The internet runs on ads.

Ad companies pay for all the “free” popular social media we use. Ad companies dictate to social media what their clients want their ads to be associated with, not associated with, and drive media of all kinds to push inflammatory and click-bait content that drives engagement and views. It’s why you indirectly can’t swear, talk about suicide, drugs, death, or violence. Sure, you technically can unless ToS prohibits it, but if companies tell their ad hosts they don’t want to be associated with someone talking about guns, the content discussing guns gets fewer ads, fewer ads = less revenue, low-revenue gets pushed to the bottom.

So lowbrow political rage bait, science denialism, and fake conspiracies drives people to interact and then gets pushed to the top because it gets ad revenue. Content that delves into critical thought and requires introspection or contemplation languishes.

Ads are destroying society because stupid and rage sells views.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
    24·
    7 hours ago

    People interested in storytelling have been obsessed with the “Hero’s Journey” for decades, which a fantastically sexist man hacked together as a concept from a poor interpretation of James Joyce and of cherry picked anthropological evidence.

    What pisses me off is that the idea has taken such complete hold of artist’s imagination that it makes people only want to talk about “Narrative” with respect to storytelling, and it misses the most essential aspect of storytelling in that good stories are always inherently plural in their nature. A good story is a cacophony of potentially true narratives all vying for your soul on stage with no easy answer, not a simple list of plot points delivered to convince you of a particular belief and singular structure through which to see a set of events.

    This leads to a massive learned blindspot about advertisement in that artists lose sight of the fact that Advertisement is the annihilation of Storytelling where the natural human invitation for the audience to interpret and construct their own unique Narrative is buried in an avalanche by an overwhelming reifying force that simplifies a complex reality down to a single corporate produced Narrative. People who do sports wear Nike.

    Advertisement is the attempt to annihilate art, it can be seen no other way no matter how many artists the advertisement industry employs in the process.

    Many people will be shocked, however, to learn that academic folklorists and scholars of ancient literature almost universally reject Campbell’s theories as nonsense—and for good reason. Campbell’s outline of the “hero’s journey” is so hopelessly vague that it is essentially useless for analyzing stories across cultures. It also displays ethnocentric, sexist, heteronormative, and cisnormative biases and it encourages people to ignore the ways in which stories are fundamentally shaped by the cultures and time periods in which they are produced.

    …

    Campbell starts out with the assumption that every great story must be focused on a single hero, whom he generally assumes to be a heterosexual man. According to Campbell, the “hero’s journey” begins with the hero living in a state of normality, which is disrupted by some kind of “call to adventure,” which takes the hero into the realm of the “unknown,” which “is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, super human deeds, and impossible delight.

    https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/

    For those who disagree, can you not see how directly this imposed definition of what a Story is slots perfectly into rationalizing Advertising and focusing on it as the true purpose of an Artist?

    • rhymeswithduck@sh.itjust.works
      21·
      5 hours ago

      I think you’re giving Campbell way more credit than he is generally given by the writing community at large. Yes, that is one way to write a story, but it’s certainly not the only method taught. For example, slice-of-life stories are completely acceptable, however it is harder to get some of the nuance across to new writers. The hero’s journey is an easy starting point, that’s all. And I really don’t think Campbell was trying to say that’s how everything should be. He was making observations about what he already saw in popular western media.

      I don’t understand your seeming conflation of advertising and art, which seems like a separate point from your criticism of Campbell. Advertising does not control art, nor vice versa. It makes more sense to look at things through the lens of money: art can be basically free to create (writing, drawing, street art are all pretty cheap). Anyone can do it. Now, something like making a film is not cheap. It can cost millions of dollars, and not many people have enough lying around to do so without getting a return on that investment. In other words, film has to make money. They know the hero’s journey will sell because it is easy for the average Westerner to digest and enjoy. So you see a lot more hero’s journey stories on the screen than you do in the wide world of books, which can afford to be more experimental or art-driven. Someone like Banksy isn’t worried about finding a rich buyer to recoup the cost of his stencils and paint. Would you agree?

      Advertising is a different beast altogether, and I’m not sure why you would criticize it for not being art. It was never supposed to be that.

      • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
        11·
        5 hours ago

        They know the hero’s journey will sell because it is easy for the average Westerner to digest and enjoy. So you see a lot more hero’s journey stories on the screen than you do in the wide world of books, which can afford to be more experimental or art-driven. Someone like Banksy isn’t worried about finding a rich buyer to recoup the cost of his stencils and paint. Would you agree?

        I think you see this conversation as discussing a serious of fairly innocuous individual elements whereas I see it as part of a broader, irrevocably intersectional problem that must be addressed in a wholistic fashion by integrating all pieces of it. I see advertisement as not separate from art and only harmful in its unintended collisions with it but rather an intentional as well as subconscious colonization and co-opting of the societal values around human artists that has culminated inevitably in AI wrecking havoc on what remains of our curiosity about human creativity.

        Campbell’s theories therefore provide justification for white westerners to reject the interpretations that non-western peoples give for their own stories, if those interpretations don’t align with what the white westerners in question think the interpretations should be. Thus, western perspectives are portrayed as universal perspectives and non-western perspectives are dismissed.

        …

        Thinking about the culturally specific influences behind familiar stories is important because it reveals that many of the assumptions that exist within our own culture that we take for granted are not universal at all, but rather rooted in very culturally specific prejudices. For instance, in the Star Wars movies, darkness and the color black are both closely associated with evil. The evil side of the Force is referred to as the “dark side” and the title darth, which is used by the evil Sith Lords, literally sounds like the word dark. On top of this, Darth Vader wears a black suit and the Emperor wears a black cloak.

        This association of darkness and the color black with evil is rooted in Christianity, which has been the dominant religion in the United States for most of modern history. Throughout the writings of the New Testament, darkness is repeatedly equated with evil and Satan, while light is repeatedly associated with goodness and God. For instance, in the Gospel of John 8:12, Jesus is portrayed as saying, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

        “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

        https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/

        “It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light”

    • mushroommunk@lemmy.today
      3·
      8 hours ago

      That’s an interesting take. Have an article or blog post or paper anywhere that gives into it more? Not sure I agree or disagree but it’s an interesting thought

      • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
        13·
        7 hours ago

        That is a difficult question to answer, I am not the first person to think this by any means but finding people who put it into simple terms and connect the dots is difficult.

        This is a great example of the species of brainworms I am talking about though.

        People fall in love with the story arc and the characters in these hero’s journey examples because they see themselves in the “before” phase—feeling stuck, small, and unseen.

        They crave a transformation.

        If you want to get better at selling your product or service, you have to understand that people don’t buy products or services.

        They buy transformations.

        Your customer is trying to get from point A to point B, but they don’t know how to do it on their own. If you want to sell to them, make your product or service the bridge between where they are and where they want to be.

        That’s why this storytelling structure works so well in marketing. Your customer is the protagonist, and your product/service is what helps them answer their call to adventure.

        I’m reminded of this quote:

        “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” —Henry David Thoreau

        https://thevectorimpact.com/heros-journey-examples/

        The thought terminating logic goes good advertising is storytelling --> all good storytelling is the Hero’s Journey.

        Which… I think the advertisement people are right, Hero’s Journeys are a perfect description of advertisements, they have a precise structure meant to influence you to see things a certain way. The problem is it is a suffocating regime to impose upon Storytelling as a pursuit of art and self-expression and it is killing our communal spaces at a deep level because of it. Artists are trained to only tell stories that contain the same genetic structure as advertisements because how the hell else do you earn money and respect as an artist these days but utterly optimize every aspect of your artistry to trying desperately to make some money?

    • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
      11·
      7 hours ago

      I disagree. James Campbell was not a perfect man, but he did coalesce what humans like to see in a story most of the time. It’s not a perfect scenario like he claimed, but more of a guide to most cultures. If you look at boring structures of story, it’s usually because it doesn’t follow western structure (the hero’s journey). Joseph Campbell hated Noh from Japanese culture because he couldn’t follow it as a hero’s journey. Even if he didn’t speak the language, he could usually tell when they followed it. I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about when cherry picking. He’s right in that to a westerner, it will be hard to understand and may be boring. To the Japanese though, it’s been around a long time.

      • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
        12·
        7 hours ago

        He’s right in that to a westerner, it will be hard to understand and may be boring.

        Ok, but he is wrong in believing that says anything meaningful about Storytelling, it is just a shitty mirror to our own failings as a culture to point out this repetitive structure, encourage people to repeat it more and then idolize it as “universal” when it isn’t.

        Over the last few decades, this structure has come to dominate much of popular storytelling, and Hollywood cinema in particular. With so many bestselling novels and international blockbusters using the Hero’s Journey to great success, it would seem at first glance that Campbell was right—that most or all great stories can be distilled down to a formula, which is universally applicable across time and place.

        However, as we’ll be exploring in today’s blog post, Campbell’s theories aren’t always a perfect fit for the needs of storytellers in the real world. The Hero’s Journey is not as universal as Campbell would claim—and the framework is weighed down by Campbell’s own antisemetic and sexist thinking.

        …

        “projected Anglo-Western storytelling and cultural values onto Indigenous mythic narratives, which in fact have very different storytelling norms and serve a very different purpose to the individualistic striving for self fulfilment which he identified [as the key to all storytelling].”

        In other words, Campbell cites superficial similarities between myths of different cultures as evidence for the claim that the stories of all cultures share an underlying purpose, i.e. the dramatic reenactment of the individual’s quest for self fulfillment.

        In the process, he ignores overwhelming ethnographic evidence that the very idea of an atomized, individual “self” separated from clan, species, etc. is a relatively new one in the history of human thought, and that such a striving self is not a central feature in stories from many parts of the world.

        https://freerange.com/blog/joseph-campbell-history-and-antisemitism-critiquing-the-heros-journey

        Do I really need to explicitly connect why this broken conception of stories is advantageous to the Advertising Industry? It encapsulates the full extent of artistry within the bounds of capitalism and subsumes the work of the artist as simply the cherry on top to help a product be sold. EVERYTHING an artist can do is just a manipulation to impose a very particular narrative of a set of events into the minds of the audience.

        • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
          11·
          7 hours ago

          Did you read what I said? I said the same thing as what you quoted from the blog, lol. The other formats are mostly boring to a westerner’s ear. It’s easy enough to figure out for yourself, watch movies and advertising before Star Wars. Star Wars is when the Hero’s Journey became popular and when advertising would have started to switch over too. Check for yourself if the movies followed it in America and Europe before Star Wars. Hint, the acclaimed ones mostly did.

            • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
              21·
              7 hours ago

              Wait, do you really think you’re right allllll the time? I’m not sure what chip you have on your shoulder, but you’re obviously butt hurt about something. Again, Campbell is not perfect, but he did give writers a handy guide to jump off from. You seem like you’re trolling or think you’re super duper smart or something? Smart people try to see other people’s side.

              • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
                12·
                7 hours ago

                Why do you feel the need to defend Campbell so passionately? Is he your daddy or something?

                Also yeah, I am the smartest person here, I am the hero so duh, obviously?

                • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
                  11·
                  7 hours ago

                  Why do you feel the need to defend Campbell so passionately? Is he your daddy or something?

                  Ahh, the troll shows it face. Have a wonderful day.