Advertisements: do they actually benefit us?

Advertising on a legitimized scale only began in the late 1800s (I think), from this soap company (you expected a more glorious starting right) called Pears Soap. Thomas Barratt decided that he needed to be more aggressive and started launching advertisements and posters featuring cherubic children in birthday suits using the soap which connoted his brand name as being full of purity and being untainted. In my opinion it’s very lame, but surprisingly it worked, and there began the history of modern advertising through symbolism and half naked people. Especially the latter.

To say that advertising is useful towards our wellbeing through the promotion of facts which becomes useful free-for-all public information, is like saying that Hwa Chong Institution advertising itself as the school with the highest SYF awards is correct. The abovementioned is true only because that includes our High School as well as Junior College side. If RI and RJC were to merge (they are going to) they would win us easily in terms of the number of SYF awards. Advertising has a bias, and will always have a bias, because that’s at the core of advertising. Even statistics thrown out, even if we concede that they are not faked or doctored, they are likely to be biased or misrepresentations. My friend once told me that we swallow up to 2 spiders in a week whenever we sleep. Firstly, that is likely to be an averaged out statistic, meaning that everyone has the tendency to swallow a lot more or a lot less spiders when they sleep. However, it is human nature to believe that that holds true for everyone, and become very disgusted and start vomiting.

Secondly, that statistic did not state the socio-economic background of those surveyed. Were they rich or poor? Where were the sleeping, a campsite? Were they even in Singapore, or Africa? There’s a reason why the BMI scale for western countries allows for fatter people than the scale for Asians. It is due to a difference in lifestyle. Global statistics, unless they’re calculated in a vacuum, are usually horribly inaccurate and inapplicable to anyone who is not “average”. But in this world, who truly is?

For my next paragraph, you all can go visit this link to show how funnily destructive competitiveness is: http://americatopten.blogspot.com/2006/12/advertisement-war-bmw-started-it-audi.html

Someone said that there are only three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies and statistics. After which, someone is supposed to say “There are only three types of people in this world. Those who can count, and those who can’t.” Unfortunately for us, advertising can easily fit all three categories. Do you truly believe Horlicks has as much calcium as 20 cups of milk, gives as much fibre/something else as several plates of spinach, etc? Yes perhaps that might be the whole carton of Horlicks, or even if it was the nutritional value of one cup, there’s no saying of how much of that artificial nutrition is actually absorbed into the body.

Yet we still trust advertising somewhat, because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to buy anything. The small “Terms and Conditions Apply” in the corner is something we brush aside to so the “bigger” and easier picture. So we buy the product.
We’re idiots.

Science and Technology

Being in SMTP, I personally feel insulted by the fact that people actually dare raise statements that science and technology actually corrupts our life. Yes that may be true to a certain extent, but what doesn’t? Over-utilizing anything, not just science and technology will result in negative repercussions. Furthermore, most of these “repercussions” are more often than not, just different interpretations of what we’ve done. For example, the whole contentious issue regarding abortion; perhaps it can be seen as a moral hazard from a non secular perspective, especially on the part of Roman Catholics, however it is essential to many people round the globe.

Science has almost always been an “enemy” of religion, because slowly but surely, religion has been losing ground on explanations for how things work, and in that sense, faith as well. Now I would like to point out the obvious fallacy in that argument; which is the fact that science had never chosen itself to oppose religion and neither are scientific discoveries made in the nature of showing how God doesn’t exist. Surely there are Catholics who not only learn science, but enjoy it and may become technicians or scientists in their own right? It is only when religion becomes over controlling and over asserting of itself, where conflict arises.

I bring the example of Galileo, the proud and boastful astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and most interestingly, monk. His discovery that a pendulum, regardless of the height with which it is swung at, will always take the same amount of time to complete an oscillation was actually chanced upon during a monk’s sermon where he got bored and looked at the chandelier swinging from the ceiling. Using his pulse to time it, he discovered a law governing motion and cured his boredom in the lecture. Truly a win-win situation. Then the Church discovered his documents (including the one about the Earth going round the Sun) and they ended up nearly throwing him in jail, but they settled for a house arrest and a written apology.

Now let’s look to all the times where religion has tried to over assert itself. Like science, and perhaps even worse than science, religion has (not so) clearly done more damage. More people have been killed in the name of God than any other reason. The Holy Crusades (yes, all of them) are among the most pointless of wars in the history of Mankind. Today we have Osama bin Laden who just can’t keep his mouth shut about how everyone else except himself is an infidel. Considering how intolerant religions are of each other (if you don’t believe in my God, you go to my hell, and my followers will send you there quickly), it is remarkable that we’ve come the distance that we have.

Science and technology on the other hand, have been advancing largely in terms of their practical use to mankind. As pointless as deep space physics appears to be, it is still believed that these fundamental rules of the universe are the key to unlocking our origins. It was discovered that every single human is created from “stardust”, meaning that the matter we’re made of was originally from another star. I would like to see in what way mankind differs from animals if we do not have science and technology. Anarchists can go to hell. IR8 rice saved India from starvation in the 1960s. People can rant on about how it is unethical to modify genes, but in the end lives were saved, and if they’d like to complain perhaps theirs’ shouldn’t.