Chapter 26 Summary- Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture

In Sut Jhally’s article, Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture, advertising is seen as “the major structuring institution of contemporary consumer society” (Jhally 246). Advertising began through the use of newspapers to transmit textual information about products. Then as color images were being produced, magazines and color photography began to display images as advertisements. Today with technology on the rise, we are submerged with advertisements on social media, television, Internet, and in Jhally’s words, “it is [in] the air that we breathe as we live our daily lives” (Jhally 247). 

After surveying a population, people seek good friendships, personal autonomy, happy family life, self-esteem, leisure time, and loving relations in order to be happy.  In other words, people are not focused on material objects in order to be happy.  Therefore, the marketplace needs to connect material objects to the social things that create happiness.  For example, food is connected with family values and bonding time.  The advertising image-system is constantly manipulating its audience into believing that happiness and satisfaction will come after a purchase. 

Music videos are also seen as a way of advertising within the music industry.  Music videos are visually pleasurable commercials for records.  It is of no surprise that music videos and commercials use sexuality in order to sell a product, service, or idea.

Another point that Jhally makes is the speedy way in which an advertisement is able to induce feeling to its audience.  Commercials on television have time slots as short as thirty seconds and directly sell feeling and emotion rather than products.  They are constructed with rapid images and music.  This speed-up concept has two consequences.  It allows its viewer to be attentive to the gratifying, rich, and complex images, sometimes sexual. The concept also allows its viewer to react with emotion and feeling rather than thinking. 

Through advertising, people can learn about pop culture and get a sense of what is happening around the world.  People see hundreds of advertisements a day and are influenced by these images throughout their daily lives.  While I scroll through my social media pages, I am encountered with dozens of ads relating to my previous searches.  This allows me to be targeted by companies, and I am always forced into buying unnecessary products from a ten second ad.