Communications Technology and the Rape of Time: Modern Advertising as an Agent of Personal Inauthenticity

By:
Prof. Jeffrey Gordon
To add a paper, Login.

Modern communications technology has given to the voice of contemporary capitalism a persistence and univocity heretofore impossible. Advertising now presents to us a world that it invites us to enter, an alternative to the reality of our daily agitation, with its choices and their consequents. The splendid world that advertising, with its increasingly singular voice, holds out for our delectation is one from which the source of all our agony has been erased, for it is above all a world without time. But the more this world of a timeless fulfillment dominates our aspirations, the more remote our chance of achieving authenticity. For the fact that we are mortal, that our lives pass in a finite span of time, is also the source of our humanity.


Keywords: Advertising, Authenticity, Communications Technology, Contemporary Capitalism, Mortality
Stream: Human Technologies and Useability
Presentation Type: 30 minute Paper Presentation in English
Paper: Communications Technology and the Rape of Time, or Why Johnny Won't Think

Prof. Jeffrey Gordon

Professor, Philosophy Department, Texas State University
USA

Jeffrey Gordon, Professor of Philosophy and NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities at Texas State University, has been concerned throughout his philosophical career with the many strands of a single problem: the meaning of human life. He has published in the popular press and in scholarly journals throughout the world.

Ref: T05P0118