Good day all.
Hey Sober45, you and I, at 50 days today, are halfway to that century (100 dry days). You game to bring it home, and head for the millennium?
One day at a time, of course. Say, S45, I discovered another of your countrymen yesterday when thinking about my post here about those synonyms, advertising and brainwashing. Marshall McLuhan, author of The Medium is the Massage in (I think) 1967, hails from up your way. He wrote, as I vaguely recall, about how we humans both shape and are shaped by, for example, the TVs that grab our eyeballs, entertain us, and shape our consciousness at the same time. He would no doubt do backflips over the internet, with its nurturing of fragmented attention spans, so everyone ends up with ADHD, and we find it such a challenge to focus on one task, or to read a book, or have an extended one-on-one conversation that is not interrupted by the chirps and other distracting draws of the conversers' handheld devices.
Anyways, another Canadian, we were noting a few notable ones way back on our day 10 or so.
I'm on a roll on this brainwashing theme, and here, it seems to tie directly into my new sobriety. I think my memory is working noticeably better after these 7 weeks of sobriety (actually I noticed it towards the beginning). Yesterday a book title and author's name came to me that I hadn't thought about in decades:
The Hidden Persuaders, by Vance Packard. It was a bestseller way back when, exposing how Madison Avenue, meaning the advertising and market research industry writ large, employ certain techniques to manipulate our tastes and desires. A quick consultation with the google just showed me there is plenty of information quickly available there about the book and the author. As I said yesterday, I think it is helpful to be aware of how the media gods conspire to direct and control our desires, in order to give ourselves a fighting chance of standing up to their sophisticated mind-control methods.
Pic = Lotuses in the architecture, NYC, 16 Feb 2020
