is difficult to tell whether these processes are initiated via internal or external cognition. The point is: it doesn't matter where the process began. What matters is understanding that the way advertising works today makes it so that it's an integral part of the decision-making process; an individual in modern society, no matter how hard he tries, cannot complete certain cognitive processes without it.

Of course, advertising is not the only tool that we utilize to help us do some of our thinking outside of ourselves. The content in media besides advertising helps us 'think' as do books, computers and other people. However, advertising assists us by storing certain types of symbolic data that we do not store within our own mind but to which we still need access.

Advertising, as a symbolic storage device, has become relied upon so much that, as a natural outgrowth of heavy usage, the retrieval process has become more and more streamlined. In other words, the more we use it the better we get at storing and retrieving the information we need. I find the increasing visualization of advertising to be evidence of this. Logos are a great example: we can retrieve their meanings almost instantaneously.

This exhibits one of the characteristics of today's society: images have become the basis of postmodern culture and, as a result, external storage devices are becoming increasingly iconic (look at the Windows' software format for another example). Advertising provides the palette for representing this information, while at the same time providing us with a means to retrieve it.

Summing It Up

Advertising in the postmodern world works by assisting in the process whereby individual realities are completed within the sphere of social realities. Postmodernists call this concept "social constructivism" and cognitive scientists call it "distributed cognition." This concept is a key element in understanding how advertising works today. It's particularly important to recognize it within the context of man's third cognitive transition because we are still in the midst of that transition. Recall that at the heart of this transition man is evolving within the environment that he has created; he is no longer completely dependent on nature to dictate his next change. And, since it is society that dictates the environment of modern man, it is society to which man looks to assist him with his cognitive processes, including the process of cognitive evolution. In today's world, advertising and society are inexplicable bound to one another and to this process.