The Time of your life

THE EFFECT OF ADVERTISING ON CULTURE

To begin my discussion of the issue of advertising, I would like to look at TV. We live in a television culture. This television culture is produced primarily by what we know as TV networks (which is, as I think about it now, a rather strange metaphoric use of the word "network") who receive money from corporations (with advertising agencies serving as the go-betweens). Cable TV has the potential to provide input from local communities, and government sponsored "public" TV does exist, but these forms of TV can be compared to regional dialects existing at the margins: it is commercial TV which sets the standards for the medium.
The arrival of the culture of TV, then, was the imperceptible result of many factors--material, commercial, demographic, technological. This culture, however, represents not only the convergence of those disparate developments, but also—or primarily--the fulfillment of an old managerial idea: to exact universal ass...