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17PHILOLOGICAL SCIENCES
INFLUENCE OF ADVERTISING ON SELF-IDENTIFICATION OF PERSONALITY
Yagodkina M.
Doctor of Philology, professor, head of advertising and public communications Pushkin Leningrad State University, Saint Petersburg
Abstract
The article is devoted to the issues of the formation of micro-societies in modern society and the peculiarities of the influence of advertising on the processes of the formation of self-identification of a person. Modern advertising not only has a certain impact on the mind and behavior of people, but also forms the image of the everyday world and social life in the individual consciousness. Also, advertising acts as a way of representing modern society.
Keywords: advertising, self-identification, the impact of advertising on the person, the media, television advertising.
At this particular interest is the ability of advertising as the management of impression, perception of a person. Advertising is one of the new symbolic means of self-presentation in various social and communicative contexts.
One of the leading functions of advertising at the present stage is that it participates in the representation of individual reality. Advertising projects information, and indirectly - the type of consciousness and personality type, helping it to identify itself among others.
Modern media now often perform family functions for a person — functions of education and personality formation. It can be noted that advertising, as an integral component of the modern information space, has a serious impact on the formation of a certain attitude to what is happening in the outside world.
From the point of view of the impact on the addressee, the following components of the impact of advertising on the addressee can be distinguished: 1) cognitive (obtaining new information through information processing processes: sensation, perception, attention, associative thinking, memory); 2) affective (the formation of an emotional relationship that encourages desires, experiences); 3) regulatory (inducement to specific actions); 4) communicative (integration into the processes of information communication, vigorous activity, exchange of opinions, etc.) [1]. Thus, the infection with stereotypes of behavior and perception occurs rather quickly.
In a social context, the advertising impact can be interpreted as a kind of management, since it takes the form of the influence of the control system on the managed one, the relations between them are built as subject-subject. The target audience of advertising is a passive subject of the management process, while it can be said that advertising, as a given of the modern communicative system, is a tool of secondary socialization, through which micro-societies are formed. For example: the Mrs. chocolate bar lovers microsocium (which can be contrasted with Snikers lovers), the glamorous Maybelline gummy microsocium, etc. The basis of the formation of such communities are stereotypes.
Social stereotypes are actively used by advertising in order to form a specific positive virtual reality. For
example, in any commercial a version of the "classic" family is used - it is a mother, father, two children (a boy and a girl) and some nice pet (bird, dog, cat). To demonstrate to the target audience a single mother living in a communal apartment with three children and a prickly-tailed gecko to boot is not rational, since it does not allow building a chain of positive associations.
For example, "My Family" mayonnaise advertising, family members are not only universal role models, but to some extent reflect a modern view on social roles: the husband watches TV, the children play in the room, the mother prepares dinner. The unification of all family members at the common kitchen table occurs at the moment when the mother puts lettuce filled with mayonnaise on the table. In this case, one can observe the imposition of virtual positive connotations on the object of advertising: mayonnaise is a food product, but in advertising it acts as a miracle cure for family happiness and coziness, admiration of neighbors and envy of girlfriends.
The advertising audience is subject to constant, systematic influence, the purpose of which is to include the addressee in the invariant of reality and impose a certain style of behavior. In the process of socialization, a person learns certain norms and cultural values of the society to which he belongs, but modern advertising offers the addressee an imitation of reality, an idealized version of it. Virtuality is widely represented in modern advertising. It transforms, breaks the intrinsic realities of temporal, cause-and-effect, symbolic links and relationships, offering a new aesthetics. This becomes possible because the inclusion of the addressee in social relations through advertising communication occurs through his introduction to socially significant consumption patterns and, more broadly, social interaction patterns, people's mutual influence on each other, leading to changes in social relations, material and spiritual life.
Modern advertising is not only the "engine of trade", it has ceased to be only a means of encouraging the purchase of goods. "Positioning the individual in countless situations possible in the conditions of free
choice of goods, advertising provides us with information about the rules of behavior adopted in a given society, moral norms, lifestyle" [2: 247].
At the same time, the values broadcast by advertising are always based on behavioral stereotypes imposed on the addressee. Advertising symbols are filled with relevant at a given time, in a given society content, and their interpretation affects the choice of a person.
Of course, the main function of modern advertising is still the function of encouraging the addressee to perform a programmable action - the acquisition of an advertised object, but advertising is a combination of images, signs that have a certain value only in the context of the general semantic field of culture in which advertising exists.
In the process of socialization, a person learns certain norms and cultural values of the society to which he belongs. Modern advertising offers the addressee an imitation of reality, an idealized invariant, in which the central condition for achieving absolute well-being is the possession of the advertised product. So advertising allows you to structure the social space on the basis of group identification of individuals through the system of consumption of a product. At the moment, one can speak not about the satisfaction of material needs by a person, but "about the experience associated with the thing and its consumption, socio-cultural involvement, group identity, given by an ideal advertising image" [5: 3].
On the behavior of any person throughout life is the most serious influence of the two needs, which can be conventionally designated as: "to be like everyone else" and "to be like no one else." Modern advertising offers a way to realize these needs, having received a two-in-one symbiotic modification, since, on the one hand, an invariant of reality is formed in it, the center of which is the product, and, as a result, the consumer of this product.
Currently, advertising is beginning to play an increasingly prominent role in the processes of socialization. Advertising becomes a means of identifying an individual with one group or another: a subject acquiring an object relates it to a certain social stratum, and through possessing the object he can be attributed to this stratum as well.
It is interesting to form in modern society the culture of hipsters - representatives of the youth who live precisely in accordance with the ideal behaviors offered by advertising. If the phone is the latest model, if the car is the latest brand, if the clothes are fashion trends and so on. This is "this is the first subculture, the representatives of which seem to be nothing. They do not strive for anything, do not dream of anything, do not revolt against the old, do not invent a new one, and in no way change the surrounding life. Hipsters take a position of non-participation, reveling in the sweetness of idleness and being ardent supporters of freedom in all its manifestations. A sort of peace-loving egoists: I do not touch you, but you also do not touch me "[3].
It can be assumed that advertising has played a significant role in the formation of this stratum of society. After all, the authors of advertising, on the one hand, rely on the characteristics of the target audience, on the
other - impose them. The language of advertising serves as a kind of filter that allows the cognitive system to cut off all the excess from experience so that the system does not overload and adequately function. However, this leads to the fact that human consciousness ignores important parts of the experience and, as a result, a depleted list of alternatives is formed when solving problem situations. A feature of advertising is to create a correlation between feelings, sensations, and material objects, that is, the unattainable is tied to the achievable. For example, the feeling of happiness or female beauty associated with the spirits; self-confidence, friendliness - with coffee, chewing gum, etc.
That is why advertising messages so often emphasize the importance of the virtual characteristics of the object of advertising, the properties that are formed and exist only in the minds of the consumer. Advertising "constructs value ideas about prestigious, desirable lifestyles and patterns of behavior, the necessary attributes of which are ideas of things marking life, social, advertising space. The true being of the individual under the influence of advertising is replaced by the illusory, virtual "[5:10]. Advertising offers images, the symbolic meaning of which refers the addressee to the rituals of everyday life, in essence, they are part of the context in which the individual is identified and self-identified.
It should be noted that advertising provides, in a sense, an aid to the process of globalization: "advertising is capable of creating an artificial world, where reality is indicated by certain symbols that create the basis for communication and interaction between cultures" [4:16]. The language of advertising images becomes a universal means of influencing the addressee.
In advertising communication, virtuality is the represented materialization of desires. Virtual reality plays a leading role in the formation of a positive image of the advertised object. The belief in the presence of positive characteristics in the subject of advertising is achieved through the use of words with positive semantics, in its definition. The advertising message is always based on a universal code: "advertised object" is "good". Each point of the content maintenance plan has a correspondence in terms of expression. All this allows you to exchange not actual, but virtual values.
In advertising, the dominant position is occupied not by an object that exists in constant reality, but by its virtual image created by means of advertising. However, for a consumer, a constructed image of an object or the consequences of its use becomes more attractive than a constant one in reality: a person with greater ease believes in pleasing facts for him, and not in the fact that they exist.
Thus, modern advertising has a serious impact on the perception of the surrounding reality by the individual, forming specific, positive invariants of the world picture in the mind of the addressee. Inclusion in the positive invariant, in turn, becomes the basis for the formation of the microsocium. However, it should be noted that human consciousness opposes such an impact, clinging to established stereotypes ("they won't advertise anything good", "only hype in advertising")
and the result of this resistance is the tradition of mocking advertising that has been fixed in recent years. What is ridiculed is no longer a threat, and one can only hope that advertising will not be able to divide all of society into programmable micro-societies, united by a tendency towards simplified predicted reactions.
The existence of advertising in the modern world, its presence in the context of mass culture and mass communications is a social fact that needs philosophical reflection, objective scientific analysis. Advertising, one way or another, is involved in the design of the living space of a modern person, has a certain impact on his consciousness and behavior, forms the image of the everyday world and social life. However, advertising acts as a representation of modern society. It is associated with such characteristics of the current socio-cultural situation as the mass culture, the design of mass communications in a social institution that determines the consciousness of modern man.
REFERENCES:
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3. Matveeva E. Hipsters: who are they? // Five corners. 21.08. 2009. [Electronic resource] URL http://5uglov.ru/news/hottheme/256/
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