Selling Paranoia, Building Paranoia
Jul. 18th, 2009 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peristaltorToday I need to rant about what an abysmal direction I feel our society is going, specifically when it comes to how we interact with each other and our environment. The "with each other" is pretty easy to codify. Just watch the telly.
Since 9/11, I've noticed several commercials like this one with a simple message: There are people out to get us. We need to protect ourselves against them.
While I cannot disagree that there are indeed people who break into homes and cars for personal gain, how much of a threat does this really pose to the average person? Does it justify the expense this alarm service no doubt incurs?
That's people. People are, after all, able to break stuff and hurt you. I'm not saying most will, not at all; but some are capable. Terrorists are people, aren't they? Still, this bunker-down with never-ending vigilance the falling towers exasperated has found a marketing niche in other creatures, too.
Here the fear of intrusion and of the violation such an intrusion brings uses the language of petty crime we saw in the first example and applies it to insects. Another:
No crime in this one, but the language of overwhelming forces beyond which no one can fight with normal tools alone certainly mirrors fears found in the other pest control commercial.
Ready to go even smaller?
There are, for me at least, too many of these commercials to count. . . and I don't watch much television. I only watch to make The Wife feel at home during her watching. (Once these ads start running, or once an especially egregious example airs, it's time for me to take a walk or hit the computer or read a book so she can stop listening to the rants. . . .)
Shall we continue? Fungi and bacteria could be waiting to invade our bodies and cause their grievous harm thanks to someone's outdated hygienic cleaning methods:
Bacteria -- like fungi and bugs and burglars -- is everywhere. It can make you sick, or worse. It could get inside you. You should be afraid. You should take steps to protect your family. You want to protect your family, don't you?
What bugs me most is the complete disregard these ads have for, well, reality.
Perhaps with these two anti-sponge examples we just need to refresh our basic understanding of bacterial infection. These infections need more than just a stainless steel fridge handle or plastic handset to thrive. They need something like an agar, that sticky stuff that coats the bottom of petri dishes. They need food and shelter, perhaps bits of grime or uneaten food.
If you wipe with a sponge, why not try occasionally thoroughly rinsing the sponge? That's something the ads never show, isn't it? One cannot spread what one sends down the drain. It doesn't take more than a well-rinsed sponge to clean most kitchen surfaces well enough to prevent the spread of hand- and food-born disease, no matter what sickly green color one uses to represent them in ads.
Ah, but that was not the point. The ads ran to graphically dramatize potentially infectious diseases spreading via those filthy little food spills and kiddie vectors and to demonstrate that unless one buys and uses an implement that can capture and be disposed of entirely, one is still in danger, isn't one?
Furthermore, we need some exposure to bacteria. Without it we would, well, die.
Hear me out. Our immune systems work in a way similar to our skin. If you handle tools or walk barefoot for long enough, you will develop callouses, a thickening of the skin where contact is made. It won't happen immediately. Yes, just as one can cut oneself or develop a nasty blister with too much contact, one can easily pick up a previously uncontracted bug or a huge concentration of familiar bugs and get sick; the chances are good, however, that the sickness will soon pass once the immune system develops specific antibodies tailored to resist that flavor of disease. Let both the skin and the immune system heal, and one is ready to go again, now with thicker callouses and a tougher immune system.
Without that constant low-grade exposure to bacteria and viruses, our immune system weakens just as constantly shod feet lose their thickness and thus their ability to walk barefoot without pain. Sometimes.
Consider auto-immune diseases.
They make a lot of sense, actually. Given a long lack of contact with certain heretofore ubiquitous afflictions, should any immune system breath a sigh of relief and relax for a while? No. According to Carl Zimmer in Parasite Rex, we have as long a history with infectious organisms as we have a history on this earth. Infectious organisms will find a way to evolve sneaky camouflage against detection. Count on it. Therefore, any immune system that doesn't ramp up its level of bug-intrusion counter-measures during "safe" times runs the predictable risk of falling prey to the still undiscovered bug.
A bug-free life the likes of which we live today may never have been a part of life before today. In fact, no, not "may." We can count on it.
As a result, our protective systems are ramping up in ways that harm us. The ancient Greeks and Romans had long and detailed books describing the diseases that befell them; why then didn't they document hay fever? Perhaps because they never experienced it. They were, after all, quite likely to suffer from various intestinal worm infestations. . . and there's evidence that people with such infestations don't suffer hay fever. Even worse than debilitating sneezing, some today lose portions of their intestines to auto-immune disease. What if that is just another response to a lack of worms to fight?
Our vigilance against infection might well be doing us a serious disservice, if not backfiring entirely. We're quite probably keeping ourselves so hygienically pure that we are falling prey to disease.
What bothers me most, though, is not that we are living such lives. It's that our attitudes against personal intrusion and violation are preventing most of us from even considering changing our hyper-prophylactic habits. Those commercials peddle their wares well, after all, because the message resonates with the buying public. We view criminal and cultural home intrusion with the same mental template applied to bugs large and small. These ads hit all the paranoid hot spots in our collective psyches that our culture and recent events have super-heated.
After all, only recently did we start to see cleaning wipes outside markets, available to wipe the horrible green CGI from the cart handle left by someone else's sloppy brat.
(Even worse, until recently these wipes were often available in antibiotic versions. I'm glad that silliness has ended. After all, people, how do you breed bacteria resistant to anti-bacterial substances? You constantly expose the bacteria to repeated less-than-thorough exposures to anti-bacterial substances. If civilization ever falls to the next plague, it will likely be spread through shopping cart handles.)
What happens if you should ingest some bug? Probably nothing. After all, our intestines are a happy home to more types of bug than we know about. It's true. The standard way to count these bugs was to smear some fecal matter on a petri dish and count what grew. Simple, right? Ah, but past researchers forgot to consider that anaerobic bacteria won't grow on a lab bench exposed to the air. Once a researcher ran a fecal sample through a DNA analysis, that researcher found that science had previously under-counted the intestinal flora by an order of magnitude.
These bacteria, fungi, et cetera aren't mere invaders. (Not all of them, anyhoo.) Most find a job breaking down our food so our intestines can absorb the nutrients. That's what the appendix does, provides a safe haven for our bacterial friends lest they be swept out the poop chute every time nature calls. It's not a "vestigial" organ at all; it's a sanctuary, a home to our little up-the-butt buddies, without which most of our food would pass right on through only partially digested.
Try telling that happy ass tale to someone who still can't accept immigrants or a new mosque in his or her neighborhood. Until we change our dominant paradigm, mostly by lowering the Panic Level, we run the risk of conflating The Others on our news and in our towns with the Bugs That Will Probably Kill Us. And changing this way of viewing the world is going to be awfully difficult with folks peddling snake oil using the paranoid language associated with both Bugs and Others.
A woman wanders through her home at night. A noise from downstairs startles her. She runs up the stairs and hits the panic button, alerting the alarm company. A siren sounds, scaring the prowler in the low-budget balaclava ninja outfit. He takes flight through the window he just smashed and escapes. Though panicked, the woman is safe because of that alarm and the service the company provides. A blanket of 1s and 0s surround the house like a digital shield against intrusion.
Since 9/11, I've noticed several commercials like this one with a simple message: There are people out to get us. We need to protect ourselves against them.
While I cannot disagree that there are indeed people who break into homes and cars for personal gain, how much of a threat does this really pose to the average person? Does it justify the expense this alarm service no doubt incurs?
That's people. People are, after all, able to break stuff and hurt you. I'm not saying most will, not at all; but some are capable. Terrorists are people, aren't they? Still, this bunker-down with never-ending vigilance the falling towers exasperated has found a marketing niche in other creatures, too.
A woman answers her door to find a human-sized ant standing on her stoop. They exchange words. During the exchange, the ant -- cartoonish but still anatomically ant-like and threatening -- peers beyond the woman into the house, not unlike a quick burglar's casing. She closes the door and calls an exterminator. He arrives and discusses the encounter with the woman on the lawn. As they talk, the ant drives by the house in a beat-up dun-colored sedan. The ant and the exterminator lock eyes, and the ant speeds away. The last shot is of the exterminator's vigilant face.
Here the fear of intrusion and of the violation such an intrusion brings uses the language of petty crime we saw in the first example and applies it to insects. Another:
A shaggy dog wanders into the living room and shakes (or scratches, I'm not sure which). A dot marked by the number 1 hops off the dog and settles into the shag carpet. Soon, more dots bounce from the first, each with a unique ascending number, until dots with numbers in the high hundreds can be seen bouncing everywhere. Only until a pesticide is applied to the carpets and dog are the dots eliminated.
No crime in this one, but the language of overwhelming forces beyond which no one can fight with normal tools alone certainly mirrors fears found in the other pest control commercial.
Ready to go even smaller?
A slobbish blob, cartoony and boorish in a Ralph Cramden way and with an attitude of Up Yours, explains how he, a simple fungus, dwells under toe nails. He lifts a nail and makes himself home, until the unguent or polstice or elixer du jour can be applied to remove his smug mug.
Another blob, this one wearing a wife-beater tee, describes how he makes himself home in human lungs. Once the inhaler or pill is ingested, he and his shabby furniture are coughed out. Another version features a wife looking just as low-rent and just as at home in your lungs.
There are, for me at least, too many of these commercials to count. . . and I don't watch much television. I only watch to make The Wife feel at home during her watching. (Once these ads start running, or once an especially egregious example airs, it's time for me to take a walk or hit the computer or read a book so she can stop listening to the rants. . . .)
Shall we continue? Fungi and bacteria could be waiting to invade our bodies and cause their grievous harm thanks to someone's outdated hygienic cleaning methods:
A woman wipes a spill from her counter using a sponge. CGI animation tracks her wipe, showing that the sponge (according to the added images) merely smears and spreads the contamination the sponge inherently carries. A disposable wipe tackles and disposes of the gunk, perhaps vile, perhaps deadly, that the sponge so carelessly leaves.
In another, a child coughs into his hand. A sickly green glow sticks where the cough has landed. He answers the phone; the green transfers from the filthy hand and sticks to the handset without diminishing in amount or intensity. Another child opens the fridge; another opens a door; the green clings to the handle and knob. Only a disposable wipe rids the home of the growing green promise of illness.
Bacteria -- like fungi and bugs and burglars -- is everywhere. It can make you sick, or worse. It could get inside you. You should be afraid. You should take steps to protect your family. You want to protect your family, don't you?
What bugs me most is the complete disregard these ads have for, well, reality.
Perhaps with these two anti-sponge examples we just need to refresh our basic understanding of bacterial infection. These infections need more than just a stainless steel fridge handle or plastic handset to thrive. They need something like an agar, that sticky stuff that coats the bottom of petri dishes. They need food and shelter, perhaps bits of grime or uneaten food.
If you wipe with a sponge, why not try occasionally thoroughly rinsing the sponge? That's something the ads never show, isn't it? One cannot spread what one sends down the drain. It doesn't take more than a well-rinsed sponge to clean most kitchen surfaces well enough to prevent the spread of hand- and food-born disease, no matter what sickly green color one uses to represent them in ads.
Ah, but that was not the point. The ads ran to graphically dramatize potentially infectious diseases spreading via those filthy little food spills and kiddie vectors and to demonstrate that unless one buys and uses an implement that can capture and be disposed of entirely, one is still in danger, isn't one?
Furthermore, we need some exposure to bacteria. Without it we would, well, die.
Hear me out. Our immune systems work in a way similar to our skin. If you handle tools or walk barefoot for long enough, you will develop callouses, a thickening of the skin where contact is made. It won't happen immediately. Yes, just as one can cut oneself or develop a nasty blister with too much contact, one can easily pick up a previously uncontracted bug or a huge concentration of familiar bugs and get sick; the chances are good, however, that the sickness will soon pass once the immune system develops specific antibodies tailored to resist that flavor of disease. Let both the skin and the immune system heal, and one is ready to go again, now with thicker callouses and a tougher immune system.
Without that constant low-grade exposure to bacteria and viruses, our immune system weakens just as constantly shod feet lose their thickness and thus their ability to walk barefoot without pain. Sometimes.
Consider auto-immune diseases.
They make a lot of sense, actually. Given a long lack of contact with certain heretofore ubiquitous afflictions, should any immune system breath a sigh of relief and relax for a while? No. According to Carl Zimmer in Parasite Rex, we have as long a history with infectious organisms as we have a history on this earth. Infectious organisms will find a way to evolve sneaky camouflage against detection. Count on it. Therefore, any immune system that doesn't ramp up its level of bug-intrusion counter-measures during "safe" times runs the predictable risk of falling prey to the still undiscovered bug.
A bug-free life the likes of which we live today may never have been a part of life before today. In fact, no, not "may." We can count on it.
As a result, our protective systems are ramping up in ways that harm us. The ancient Greeks and Romans had long and detailed books describing the diseases that befell them; why then didn't they document hay fever? Perhaps because they never experienced it. They were, after all, quite likely to suffer from various intestinal worm infestations. . . and there's evidence that people with such infestations don't suffer hay fever. Even worse than debilitating sneezing, some today lose portions of their intestines to auto-immune disease. What if that is just another response to a lack of worms to fight?
Our vigilance against infection might well be doing us a serious disservice, if not backfiring entirely. We're quite probably keeping ourselves so hygienically pure that we are falling prey to disease.
What bothers me most, though, is not that we are living such lives. It's that our attitudes against personal intrusion and violation are preventing most of us from even considering changing our hyper-prophylactic habits. Those commercials peddle their wares well, after all, because the message resonates with the buying public. We view criminal and cultural home intrusion with the same mental template applied to bugs large and small. These ads hit all the paranoid hot spots in our collective psyches that our culture and recent events have super-heated.
After all, only recently did we start to see cleaning wipes outside markets, available to wipe the horrible green CGI from the cart handle left by someone else's sloppy brat.
(Even worse, until recently these wipes were often available in antibiotic versions. I'm glad that silliness has ended. After all, people, how do you breed bacteria resistant to anti-bacterial substances? You constantly expose the bacteria to repeated less-than-thorough exposures to anti-bacterial substances. If civilization ever falls to the next plague, it will likely be spread through shopping cart handles.)
What happens if you should ingest some bug? Probably nothing. After all, our intestines are a happy home to more types of bug than we know about. It's true. The standard way to count these bugs was to smear some fecal matter on a petri dish and count what grew. Simple, right? Ah, but past researchers forgot to consider that anaerobic bacteria won't grow on a lab bench exposed to the air. Once a researcher ran a fecal sample through a DNA analysis, that researcher found that science had previously under-counted the intestinal flora by an order of magnitude.
These bacteria, fungi, et cetera aren't mere invaders. (Not all of them, anyhoo.) Most find a job breaking down our food so our intestines can absorb the nutrients. That's what the appendix does, provides a safe haven for our bacterial friends lest they be swept out the poop chute every time nature calls. It's not a "vestigial" organ at all; it's a sanctuary, a home to our little up-the-butt buddies, without which most of our food would pass right on through only partially digested.
Try telling that happy ass tale to someone who still can't accept immigrants or a new mosque in his or her neighborhood. Until we change our dominant paradigm, mostly by lowering the Panic Level, we run the risk of conflating The Others on our news and in our towns with the Bugs That Will Probably Kill Us. And changing this way of viewing the world is going to be awfully difficult with folks peddling snake oil using the paranoid language associated with both Bugs and Others.