Institute For The Future

Rushkoff on persuasion, coercion, and why we listen

 

As part of my research on the Future of Advertising, I'll be interviewing Douglas Rushkoff, professor and author of Media Virus, Coercion, Life Inc. and other books about culture, technology, and the mediascape. Several years ago, Douglas wrote and narrated The Persuaders, a PBS Frontline documentary about new, and often controversial, methods marketers and advertisers use to push us to specific behaviors (such as buying new sneakers or choosing one brand of soda over another). I think The Persuaders, viewable online in its entirety, and Douglas's first Nightline documentary Merchants Of Cool, should be required viewing in junior high school as media literacy training. As part of the online support materials for The Persuaders, PBS republished a chapter from Douglas's book Coercion: Why We Listen To What "They" Say. The chapter, readable here, contains a classic Rushkoff bit about the revolutionary power of the television remote control as a weapon against one of advertisers' most powerful tools of persuasion: narrative tension. From Coercion:

 

Most stories work by generating tension. The plot moves up an inclined plane of increasing stakes and danger, and the audience experiences the agonizing thrill of going along for the ride. The further into danger the character goes, the higher our own level of tension will become. The good storyteller slowly and consistently builds our anxiety—careful not to push so hard that we run out of the theater. As the level of tension increases, we are drawn deeper into the storyteller's spell. The worse it gets, the more dependent we are on the storyteller for a way out. It's all worth the pain, though, because eventually the conflict will be resolved and the audience will be released into delightful catharsis.

 

Because the audience is willing to accept any reasonable escape from their own state of unbearable tension, the storyteller has the power to concoct whatever solution he wishes. And embedded in that solution can be an agenda. The more intense an audience's level of anxiety, the more preposterous a release it will accept.

 

The thirty-second advertisement can use narrative tension to influence through catharsis, too. The story just has to generate its anxiety more quickly. I was disturbed as a child by an ad in which a midlevel executive is seated behind his desk. He looks like a nice enough guy—a lot like us, in fact. But something's wrong. His phone is ringing noisily. His boss is angry. He's lost an account. His wife crashed the car. We see he is in great pain. What's he going to do? He opens the drawer of his desk and smiles. What does he see? A brand of pain reliever, of course. He swallows the pills, and we watch as a psychedelic swirl of colors fills the outline of his body, soothing every painful area. He is happy, and his problems seem diminished. I can remember wishing my problems would manifest themselves as a headache so that they could be cured as easily.

 

As long as an influence professional can build his idea -- be it a product, candidate, or lifestyle—into the fabric of a story, he can successfully program an audience to accept it. The better his story -- the more profoundly we identify with his character's dilemma -- the more fully and permanently we will accept the underlying agenda...

 

In an appeal to the La-Z-Boy viewer, television manufacturers developed the remote control. Little did they realize it would thwart the efforts of the people programming television content.A person armed with a remote control makes a completely different set of internal calculations when confronted with an anxiety-producing narrative. With very little effort, he can push a button and release himself from the rise in tension. Young people today pride themselves more on their channel-surfing capabilities than on the lengths of their attention spans. Watch yourself or your child operate a remote control; the impulse to change channels arises more often out of disgust at being made to feel tense than out of simple boredom.

A person with a remote control doesn't need to be sucked into the aspirin commercial any more than he is into the Suzanne Pleshette movie. The businessman in the commercial is obviously having a bad day. Why watch? Click. Easy as that.

 

The television remote allows for easy escape, fundamentally changing the viewing audience's relationship to television. Young people and remote-control-capable adults no longer sit back and watch a television program; they watch the TV set and put it through its paces. They are literally watching and deconstructing styles of programming. Just as journalists and the public watched Marv Albert work his spin control, viewers now watch television programmers and advertisers attempt to draw them into coercive stories.