Existence is Commerce?

Technologies, especially those that are interactive and information oriented, are empowering consumers.

The consumer is increasingly knowledgeable, informed, hip, with-it, and savvy.

Or is she?

For decades now, the membrane separating the "visibly paid" media such as TV commercials and ways of communicating via "relatively invisible" publicity, placements, and planted content has been dissolving.

Whatever shreds are left of this membrane should disappear in a few years under contemporary conditions.

Movies and TV shows have been doing product placement for years.

Video, computer, and online games now allow commercial placement in a variety of ways. In the rich context of the "game world" are embedded signs, products, billboards, store fronts, logo-bearing apparel, and so on.

Sports events are massive canvases for parading sponsorship logos.

Drug companies reward opinion-leading doctors who speak or write favorably about their brands.

Celebrities commit their auras in the service of brands.

Blogs, of course, are no exception. Recently, Nokia achieved a major commercial coup by sending its new model phone to about 50 influential tech bloggers. Their comments about the phone had such massive viral impact that Nokia servers crashed a few times.

Conceptually, the notions of commerce, culture, and life are commingling in ways such that their disentanglement is difficult, hopeless, even painful.

Sure, Ad Busters and others try various clever tactics of disentanglement, but these elite efforts have little mass impact. Besides, they are coopted fast in commercial service.

So, "I shop, therefore I am" is no longer a critically funny book title.

For ever-larger radiating swaths of humanity, existence IS commerce.

Resistance is Futile... Impossible is Nothing... Coke is it...

Nik Dholakia
Rhode Island, USA