Synthetic Ideas: When The Corporate World Feeds Off Popular Culture
We’ve all gotten used to it by now. Clean, flat designs on our screens trying to sell us something, whether it is a product or an idea. The difference between the two is becoming non-existent. Afterall, isn’t a product the physical embodiment of a thought?
Good design has become dominant in our culture as a sign of wealth and credibility. As our lives are increasingly being shifted online, not only companies but also normal people have adapted with colorful palettes and appealing website layouts to attract attention and communicate effectively.
Social media has maximized the obsession with pleasant aesthetics, so it comes as no surprise to see everyone’s usage of cute infographics as a tool for spreading information about current social issues, especially when the biggest demographic invested in said issues is made of younger generations who are more comfortable with technology. This phenomenon has become widespread ever since the BLM movement started in 2013, which also mobilized teenagers the most.
Infographics rely less on data and statistics, and more on slogans and bullet points. Before being informative, they ought to be eye-catching, that’s why they also make up for an effective marketing strategy.Yet, this is the very reason why infographics can be misleading due to their oversimplification of the matter, and they are most likely biased towards a specific narration.
The dissonance between the messages being displayed and their visual form makes it easy for brands to appropriate this aesthetic and accelerate the corporatization of politics.
At the same time, one has to ask themselves whether it’s even appropriate to aestheticize such human-rights related issues: the more Instagram infographics one sees, the more neutral they start to feel about the content because it all looks the same. On social media, the message becomes secondary when faced against the medium. So much of today’s graphic design is based on user experience which prevents us from reasoning and creating a narration for ourselves, limiting us to the passive role of a spectator. Or in other cases, a re-poster.
If engagement is what today’s businesses thrive on, it’s easy to understand why corporate culture has been leaning so much onto their potential clients by creating an image of itself that’s as relatable as possible.
We’re just like you. Just a little better. Just a little more powerful.
Corporates are now preaching to us about social issues and politics while hiding the fact that the ideas they’re selling aren’t anything else but mere dupes of what the real problem is.
Every year during the month of June companies start sporting the rainbow flag all over social media and sell LGBTQ merchandise, capitalizing off the support their consumers want to give to the community. But where does that money actually go? The rise of awareness in the issue won’t lead to anything unless the companies involved adequately take action, like making the workplace more inclusive and give more support to the economically-vulnerable members of the community. With commercialization of Pride Month, the political roots of the event are dampened and the only ones who can celebrate are those who haven’t been marginalized by systemic discrimination.
Being able to work on aesthetic alone is a tactic afforded only to those already in power as it allows them sway everyone away from their lack of actual content. When ideas turn into expendable commodities, they are easily absorbed and adapted into the corporate world only to be sold to consumers as a novelty that fits into current trends, which encourages consuming ideas instead of acting upon them.
How many times have you come across the sustainable section in a fast-fashion store? The juxtaposition between these two already sounds like a joke.
Corporations are pledging to reduce their carbon footprints, but they aren’t making any effort in doing so. Instead, they’ve thrown that responsibility onto their consumers who are guilt-tripped into buying sustainable clothing, organic produce, eco cars. However, the only difference between these products and the normal ones can be found in their price, whereas the production conditions and the environmental impact they have has stayed just as unsustainable.
Companies come up with solutions to an issue only to create a bigger one to replace it with. They gain social capital with effective PR and marketing strategies by projecting themselves as socially aware, so they are no longer responsible for further action.
The liability in saving the planet and in being a dutiful citizen is put on normal people who are made to believe that using bamboo toothbrushes and wearing sustainable clothing is enough. This sustainable consumerism is the sugar pill companies, whose only goal is a progressive rise in ending revenue, are giving us to be at peace with our guilty conscience.
Album cover for Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing by Discharge
With the average individual having a fixation on being a good person, we feel guilty that we might not be enough of a good person, and we also live with the fear of being shamed if we’re ever caught not being a good person. Therefore, in the game of partaking into society, we buy into whatever paradigm big corporates are feeding us in order to fit in.
GIVE IT SOME TIME AND TODAY’S IDEA WILL BE NEUTRALIZED AS SOON AS ITS DECLARED OUT OF FASHION.
We could call this opinion fetishism. Opinions are no longer the result of a thought process and start taking a life on their own as a commodity, apart from the individuals that created them in the first place. The process has come to the point where having a belief isn’t much different from determining your music taste. Reasoning becomes a tool for commodities and stops being the process leading to a thought. Therefore, matters of taste and opinion become an identity marker to create belonging into a certain group. Most people want to be right or good. Hence, they aim for a spot in the dominating group.
Who we are and what we say – or think – become synonyms.
The process of opinion fetishism is dehumanizing as it shrinks the distance between Self and Thought and leaves people both as containers and living posters of beliefs that cannot be changed. Our views become what – not who – we are. The ideas we appropriate are weapons to assert a position in social dynamics.This also explains cancel culture. Because we are our ideas, Time doesn’t allow us to change what we once said. The labels we once tried so hard to shed off now come back again as words we uttered, thoughts we noted down.
Commercially speaking, with popular culture we define everything that can be easily digested and enjoyed by the majority of the population. Here, culture and business leadership are tightly connected; it is not rare to see business owners and their products imprint assumptions and symbols that will persist for years ahead. Successful businesses are aware of the cultural Zeitgeist they’re living in and are able to use that knowledge at their advantage.
Donna-Lee Phillips, Fragments from a Visual Journal: November 16, 1977 to January 9, 1978