Advertising Awareness: the ability to expose advertising discourses that undermine sustainability, and resist them, Arran Stibbe, University of Gloucestershire
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Catching a glimpse into the deep insights about human needs that modern psychology has revealed requires little more than picking up the nearest magazine and critically analysing the advertisements within it. Since Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, first started applying his uncle’s psychological theories to public relations and advertising in the 1920s, a significant proportion of the effort of modern psychology has been applied to the task of convincing people to consume. A magazine advertisement for a vacuum cleaner reads:
Life isn’t always neat and tidy. It’s about laughing, crying, loving, dancing, maybe even shouting. So we’ve developed the new QuickClick tool change system and the ComfoGlide floor tool, to save you energy and time to enjoy what we’ve all been put into the world to actually do. Live. (Kärcher advertisement 2006)
Central to sustainability literacy is awareness of the consequences of such discourses for the sustainability of society (Stibbe 2008).
Click for pdf download of the full chapter 'Advertising Awareness' from the Handbook for Sustainability Literacy
