By Chandana Agarwal
In the long weekend that went past, I was going through some ads and came across the 2011 Jeep commercial. It said, “It’s the things that we make that make us.”
It talks of the fact that America is built by people who make things and that’s what being American is about — it is about building things. It got me thinking of this notion in the larger context, specifically, in the way we interface with the new global world.
This can’t be any truer than in the case of advancing technology and science and the “progress” we make. Let’s take a step back and look at the progress of technology that helps us connect and our self-perception and the lens through which we view the world. In the oral tradition, before the printing press was invented, it was a given that our opinions were closely linked to us, they defined who we were and how we were seen.
With the invention of the printing press, it became possible to write our views under a pseudonym and express a view that was not in keeping with our public image. We could have a revolutionary view or an anti-religious view and stay dis-associated with it in the public domain. Now, in the age of social media, it is possible to create a public profile that is completely divergent to the one that people think of us to be. If technology is merely an extension of our senses, telescope being the extension of our eyes and a phone being the extension of our ears and voice, then internet is an extension of our entire sensory system. Since we perceive the world through our senses, technology impacts not just our response to the world but even how we perceive and process it.
For instance, in the written tradition, the narrative is linear and sequential. May be that’s what shaped our views about time and life in that era. We believed there is a progression to things — we believed in causality, we believed everything leads to something else and that journey was important for the story of our lives to unravel itself.
Now, if we look at the present times, where social media is the currency, it is possible to edit a status of the past, or even delete it from our timeline. We can manage who can comment on our lives. We can have multiple versions of ourselves. I think that for the generation born into it, their views of life would be influenced by the way social media operates. It is okay to do your graduation in one subject and choose a career path quite divergent, akin to updating a status. Nothing in life is absolute, everything is editable and it is possible to make everything prettier by using a filter. Nothing is sacrosanct.
This lack of a sense of the absolute is what makes it difficult for a lot of us to relate to Generation Z. This is the first generation that is pure digital native. Is it surprising then that they are expected to be the people who will eclipse all other generations in embracing diversity and inclusion? The digital world allows you to communicate by texting or by voice command and everything else can be hidden, your gender, race, ethnicity, caste etc. It is easy to hide or change all the things that defined your access in the offline world. Connections between people are influenced by common group memberships based on interests and ideologies rather than the social clubs their parents belong to. Your self-view is possibly more important than how the world views you, because that is what you project. The world only knows you from your timeline.
Do brands in this scenario have to find newer ways of forming connections, of building relationships? In order to be loved and respected, brands have to start thinking about taking a stand with regard to causes to be identified with and adopted. It is time that Benetton and Dove are no longer the exceptions in this space. Today, what one stands for is as important as what one does. This is true for people and brands. For instance, an organisation’s reputation is not just dependent on the quality of products it makes but also how it treats its employees. There are many clients and agency brands that won hearts by paying back the salary cuts made during the pandemic.
I doubt that the makers of technology consciously think of these unintentional consequences of what they make, just like the makers of advertising often are ambivalent about the impact of the ads that they create. The debate on whether the ads should merely portray the reality of our culture or should they be a medium of change has been on. Does a brand really have to leverage that aspect of our ugly truth to sell some more of what it is selling? Let us not forget that as people in advertising, it is the ads that we make that make us the agency brands that we are.
(Views expressed are of the author)
{The author is President, 82.5 Communications, North, The Ogilvy Group, and Kathak artiste}