Home Recreation: A Way of Life Modern society tends to fragmentize life Sports Films History Baseball: The Components of Profit Estrogen and Antagonists Diet and Nutrition The Vitamins Vitamin B Vitamin C Vitamin D Vitamin E Let the stars size up your shopping style Astrology: Magic or Science? Jamaica For Cyclists Maine: Earliest Inhabitants The passion for football Changes in Body Weight The Metabolism and Energy Transformations of Healthy Man Normal Activity Restricted by the Conditions of Experiments Metabolism During Specific Activities and Movements Public Colleges M to N N to Z What Is It We Want? Directed Thinking On Being Oneself Economics Is a Branch of Biology Life Is Also Frustration How Goods are Bought and Sold Leisure and work The Pecuniary Standard of Living The Uses of Time Teaching People to Want Things Art as leisure The Loss of Privacy The Great Emptiness	Teaching People to Want Things And now we have to bring into our picture one of the most highly illuminated aspects of modern economic life, advertisement. There is great need of a history of its wide extension, new methods of appeal and increased penetration during the past half century. That history would deal with media, the newspaper, the circular, the shop window and the bookstall, the wayside house and the railway carriage, the roadside board and the hoarding. It would glance up at the aëroplane writing advertisements in smoke across the sky with letters one mile or so long. It would consider the advertisement side of the cinema and radio. There is deliberate and open and there is also masked and incidental advertisement. There is a point when advertisement ceases to attract and begins to irritate or bore. People can be habituated to disregard an advertisement. Turning now from the methods to the social function of advertisement, we may point out how necessarily advertisement is a part of the replacement of individual by widely organized marketing. The old trader and his shop were known in the neighbourhood. The talk of the countryside was their sufficient publicity. But the new trader may be at the other side of the mountains or the other side of the world. As he cannot show his face, he must show a placard. He has to create a giant, a nationsize or world-size personality, for himself and his commodity. Picturesque and amusing as the methods of advertisement often are, this side of the question is far less important and interesting than its aspect as a new system of intercommunication and its bearing upon social psychology. The advertisement organization of today can spread the knowledge and use of a new commodity and all the changes in habit and custom a new commodity may bring with it, with the utmost rapidity throughout the world. It can break down social habits and usages in the most extraordinary way. It can suggest new conveniences and economies of time and labour, indulgences such as gum chewing, taking a daily bath or resorting to winter sports. It can make us feel uncomfortable after our coffee or doubtful whether our throats are not suffering from a previously unsuspected irritation. At present it seems arguable that there is great waste and overlapping in this field of activity. And it is only slowly and recently that a genuine system of ethics for marketing generally and salesmanship in particular has developed. Is it necessary to protect the public more strongly than it is protected at present against misstatement and furtive falsehood in advertisement? In Great Britain there is a considerable general legal control and much effective local legislation against sky signs, tiresome processions, flashing lights and other irritating media. In the United States much has been done through the federal government's control of interstate trade to check lying and unwholesome suggestion in advertisements, more particularly in the advertisements of medicines and drugs. America moreover is the centre of the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World, whose motto is "truth in advertisement," and furthermore, this association has established a National Vigilance Committee to keep the profession above reproach. In the future it is quite possible that the check upon the statements of Briareus, as he hands out our goods, will be much more stringent. The main body of the advertising profession will certainly be on the side of such a censorship. Competition in falsehood ultimately discredits all advertisement. It may be possible to bring side by side sample advertisements for the last century and the present time, to show the advance in dignity and integrity that has already occurred. The extension of professional advertising from marketing to politics and the public service will open up another issue of very great interest. For the modern man the daily newspaper already fills to a certain extent the place of a daily religious service. It takes him out of himself and reminds him of all the world. It makes a miscellaneous appeal. Formerly, in the days of fixed traditional attitudes the newspaper took the side of some definite party in politics; it discussed morals and public affairs in its "contents," and its advertisements were mainly marketing--and invitations to entertainment. But now it is much more "newsy" and much less educational in its contents, and on the other hand the advertisement columns become a forum for appeals and proclamations of collective importance. But here we are passing away from marketing and looking again towards the question of public education. We will go no further in that direction now. All our later chapters will point towards education, and finally the chapter on Education will crown and complete our work. But to our growing enumeration of human activities we now add the placard and the handbill, the aëroplane writing across the heavens, the sky sign flaring and blotting out the stars, the displayed advertisements of the newspapers, the monstrous letters on the cliff face, the hoarding making its discordant proclamation athwart the rural scene, the rain of samples, the perpetual nagging of our wearied attention in railway carriage and street car and restaurant and hotel room, the bawling loudspeaker, the interlude advertisements on the cinema screen (in France more particularly) and the association of the radio (in America) with advertisement. And every one of these things means a swarm of people busy in making and diffusing the glad tidings of goods to be bought; a whole world of clamant activities.