When students talked about the nature of the media and advertising, they saw it first as an entertainment, as a diversion. Of course, when asked, they said that what it really did was make money by selling us those products that will save us from our inadequate selves. Once the students reflected on this economic relationship between information and entertainment and our consuming products to make money, they saw and expressed other possibilities in discussion.
The most obvious and least important thing that the media sell us comes in the form of products. More importantly, if not vitally, they sell us a way of thinking, a way of living, a way of acting, and way of perceiving ourselves and the world. The media in all its forms, entertainment, information, and advertising, pervade our lives and thus seduce us softly into accepting meaning perspectives about ourselves and the world. Once we accept these meaning perspectives, we will willingly continue to submit and serve as unquestioning volunteer participants in the creation of other's wealth and power while we pay for the privilege of doing so.[165] Whatever the economic costs we suffer from this arrangement, we suffer another cost we feel hidden from us, but showed in my students' attitude toward interviews. Participating in the media and advertising fed my students' fears about themselves. It fostered feelings inside them that cause them to feel essentially defective, essentially flawed and inadequate, undeserving of the unconditional. As the expression would have it, when they went to an interview to sell themselves, they felt they had precious little to sell.[166]
My students felt they had become a product, a commodity which was rather a drug on the market—a dime a dozen, and defective and flawed at that. They had become reified, an It in an I/It relationship with the media and with their economic and personal worlds. When we looked at the advertisements and programs they watched, we could see how their self-perception had become defective and flawed, inadequate and unacceptable on the open market. That's a bad enough self-perception/meaning perspective when you think about my students and our general approach to valuing ourselves in the workplace, but it absolutely hammers at our human vulnerabilities, our need to receive and to give the unconditional. This assault on our worldly identity and ego comes at a very high price. The more we concentrate on an identity that will please others, the more we surrender to the dominator, conformist meaning perspective for the world. Our ego becomes more and more defensive and thus more and more aggressive. All of this distances us from the becoming self we seek.
It occurs to me now that we all seek the becoming self even when we feel no conscious desire to do so. This recalls us to my sojourn in the cheapest cab in town. Those people I met sought the becoming self because they felt a hunger for some non-material or spiritual part of themselves wherein a peace with self and the world might lie. However, the world in which they lived never suggested the existence of something other than the material to feed hunger. As a result, they felt their need through material and dependency creating means. In that process they gained another form of identity which in some strange way satisfied their need for identity even as it made any real experience or pursuit of the non-material, spiritual part of themselves nearly impossible. They found a very tangible identity, but in exchange, they lost their connection with the unconditional.
The media, advertising and the popular culture break our connection with the unconditional as well in much the same way. They create identity and dependency, too. They tell us our human needs can only be feed through material consumption.