Table of Contents
Issue #3 as well as supplement added at the end.
Communication Research Trends:
Critical Views of Advertising
vol. 3 no. 3 1982
Research Trends in Religious Communication:
Advertising and the Christian Imagination
vol. 3 no. 3 1982
Abstract
In the late 1950s and early 1960s a series of very influential thinkers began a strong movement of criticism of advertising. This questioning of advertising led to a deeper questioning of the 'cult of consumerism' which advertising propagates.
Vance Packard in his popular book, The Hidden Persuaders (1956) attacked advertising for using the techniques of depth psychology to raise 'subliminal anxieties' and manipulate desires for alcohol, cigarettes and other consumer items. John Kenneth Galbraith, in The Affluent Society (1958) pointed out that advertising was encouraging a wasteful consumerism which allowed a small portion of the world's people to use up scarce resources with profligate abandon and destroy the environment in the process. For Herbert Marcuse in The One-Dimensional Man (1964) advertising was the means by which a dehumanising technology reached into the inner space of our consciousness and destroyed our freedom.
The criticism of advertising continued to grow during the 1970s and has become a much broader attack on the style of life and worn-out political ideals of advanced industrial societies. The worldwide 'green movement' and peace movement are but two examples. It is also expressed in the desire to protect the non-Western, traditional cultures from the domination of North Atlantic industrial societies.
Currently, there is a new wave of thinking critical of advertising. Some of it attempts a more balanced, complex analysis; some of it is even more radical. This issue reviews some of the more recent, 'new criticism' of advertising.
Recommended Citation
(1982)
"Critical Reviews of Advertising,"
Communication Research Trends: Vol. 3:
No.
3, Article 1.
Available at:
https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/crt/vol3/iss3/1