Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say by Douglas Rushkoff analyzes techniques of persuausion used in advertising, by salespeople, and in other media, to try to explain why we are so susceptible to persuasion even when we know that we are being persuaded--and sometimes even when we know the techniques being used against us. Rushkoff describes himself as having become increasingly alarmed at the ways that persuasive techniques match and overcome the increasing sophistication of audiences, and he wants to understand why persuasion is so effective.
This past year, I've been picking up a lot of non-fiction of this type, and I've come to realize it's a genre: I guess you'd call it something like contemporary cultural criticism for a popular audience. Like all genres, it has conventions which I am learning to recognize.
The first convention is that the problem being examined must be described as very, very scary. Rushkoff manages this by giving examples of salespeople so sophisticated they can change their pitch based on whether the customer looks up and to the right or up and to the left (one means you're lying, the other means you're accessing the rational part of your brain), by describing the extensive psychological research behind the design of shopping malls, and generally suggesting that "they" know an awful lot about "us." More than we know, probably. So much that "they" know what we're going to do better than we do.
The second convention is that the author needs to fling his net wide: the problem can't be isolated, but must be all-pervasive. Aspects of it must interact at all levels of society and government. Rushkoff does this by producing chapters on face-to-face sales; "atmospherics" such as the design of shopping malls; something he calls "spectacle," which includes things like Promise Keepers rallies and Lollapalooza; public relations; advertising; pyramid marketing schemes; and virtual marketing. It's all in there folks, with a hefty chunk of material on CIA interrogation techniques thrown in as a bonus. Frankly, the connections between these various things often seem a bit strained to me; I'm not convinced that the guy pitching the adjustable bed to the retired folks is really all that much like CIA interrogators, a connection Rushkoff draws explicitly. By the time I was halfway through the book I felt I had lost track of his thesis, which had seemed clear to me early on. Many books in this genre start out as articles in magazines which are then parleyed into book deals. I can't find clear evidence that Coercion took that route, but it feels padded, like a thesis that could support three chapters has been forced to support 300 pages instead.
Finally, it is conventional for books of this type to conclude with a chapter outlining the solution to the problem that has so carefully been made to seem insurmountable for the previous 275 pages. This is much like the happy ending tacked on to a film after its original final scene was found to be too depressing for preview audiences. Rushkoff's hopeful conclusion is especially unconvincing; after making his readers believe that their social and consumer behaviors are determined by subtle and powerful forces beyond their control, he concludes weakly that greater "mindfulness," and a willingness to pause before we buy are the solution. He convinces us that "their" persuasive powers are so effective that we can hardly recognize them, let alone defend against them, but ends his book with the words, "without our complicity, they are powerless. Without us, they don't exist" (307). C'mon, Doug: either you believe the first 275 pages of your book, in which case there's no way you think it's that easy to avoid coercion, or you believe your conclusion, in which case the previous 275 pages of doom and despair were cooked up to sell books and fuel your consulting career.
Posted by Su Penn at June 5, 2003 02:21 PM | TrackBack