Pursuant to a conversation about dreams, my friend Dan forwarded to me the following link to an article published online by the New York Times. The subject of the article is ”a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/health/10mind.html?em
Written by Benedict Carey, the title of the article is “A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain”. Of the 24 paragraphs in the article, only four of those paragraphs include a reference to the premise of the original research paper by Dr. Hobson, that “dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.” Rather than explore this premise, the article emphasized a much more sinister interpretation of dreams, concluding with the sentence, “No reason to scream, even if it were possible.” Other words used by the journalist to describe dream research, words not ascribed to or included in direct quotes from the sources themselves include: Divorce, frustrations, argues, argues, stirred controversy, anxieties, frantic, imagined loss, strong biases, attach more significance to a negative dream, mystery, argument, impossible to scream, heavy dose, night terrors, attacks, narcolepsy, infringement, struggle, schizophrenia, suffer delusions, unknown origin, abnormal, psychosis, ominous, strange, meaningless.
What interested me relates to my own current research into the omnipresence of subliminal persuasion and embedded suggestions in media. The words listed above could be expected to create a much different state in the mind of a reader than the title, “Tuneups for the Brain,” suggests. The visions of troubling dream experiences, prompted by those word choices, are probably not ones a reader wants to keep in mind. Therefore, he or she may want to be quickly taken into some other thought. And, looking at the ”package” in which the article arrived, New York Times online is prepared to do just that. Opening one’s aperture only slightly beyond the printed words of the article, one can readily see this “package”.
First, running vertically down the middle of the screen, next to the title and adjacent to the first five paragraphs, the following list of 14 links. Each link incorporates a sign-in service and, in some cases, ads for various additional services and products.
- Sign in to Recommend
- comments (28)
- Sign In to E-Mail
- Reprints
- ShareClose
- Digg
- Mixx
- MySpace
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Permalink
On the right third of the page, lists of other articles alternate with print and photo advertising. Interestingly, the top grouping of other articles is titled “Well”. Well, despite its seemingly benign title, “A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain,” consider again the rather unsettling embedded suggestions in the main article incited by the journalist’s word choices. This word choice and suggested unease just might incite a sense of “un-wellness” in the reader for whom these additional articles could seem particularly worth reading. Should the reader choose to review this article on another day day, a brand new list of current articles and advertisements appear in this location. And, it is worth noting, that this location, the right side of the page, is an advertiser’s premier selling location.
This may well be exactly the hoped-for consequence which telephone utility engineer Claude Shannon and physicist Warren Weaver foresaw when they developed “Information Theory,” for Bell Labs/AT&T. While envisioning a system by which the greatest amount of data could be tranferred across a phone line, Shannon defined information as “something completely meaningless”. Danish science writer Tor Norretranders states in his chapter ”The Tree of Talking” in The User Illusion:Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, “Indeed there are plenty of grounds for a conspiracy theory of the most devious kind: that the notion of information was invented and developed by engineers from big private corporations who then made a profitable business out of having the rest of us talk about truth, beauty, meaning and wisdom — on the phone.” Or, in this case, in our blogs, websites, web posts, Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, et al. The only ”information” that matters, in this context, is the volume and duration of data a user can be compelled to transfer across the provider’s media. For it is by the minute and by the bandwidth that this business of providing communications services is so fabulously profitable.
Following the article are two groupings of “Ads by Google” book-ending references to related articles and related searches. As within the related listings, within the title of these ads are the words, dreams, brain, beds, lucid dreaming. And, as with the lists of articles and ads along the right side of the window, these at the end of the article also change from day to day.
And finally, across the bottom of the page is a selection of pictures, illustrating 12 other article titles, hot-linked to their pages.
Okay, fine, you say? So there’s a troll who collects a few coins when we cross his bridge/use his phone wire, so what? That’s only fair, isn’t it?
Yes. And it is still worth questioning for yourself what part of your day and portion of your pay they legitimately earn. To have at our fingertips these multiple, amazing and reliable media through which we may communicate is indeed fabulous. The “what” that interests me here are the clever and subliminal methods used by these talented trolls who provide the bridges between you and me. The billions of dollars advertisers invest annually in catching and holding our attention is irrefutable proof that they believe we can be persuaded and influenced.
Are any of us so clever that we can be exposed to this amount of overt and embedded persuasion day after day and be absolutely certain that the thoughts we think, the conclusions we come to, the subsequent actions we take, even the very life we are living are really the thoughts, conclusions, actions and life we ourselves have chosen? Without time to assess for ourselves the value of what we read, hear or are shown, we may unwittingly be allowing the media providers and their advertisers to do this assessing for us. Is this truly what you want for your sweet and infinitely precious, finite life?