Customer Reviews

The Age of Manipulation: The Con in Confidence, The Sin in Sincere

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I found "The Age of Manipulation" at a local library while I was doing a research about subliminal messages and I wanted to know why they're such a big deal for some people.
I thought I was going to read about some conspiracy theory not to be taken seriously. After all, who needs hidden messages in the media when we have so many lies in our daily news and everything that's called "entertainment" has a strong sexual appeal, most of them are not subtle at all. In other words, who needs subliminal messages? Who needs some dirty message we can't consciously notice when there's so much dirt in the media that we can see with our eyes wide open?
I must admit I thought the book was about some religious/right wing ramblings taking everything in our daily life to "magical" proportions. But I wanted to know more so I read it. I realised Dr Key really has a point. It's not about magical thought or conspiracy theories at all, what he did was just to link Freudian theories, philosophy, science, to things he saw in the media, and that's what's brilliant about his work. He saw what we couldn't see without a "little" help. So if you see something dirty in his books, don't blame him, blame Freud ;-) Or our incounscious defense mechanism that block what we have seen because what we saw could shake our values systems, our view or the world, everything we belive in. Freud again. It's not a book for everyone, if you want to "stay safe" don' t read it. You'll never see the world the same way again after reading it - that could be a blessing or a curse.
In those times when conglomerates that dominate our global economy also dominate everything we call news, culture, art and entertainment, this book is a must! As well as his older books, if you can find them, go for them! But if you get "The Age of Manipulation" that's enough, it's his most comprehensive book, the one that says it all.
We've been had for so long, that's enough! Let's not allow humanhood "devolve" to media zombies.
Somebody please reprint this book before it's too late.

Dr. Key's fourth book on subliminal advertising is worth the purchase price just for the pictures: liquor ads with blatantly obvious erect penises drawn into the stream of pouring gin, "sex" airbrushed into practically everywhere, and even a McDonalds ad with a hand dipping an unforgivably phallic "Chicken Tender" into sauce. Key hypothesizes that the male homosexual taboo is at play in many of these ads. When we perceive these images subliminally but repress them, he says, it creates an irrational attraction to the advertisement. He showed some of these ads to Inuits, almost all of whom saw the penises immediately and burst out laughing. Americans only saw the images immediately 5% of the time. Although Key doesn't use the word "meme," he is thinking along the memetic paradigm as he uses Madison Avenue's sneaky tactics to enlighten readers about the vulnerable nature of their minds. A well written and erudite book.

--Richard Brodie, author, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme

Like other reviewers of this book, I am familiar with the work of Cialdini, Aronson, and Pratkanis. I highly reccommend these authors for a good scientific examination of persuasion (and subliminal persuasion).

I come from a psychology (undergrad) and marketing (MBA) background, and I work in marketing. I found Key's discussion of the ads featured in this book to be very informative; I think he is right on with his analysis of many of the ads featured. With all the money that comapnies spend for these ads, it is highly unlikely that the hidden messages are accidential. I enjoyed this book because I have never encountered an attempt to point out and explain the hidden messages in ads.

However, Key should have just left it at the modest claim that advertisers sometimes use hidden messages in ads in an attempt to get people to buy products. Instead, Key goes on to claim that subliminal and archtypical messages are the main factor in all of our purchasing decisions. This is an extremely tenuous argument, and one that he does not back up scientifically except to refer to "numerous studies published", and citing several scattered studies.

I could also do without Key's self-aggrandizing, and his notion that he is out to save the world from the virulent world of big business and government propogandists. The tone of the book is hardly endearing, and Key goes way beyond what a reasonable academic would try to prove from the evidence presented. Key's ramblings on page 196 about the evilness and uselessness of university business education is laughable.

Key also presents no evidence that the subliminal messages are what causes people to buy. As a marketer, this information would be vital to me. Are there studies comparing consumer choice with identiacal ads, only varying the presence or absence of the subliminal images? In my MBA program we were taught sound analysis of marketing plans, not subliminal trickery.

All in all, I enjoyed the book for its analysis of hidden messages in ads. But please look to other psychology, communication, and business scholars for a more scientific analysis of the issues presented.

Eric

I stumbled across this book by mere chance. Ironically enough, the title lured me in. This book is not for the faint of heart. The author is incredibly well educated in his field of study and experience. The reality he sets before us can be mind numbing and liberating. A phoenix from the ashes. Should be required reading for all middle school students because of the education the author poses. Consumer debt grows in proportion with industries growth and Wilson Bryan Key explains the techniques ad agencies use to rape the American people. As the author stresses throughout "theories are not fact" and that we need to "watch ourselves". I wholly agree with the authors approach because it is not subtle nor intimidating... it is just powerful. Truth in advertising is about as meaningful as Politics being considered a science. This is a must read for every individual in the United States and abroad. This can help you realize that not only are you not alone but that advertising is not a "victimless crime". DO NOT SUPPORT YOUR OWN DEMISE. I cannot stress enough that Dr. Key is the closest thing to a consumer advocate if there ever was one. I only hope there will one day be someone as well versed and competent as Dr. Key to fill the shoes of the "Master of Exposure". Some of us are truely endebted to the wonderful insight Dr. Key has given. Endulge your senses and explore the real world in which you live. All we can ask is, "Dr. Key, when does the next lesson begin?"

This is a pretty good read, but nothing new. It is the same message Key has been pushing at us for half a century. It seems as if the advertisers have become more sophisticted, while Key has only slightly refined his message. Like many of the advertisers he criticizes, he actually uses mainly the tools of repetition and building on existing motives, rather than adding persuasive or novel content.

Key's books are always interesting and very provocative, and this one is no exception. However it does not add much to the now somewhat tired theme. The things he gets right are, well, pretty obvious by now. Advertisers are willing and able to craft images that evoke primal emotions, through testimonial, social situations, and evocative imagery, and may do so in ways that are deceptive. They certainly rely on this to transfer feelings to their product more than they rely on persuading us with a strong argument that we need the product.

The scientific basis of Key's ideas is legitimate. Marcel's fascinating research years ago showed that things perceived but not noticed are processed to a remarkable degree semantically, priming subsequent behavior and interpretations without itself ever becoming conscious. There's no reason in principle why this shouldn't happen just as well with figure and ground as it does with tachistoscopic images. That's why Key felt he could compare the phalluses in ice cubes with the apocryphal stories about James Vicary's briefly flashed "Eat Popcorn, Drink Coke" messages that caused so much undeserved panic. Neuroscience research has since confirmed that there is a distinct amygdalar response to emotionally evocative images that we aren't aware of seeing.

Ok, but big deal. Artists and poets make a meager living at the same craft. Finding subtle ways to evoke emotion. What is special about Key's argument ? Key's whole argument, when you strip off the annoyingly redundant social criticism, is simply that these unaware images and nonverbal embedded stories, since they are not made explicitly conscious, cause "repressed" feelings to be applied to advertisers' products.

The cognitive neuroscience version of Key's psychoanalytic story is that the images activate semantic and preprocessing nets that alter how we interpret the product we are reading about. Key's argument, which may have some merit, can probably be summarized better by saying that since we don't know where the emotion is coming from, we may be more likely to associate it with the product rather than the evocative hidden imagery. That's assuming the images are truly that evocative, that we can perceive them, and that we don't notice them.

It is also assuming that the emotion isn't simply misplaced to the person we are with rather than the product. There's probably a good reason why teenage boys like to take their dates someplace that raises their heart rate rather than to the library. Some of that excitement gets transferred to them. See Perry Buffington's amusing "Cheap Psychological Tricks," and "Cheap Psychological Tricks for Lovers" for a realistic perspective with humor rather than paranoia.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that the thing advertisers do better is not hiding phalluses, it is inundating us with sheer repetition and using images that have cultural relevance. The suggestion isn't stronger, it is just customized and given to us over and over through powerful mass media delivery syringes.

The mystique that Key has been cultivating for so many years is that particular images can be made so powerful that people can't resist them. It's a direct analog to the myth of the all powerful hypnotist whose every suggestion can cause people to leap out of windows or strangle their cat. Fifty years of psychology research tells us otherwise, that the context and expectations are far more important than presumed magical mesmeric powers of individual images and suggestions. Yes we can make the individual images or suggestions more evocative, but only so much, and then the repetition and our expectations become more important.

Key's influence on culture is seen most dramatically in the fact that he was successfully able to nearly single-handedly commandeer the word "subliminal" from its original meaning of "below threshold," to now being in common usage as "pictures with hidden sexual imagery," and even just "any message that we are unaware of."

The problem with Key's books is not that he is wrong, in spite of his alarmism he was probably more right than most people from the start. The problem is that he stubbornly refuses to see anything but a narrow view of what is going on. Like Freud, he convinced himself early in his career that all around him was sexual images, and now that's most of what he seems to see. There are often more interesting things going on psychologically in the images crafted for us than just erotic imagery, and more ways it is used than just advertising. Pratkanis and Aronson's "Age of Propaganda" makes a nice accompaniment to Key's books, helping to pull them back into some scientific perspective.

After reading this book, I ran out and read all his other works. I highly recommend all of his books. These books will change your life. The world of advertisements is not what we thought it was. We are being controled, and this book will help you start to see the truth.

This book will probably forever change your perspective on all of western civlization if you have the guts to finish it, and consider its far reaching implications. You might realize things about your mind that you never before thought possible. It also deal heavily with human psychology, prepare yourself for some Jung and Freud to.

Read "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion", by Cialdini, instead. "Influence" is a much better book about manipulation.

* * *

How was I manipulated into buying "The Age of Manipulation"? Certainly not through the techniques it discusses. (Say what you will about low-bandwidth, textual interfaces, but they are not subliminal tools.)

"The Age of Manipulation" combines a whiff of deconstructionism, and a trace of political activism, with a repetitive, barely-examined chorus of "you are a slave to subliminal advertising".

I don't dispute the presence of subliminal elements in advertising, but I find the treatment in this book too simplistic and too superficial. By what other means are we manipulated?

Americans, by the way, are presented as the bigger dupes, because they don't have a European appreciation for symbolism. Coincidentally, Europeans are also willing to spend much more for homeopathic treatments, and that may make the authors fonder of them for several reasons.

After reading this book, I am earnestly convinced that Wilson Bryan Key (its author) deeply and sincerely believes in its premise--that we are relentlessly being manipulated and exploited by subliminal imagery being inserted into the media (particularly the advertising) that we see and hear. However, I found Mr Key's theory--no matter how earnestly he gives it--to be unpersuasive and unconvincing.

There is certainly no doubt at all that no small number of advertisements contain meaningful symbols, if you look hard enough for them. (Ironically, many of the illustrations in the book are rather poor evidence for this--they're grainy greyscale images of color ads, that make it more difficult to spot the symbol, even once the author has told you what to look for.) But in order to accept that these images are the diabolical threat Mr. Key describes, you must accept three additional ideas: that these symbols are deliberately placed; that they are placed with the intention of manipulating you; and that the subconscious mind is capable of perceiving them in a matter of milliseconds when the conscious mind often has great difficulty finding them even when told to look for them. I found none of the three to be proved at all convincingly.

First, after examining his illustrations, I remain respectfully convinced that a large number of these symbols are accidental, rather than intentional. The human mind is extremely good at pattern-matching; we have survived in large part through our ability to take huge amounts of sensory information and quickly sort it out into meaningful patterns. We're so good at this that we often find patterns even in completely random information. We may see the pattern of a human face in the stucco on a wall or the wood grain of a table, not because it was deliberately placed there, but simply because our brains are highly tuned to pick up on anything resembling that pattern. Likewise, Mr. Key says that once we train ourselves to look for 'subliminal' images, we can see them virtually everywhere. Probably true, but not because the pictures we see are loaded with subliminal images; it's simply because, if we train ourselves to search through the innumerable random details of an image for anything that resembles a meaningful pattern, our wonderful pattern-matching brains will very often find a way to oblige us.

Now, there's no question that some number of ads do contain subtle images deliberately placed there by the artist. But does this mean that they were placed there with the purpose of manipulating our minds? Mr. Key seems to believe so; but based on my own experiences in creative fields, I'm much more inclined to accept another explanation. The artists and editors that piece these ads together often work for long hours in anonymity. When you're working on a project like this, the temptation is always there to add some deliberate, hidden detail--something that you can later point to and say "See that? I was there." It's the same impulse that leads Disney animators to throw hidden images into their films, or programmers to put obscure 'easter eggs' into their software. If you had to spend hours or days of your life painting the random cracks and sparkles of an ice cube for a liquor ad, might you not be tempted to add a tiny set of initials, or perhaps a picture? In particular, what if you disagreed with what was being advertised? Might you not put some embarrassing symbol in there that wouldn't be spotted until the ad was printed? And finally, after all the media furor surrounding subliminals, might you not be tempted to put something in there just to give Mr. Key and the like something to rail against? After all, if he prints your ad in his book, that's tens of thousands more consumers that will be exposed to it, and free of charge to you...

Finally, in order to accept subliminals as a threat, you must be prepared to accept that your subconscious mind can pick up and act on these tiny details that the conscious mind completely fails to spot. I did not find Mr. Key's 'evidence' to be at all convincing in this regard. Studies have been published that support both sides of the issue; but to me, the studies that suggest no significant impact are more closely linked to real-world conditions.

In conclusion, if you're interested in psychological techniques that are used to manipulate you into buying (and not just through advertising), I heartily recommend that you look into Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini instead.

I haven't yet finished this book. It started out o.k., much like his earlier books, but after a few chapters he strayed wildly off of the subject (subliminal manipulation) and I've been waiting for him to get back to it. At this point he has talked about politics, the nature of truth, philosophy, language, Aristotelian logic.......all without any support for his opinions. Read his earlier books instead.