Hijacked
More than almost any other species, humans live in environments far different than the ones we evolved in during most of our existence. This extreme adaptability to a wide range of conditions, combined with our aptitude for molding those conditions to our liking, has made us the most successful large mammal on the planet, from its equatorial jungles, to its arid plains, to the Arctic. But of all the environmental changes our species has seen (and provoked), the transformation of our visual surroundings may be the most striking. How odd that I hardly noticed it until recently. But then, I grew up in the city.
Abandoning the city for the country has entailed many changes, but I’ve been especially struck by the change in my visual environment. Not just the rugged ebb and flow of mountains, valleys, and desert towns that is rural New Mexico, but the drastic reduction in the amount of advertising that that I encounter on a daily basis. In the little town where I spend most of my time, there are no billboards, and few storefronts. The sporadic signage that does exist promotes events at the public library, the occasional school board candidate, or local fruit. The few businesses in town have hand-painted signs that lean haphazardly against the most convenient tree, or simply their name in small letters above the front door. Anything more garish would be pointless; everyone knows where to go for what’s available nearby and, in a town with only one restaurant and a small co-op grocery — no fast food, convenience stores, or gas stations — there’s no need for aggressive advertising.
Of course, it’s not news that the countryside is a feast for the eyes; that’s why city dwellers go there when they need a break. Nowadays, most Americans live in urban areas, but close to half wish they didn’t. The collective yearning for pastoral peace and tranquility is supported by research suggesting that human happiness is inversely correlated to population density. Capitalism’s visual dominance of the urban landscape is so pervasive as to have become normalized. It is, in fact, “normal” in the sense that it’s all many of us have known all our lives. The crazy quilt of commercial imagery intensifies every year — as we’d surely notice if we could return to the downtowns of our childhood — but the intensification is experienced gradually, insidiously. Unless we shut ourselves in our homes, a hundred billboards a day clamor for our attention, and we think nothing of it. I didn’t even realize how numb I had become to the endless barrage of commercial imagery that characterizes city life, until I stepped out of it.
This cumulative cluttering of our landscape has been advancing since the invention of advertising, or of capitalism, or of cities, or maybe even of writing. Who knows when the rulers of early human societies first realized that they could put a thumb on the scales of the social order by controlling what people see every day? Surely the Aztecs and the ancient Egyptians knew it. Molding the visual environment has been a key technique of social control — of influencing the attitudes, beliefs, aspirations, and inclinations of one’s neighbors/subjects — since the earliest temples and pyramids that loomed over the public square. In pre-industrial times, such messages were largely religious; today, they are overwhelmingly commercial. Whereas the public art and architecture of incipient states spoke with a unified voice, today we are surrounded by competing messages, each striving to be heard over the others. This visual cacophony surrounds us to such a degree that (we think) we barely notice it. We all like to think that advertising doesn’t affect us much. Advertisers, who have done the research, think otherwise — and are confident enough of its efficacy to spend hundred of billions of dollars on it.
Before an ad can make its pitch, it must get your attention. Our evolution into the kind of animal we are — our species-being, if you will — has determined what sorts of things catch our eye: bright colors, quick movements, sharp contrasts. Eventually, semantic content — words and pictures — came to vie for center stage with the raw material of color and movement. Other animals, having evolved different kinds of survival strategies, respond to different stimuli. Dogs are indifferent to flashy colors, but will alert to smells that humans don’t even perceive. Cats fixate more intently on horizontal movements than on vertical ones (as any cat owner with a laser pointer can confirm). In our prehistoric trajectory as predator, prey, and social beings, our brains evolved to respond to relevant visual stimuli and to ignore the irrelevant. Visual messages evoking food, sex, or violence are always relevant.
Advertisers, caught up in their own struggle for survival, quickly learned how to exploit these evolved responses for their own ends. Thus, cars are advertised via visual appeals to sex, ads for hair and beauty products burst with allusions to luscious foods, and entertainment grabs our attention with violence. Over the course of our individual lifetimes, we become savvy to this visual and semantic manipulation, but our reptile brain never does. (Just try to sit in a doctor’s office and NOT glance at the television.) We “tune out” when the commercial comes on; we note the billboard and then return our focus to maneuvering through cars or pedestrians. Without this filtering, it would be hard to function; and yet, our brains are locked in a perpetual arms race with ads designed to punch through our neural defenses and drag our attention back to what they are selling. When moving through urban spaces, we now expect to be targeted by literally hundreds of messages an hour, all shouting “LOOK AT ME!”
A society organized around the buying and selling of goods and services, where profit depends on standing out from the crowd, does not reward subtlety. Rather, it selects for ever more eye-catching mechanisms, from the purely visual (flashy colors, 6-ft high letters, eye-catching graphics) to the semantic-but-visually-transmitted (words, pictures, scenes of humans enacting social tableaux). Winners of this competition need not be attractive, only “extreme” in some sense; think of all the billboards featuring a cavernous mouth open in surprise or excitement, or slogans that strive for the catchiest pun, the most indelibly inane rhyme. (“HURT? CALL BERT!” “HIT BY A TRUCK? CALL CHUCK!”) Pictures of calm (or slumbering) people are useful only for selling mattresses or beckoning weary drivers to comfy hotels; pictures of people freaking out are used to sell nearly everything else.
The recipe for our modern-day mediascape: combine mass literacy with cheap industrial production of paper, lumber, steel, paint, plastic, neon, fiberglass; add a dash of social engineering courtesy of Albert Lasker and Victor Lebow; pour into the pressure-cooker of late-stage capitalism; simmer anywhere from a few decades to the point at which it explodes.
Driving out of the city, one is made aware of all this sensory bombardment by its sudden absence. It’s as if someone turned off the firehose of information constantly blasting into our eyes and ears; after blinking in confusion for a bit, we begin to notice other things, the subtler signals to which our senses originally evolved to respond: those things that predate the regime of buying and selling, that exist whether they are seen or not. In the absence of manmade visual clutter, one rediscovers the possibility of actually choosing what to look at. One begins not just to notice, but to actually observe features of one’s environment, such as the remnants of this morning’s snow, patchy under trees and on the northern and eastern slopes of the surrounding ridges and hills. The quick movement that draws your attention is more likely to be a rabbit or a bird, rather than a series of fast edits on a screen. The contrasting black/blue/white of a magpie, or a flash of bright fruit half-hidden among a shower of green leaves, catches your eye thanks to the same evolved responses that advertisers have hijacked for their own ends.
In the countryside, the chatter and hum of infotainment is replaced by the sounds of birds, water over rocks, wind through dry leaves, the occasional car on the distant highway. The bold hues of billboards give way to the softer auburns and oranges and greeny-yellows and yellowy-greens of the fall oaks and aspens. Driving, you notice chunks of slush slide off of passing cars and trucks, bursting into showers on the asphalt. You squint to see whether the soaring shape above is a hawk or a buzzard, peer at the passing shoulder to note whether today’s roadkill is just a squirrel or something more interesting. In the middle distance, the eye is caressed by the sweep of the hills accentuated by this morning’s dusting of snow. Raise your gaze a bit and you can see where it is still snowing along the ridge of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, and where it isn’t but probably will be again by tonight. You feel your eyes, your ears, your lungs relax and open, responding to conditions more like those that molded them millennia ago. The air, while not pristine, is a far less concentrated mix of pollutants than what city dwellers have come to perceive as normal. Liberated from the olfactory assault of car exhaust, cleaning products, fast food restaurants, and trash, your nose attunes to the occasional whiff of skunk or wood smoke or blossoming chamisa. Every time you step outside, you meet a panorama that pleases and soothes, filled with features that our ancestors learned to love precisely because they signified health and comfort and abundance. Whether a product of fin-de-siecle pastoral romanticism or evolved physiological response, the feeling that this is where we belong is very real. In a sense deeper than words and older than civilization, it is our home.
