Plato and advertising - Oracy project

 

Plato & Advertising

Recently I read  a platonic analysis of advertising by Richard Oxenburg which lead me to do an oracy project on it for school. 

What is the allegory of the cave?

Plato’s "Allegory of the Cave" is a concept devised by the philosopher to ruminate on the nature of belief versus knowledge. The allegory begins with prisoners who have lived their entire lives chained inside a cave. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners are people carrying puppets or other objects. These cast shadows on the opposite wall. The prisoners watch these shadows, believing this to be their reality as they've known nothing else.

Plato posits that one prisoner could become free. He finally sees the fire and realizes the shadows are fake. This prisoner could escape from the cave and discover there is a whole new world outside they were previously unaware of.

This prisoner would believe the outside world is so much more real than that in the cave. He would try to return to free the other prisoners. However, the prisoners do not believe him and choose to stay in the cave. 

How can this be applied to advertising?

In the modern world advertising is unavoidable. Wherever you go, something is being sold to you. Whether it's a product, a lifestyle or even an ideology, everything is being advertised constantly. 

The best example I can think of is New York Times Square, where the view is dominated by adverts. This is reminiscent of plato's allegory of the cave. Much like how the prisoner's of the cave were shown shadows of objects, the advertising world presents us with 'shadows' of products. Products are shown in the best light possible, at any cost so that we buy into and want these products. In advertising products are usually attached to some form of reality, or lifestyle. 

In the case of this advert, the product is not being sold, but the sexualisation of women. Advertisers commodify not just things, but people. The message of this advert is that by buying the beer, you get the woman, or the sex, or the romance.

In the case of tinder, love and relationships have been commodified to the point that it has been reduced to swiping left or right on people. Everyone who joins the app themselves becomes a product, that other. 'buyers' can invest in or not, in the pursuit of hopefully finding love.

For Plato, human's have a tendency of confusing the 'spiritual goods' such as : love, friendship, justice and beauty, with the more instantly gratifying 'material goods'. Advertisers manipulate by confusing these priorities. Advertisers show shadows of the spiritual goods in the form of material goods, and urge you to consume more and more and more. By buying into these things we are reduced to the prisoners in the cave who choose ignorance, we choose to focus on things rather than feelings and people. 

The Big Issue front cover

 Whilst researching The Big Issue, we were set the task of making our own TBI cover. For this I chose Adrien Brody as my central focus because he starred in a very recent film (at the time of making) called 'The Brutalist'. The film covers the experience of a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor who immigrates to the US, where he struggles to achiever the American dream. The film parallels between the artistic experience and the immigrant experience. This choice of topic is highly effective because it fits the high-brow taste of the ABC1 TBI audience, who have an appreciation for arthouse films. The film also covers social and historical issues, such as immigration and the feeling of otherness, anti-semitism and post-war trauma. A particularly relevant part is when the main character is homeless, which obviously relates to the purpose of TBI. 

I chose this photo of Adrien Brody because it is serious but appears natural. His dishevelled hair and ordinary outfit makes him to appear more 'ordinary' despite being an A lister.