I like the new Orange advert http://www.i-am-everyone.co.uk/. There are
others in this vein – The Sunday Times for example. It is about
personalisation. It aims to speak directly to ‘real’ people.
Advertisers, it seems, are beginning to realise – no doubt through the
reports of sociologists – that there is no ‘Public’…. …to realise
that there are many diverse groups of people who all need variously to
be catered for in targeted and unique ways. This is in contrast to the
formerly popular general attempt to rationalise and generalise for ‘the
Public’ from a ‘sample’ of a few, which many have begun now to see is
fraught with a sociomyopia that oversimplifies and alienates badly
enough to work counter to its primary, if piecemeal, aims. We are more
complex than we used to think, and efficiency requires less bluntness in
our implementation strategies – whatever project it may be that we
pursue. Fundamentally, the efficiency of today’s socio-micromanagement
is something we must all grasp – across all disciplines and walks of
life – as we stand up to the collective social task of environmental
behaviour change. This seems to be one story in the multiple narratives
we are exposed to that really does seem to carry weight. This is an
eco-social, collective responsibility moment for the species, in that it
is global, and requires consensus on a geographical and population
scale unprecedented in human history –at a moment when we realise how
diverse we truly are. The Orange advert speaks to an understanding
(within the arts community that informs these marketing tactics) of the
unfolding zeitgeist of a humanity at a crisis moment in both its
self-realisation and its survival potential, and how the answer to that
crisis seems to us all to lie somehow within our understanding of the
self, of who each one of us is, and how each one of us in our moment by
moment unfolding as persons can contribute, through our self awareness
and our actions, to the eco-social behaviour change required of us all
to prevent the destruction of our planet.