Advertising

     Advertising is everywhere, and it is almost impossible in this day and age to escape. Advertising is on the food you eat, the radio that you listen to, and on phones that you look at. Big billboards advertising phones, furniture, casinos, food, and many more thins line the roads you drive on. Commercials advertising anything from cars to food play in the shows you watch. Even if you have that nifty trick of skipping through ads, either by recording it or watching it on a platform that doesn't have commercials, advertisers still get to you. They place their products in your favorite shows, have your favorite characters use their products so you can never get rid of them. For example, my family is a big fan of the newer Hawaii Five-O TV show. All of the characters use Microsoft. From their phones to their tablets, to even the set up of the big screen that helps catch bad guys. In one episode one of the characters holding a Microsoft phone points out one of the "cool" features of the phone.
      Without advertising, companies would not be able to tell the public about their products. They would be unable to compete with big brands that advertise their products, and they would go out of business. It is always a battle to find the best way to get a person to buy their product. They release more and more advertisements to catch more peoples' eyes. However, this just puts more pressure on other companies to do the same, and they do. After a while, an ad will not catch a persons' eye anymore, and they have to create more. The vast amounts of different ads have caused people to develop a filter on ads. Taking in what is important and discarding all the rest. This has, in turn, made it very difficult for companies to catch people's attention, so they create more ads. It is a snowballing effect. There is a big downside to ads on the human mind too.
        There are so many ads people have been good at taking in what is needed and nothing else. This ability to do this has severally limited our capabilities to think beyond or see the truth, we have become narrow-minded. We have gotten so good at discarding the unneeded that sometimes we discard things that are needed. We become unable to identify tiny changes in things, like a person's emotions. We are impatient and very narrow-minded, quickly scrolling through things until we find what we want. This has made it difficult for people to see a new perspective, or try a new thing because we are always consuming what we want. Advertising splits us up into groups, creating an "us vs. them situation." The most prominent example of this is Apple users vs. Samsung users. Advertising companies create more invisible boundaries between us, which makes it hard for people to work together. It creates animosity. Pitting us together when we are all the same. Overall, advertising has made it hard on the human brain to think on its own.