Captains Of Consciousness Advertising And The Social Roots Of The Consumer Culture

by Stuart Ewen

Advertising directed some of its messages directly at children, preferring their “blank slate” characters to those of their parents whose prejudices might be more developed. J. B. Watson, the psychologist/ad man, had given underpinning to such a strategy. If the children were indoctrinated in the “behavioristic freedom” which characterized the modern industrial world, he argued, business might be able to intervene in the values and definitions of family culture. Rejecting the “freedom of the libertine”—as he called attitudes which were not responsible to industrial reality—he spoke for an education of children into the categories of modern life. If this could be done, he felt that children could help to circumvent parental attitudes which were not in step with the exigencies of the industrial process. “Will not these children in turn,” he asked rhetorically, “with their better ways of living and thinking, replace us as society, and in turn bring up” yet more modern children?54