CN Central: Nanny State Versus Creative Freedom

It is clear that this post is from the pen [computer] of someone working in marketing…

Should we continue to challenge the traditional and push the boundaries of design, or tread a safe line and risk having our creativity stifled?…

The implication is that creativity is bounded by what are generally deemed to be standards of decency. Why should creativity have to push such boundaries ? Surely it is possible to be creative within accepted boundaries? Socially acceptable boundaries are created by society hence pushing such boundaries is effectively attempting to engineer a lessening of standards, or, at the very least, a changing of perceived standards of decency within that society…to what ends may one ask, merely to sell a few more bars of chocolate or pairs of knickers?

If it is deemed acceptable for standards to be set by advertising campaigns then it appears that the moralistic elements of social life will be determined by those same marketing companies and not by society at large…as society itself is increasingly being motivated not by need but by greed, greed created by intensive and sometimes very subtle advertising.

Here we meet the concept of memes, a concept conceived by Richard Dawkins and expanded by Susan Blackmore.

The word meme, which is close to a rhyme with gene, is derived from a Greek root Mimeme indicating cultural transmission or a unit of imitation. Examples of memes as described by Dawkins are,

…tunes, ideas, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves by jumping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation…(Dawkins.1989. p.192)

The process of reproduction of ideas is very similar in some respects to that of
biological entities. Again from Dawkins….

As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter, “memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the same way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn`t just a way of talking. The meme for, say, ‘belief in life after death’ is actually realised physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individuals the world over.”(Dawkins.1989. p.192)

It is clear from this that we should be aware of the subtle creeping commercialism that infiltrates our lives, not just the desire to buy that it creates but other things on the peripheries, such as the pushing of accepted socially acceptable boundaries simply to spread the attraction purportedly created by marketing creativity to a much wider audience…and hence persuade that audience to part with its hard earned loot…for what? A couple of chocolate bars or pairs of knickers?

Watch the marketing advertising scene over a lengthy period and it is surprising what it generates in terms of ideas…as well as assisting in the expansion of human greed.

Am I merely a cynic or perhaps more of a realist?