The Image

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  The difficulty of curing us of our ever exaggerating expectations comes from the very fact that not truth, but credibility, is the modern test. We share this standard with the advertising men themselves. For everybody, then, it is more important that a statement be believable than that it be true. This is illustrated by the spectacular success of a series of Rheingold beer testimonials. These were, of course, written by copywriters, to suit the personalities of the celebrities who gave the endorsements. “Although the agency helps out,” Freeman explains in his Big Name, “the endorsement is none the less sincere or believable. The foundation for the endorsement is the fact that these are well-known persons, believable as beer drinkers, who are well liked and trusted by their publics. [Some examples are Van Heflin, Victor Borge, Louis Armstrong, Ernest Borgnine, Nat (King) Cole, Sir Cedric Hardwick, Raymond Loewy, Joanne Dru, Beatrice Lillie, Charles Coburn, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Groucho Marx.] They would not put their names to a statement unless it were true, the readers believe, so that it is of little consequence that the actual choice of the words used to convey their approval of Rheingold is the work of another hand.”

  The advertising world can never collapse so long as believability remains the test. Even as each old advertising formula becomes ritualized and its mechanics become widely known, the mechanics themselves become the pseudo-eventful center of interest. When a manufacturer of shaving cream was cited by the Federal Trade Commission for using tooth paste instead of shaving cream on a television commercial to show the supposedly remarkable under-water staying qualities of the shaving cream, the manufacturer inevitably benefited from the repetition of the brand name in this widely reported pseudo-event. We have already seen that in the news world, when the press conference became ritualized as a form of pseudo-event, it lost some of its charm and much of its function; when a looser, more ambiguous form of communication was required, the institutionalized leak was developed. Similarly, in the world of advertising, when the straight endorsement becomes ritualized and loses its appeal, new interest can be created by such devices as letting the public elect their own endorser (Miss Rheingold) or by showing them how the endorsements are bought and paid for (Thom McAn). There still remains enough of an always novel kind of believability.

  P. T. Barnum’s flamboyant explanation of his success as a showman can serve now as prosaic description of our everyday experience. The world’s way, Barnum observed, was “to excite the community with flaming posters, promising almost everything for next to nothing.”

  I confess that I took no pains to set my enterprising fellow-citizens a better example. I fell in with the world’s way; and if my “puffing” was more persistent, my advertising more audacious, my posters more glaring, my pictures more exaggerated, my flags more patriotic and my transparencies more brilliant than they would have been under the management of my neighbors, it was not because I had less scruple than they, but more energy, far more ingenuity, and a better foundation for such promises.

  This might be the appropriately immodest motto for an expanding American economy, which thrives on our ever more extravagant expectations.

  V

  THE CENTRAL PARADOX—that the rise of images and of our power over the world blurs rather than sharpens the outlines of reality—permeates one after another area of our life. There is hardly a corner of our daily behavior where the multiplication of images, the products and by-products of the Graphic Revolution, have not befogged the simplest old everyday distinctions.

  Life in medieval times, remarked the Dutch historian Johann Huizinga in his classic Waning of the Middle Ages (1924), offered sharp edges and bright contrasts. Each season, each time of day, each station in society, was clearly distinguished from others. Perhaps we can never recapture the poignancy which a medieval man felt in a warm fire on a winter day, in the sound of the leper’s bell, in the dark of night, in the splendor of a nobleman’s brocade. Equality and economic progress have leveled sensations. In rich, adept America, distinctions of social classes, of times and seasons, have been blurred as never before. With steam heat we are too hot in winter; with air conditioning, too cool in summer. Fluorescent lights make indoors brighter than out, night lighter than day. The distinctions between here and there dissolve. With movies and television, today can become yesterday; and we can be everywhere while we are still here. In fact, it is easier to be there (say on the floor of the national political convention) when we are here (at home or in our hotel room before our television screen) than when we are there.

  In twentieth-century America we have gone one step beyond the homogenizing of experience. Not only do we begin to erase the distinctions of nature. Our own distinctions become more impressive than nature’s. Even as we try to sharpen our artificial distinctions they become ever more blurry. A couple of examples will suffice.

  Take, for instance, our notion of time and the seasons. Measured by our economy, they become pseudo-events. As the machinery of production becomes more complex, as “progress” becomes ever more certain and more predictable, we must cautiously measure it out. Next year’s model of an automobile (always out this year) is not the farthest step to which our technology can reach. But it is the farthest stage to which the pseudo-events of publicity and advertising can profitably be accommodated. It often represents not where progress has reached, but where it has been conveniently arrested.

  Advance publicity becomes more important for everything produced. To change next year’s model of automobile we must have begun retooling eighteen months before; planning must have begun over two years in advance. The vast machinery of progress then makes every product express an obsolete imagination. Women’s dresses for next summer must go on sale this winter, which means that they must have been designed, and the new styles decided on, at least last summer. Next year’s designs are made before this year’s have been sold. In publishing, for example, Books for Fall are announced before summer has come. In Publishers’ Weekly, Santa Claus arrives with his Christmas picture book gift items on the Fourth of July. We anticipate ourselves so that manufacturers and merchandisers always live in several seasons at once. Not only news, but more and more other items of daily consumption are made for future release.

  The increasing importance of public relations in the world of politics and pressure groups has blurred the meaning of so simple a notion as “membership.” People cannot remember the names of the organizations they belong to. Money-raising counselors and professional managers of pressure groups must be adept not only at handling people, but especially at using names. Every year, more thousands of reams of stationery are printed with lists of “advisory committees,” “sponsoring committees,” and other fictitious bodies. Organizations are set up and dissolved to serve any purpose.

  The United States has historically been par excellence the country of “voluntary” organizations. Here even churches have a voluntary character which they have had almost nowhere else in the world. But in the twentieth century ours has become the country of “front” organizations. In the United States, more and more organizations are pseudo-events, set up not because their members wish to collaborate for a common purpose, but because it serves someone’s purpose that the founding and the activities of such organizations be widely reported. They are appendages of the media. They are front organizations, but not in the sense that they front for subversive causes. Rather in the sense that their membership and sponsorship and leadership are carefully constructed not to do a job but to produce an image. The “fellow-traveler” (also a characteristic product of our age) is a person—of whatever political complexion—who allows himself to be associated with that image.

  Pressure to participate leads to more and more nominal membership: in churches, service clubs, professional societies, pressure groups, charitable organizations, and political associations. Our joining is itself one of the most perfunctory of pseudo-events. We wish our membership to be reported. We do not care to participate. Multiplication of these personal pseudo-events c
onfuses and dilutes our personal loyalties. The very idea of membership becomes hopelessly blurred. The Reader’s Digest offered itself not as a magazine to be subscribed to, but as an “association” to be joined. We have book clubs and travel clubs and Christmas clubs, and clubs and associations ad infinitum. Nowadays it would be pedantic to say these are not clubs. But if they are properly clubs it is simply because so few associations (except rural, obsolete, or snobbish groups—country clubs and downtown dining clubs and small sewing and reading circles) remain clubs at all in the traditional sociable sense. “Are you a member or aren’t you?” “I can’t remember.”

  The mark of an educated man, Irving Babbitt once shrewdly observed, is the clarity of the line in his mind between what he knows and what he does not know. Of course this is only an ideal. But today it is more difficult than ever to reach for it. When in our schools the study of “current events” (that is, of what is reported in the newspapers) displaces the facts of history, it is inevitable that the standard of knowledge propagated by newspapers and magazines and television networks themselves (that is, whether one is “up on” what is reported in the newspapers, magazines, and television) overshadows all others. When to be informed is to be knowledgeable about pseudo-events, the line between knowledge and ignorance is blurred as never before. No wonder we use the quiz formula to test knowledge. No wonder our estimates of books and movies and television programs are shaped by whether they have won prizes (Pulitzers, Oscars, and Emmies) or have attained best-sellerdom. We should know them simply because they are well known. Having made celebrities, we have a duty to worship them. We worship them by keeping them alive, by keeping them well known. Distinction between “knowledge” and “ignorance” itself has become old-fashioned. It is displaced by the minute and barely discernible degrees of well-knownness.

  VI

  ALONG WITH the blurring of knowledge, the multiplication and sharpening of images brings the blurring of our intentions and desires. Do not improved marketing techniques enable manufacturers to know what we want better than we do ourselves? New ambiguities enter into “desire” and “function.” Does the public really want fins on its new-model automobiles? If the fins do satisfy a public want, are they not then somehow functional? We become more and more confused about our desires in an ever expanding economy where products are always remoter from primitive needs.

  We read advertisements, then, to discover and enlarge our desires. We are always ready—even eager—to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what we have all along wanted without really knowing it. The ambiguity of “desire” and of “function” come along together. “Function” was once a word for describing a simple standard of utility. By contrast, an ornament was supposed to be only subsidiary to the object’s function. But we become more uncertain what is the precise usefulness of any particular product. That usefulness itself becomes a kind of pseudo-event—a utility made up for the purpose of being reported. We then find ourselves occupied less with finding products to perform certain obvious functions than with discovering what is the real function of objects that we think we want. The search for function—as anyone who has lived in a modern “functional” house knows—is just as uncertain as the search for beauty.

  A symptom of the blurring of our intentions and desires by the increase of images is the rising interest in public opinion, and especially in public opinion polls. Although the expression “public opinion” dates from at least as early as the end of the eighteenth century (Jefferson used it), it came into common use only in the era of the Graphic Revolution. The multiplication of news reports multiplied the supposed evidence of the opinion of the people generally. Of course what was printed as “opinion,” and what was therefore most widely available, was not everybody’s opinion, but only a few symptoms. Still, with rising literacy and extending circulation, there came an increasing tendency to take the symptom for the fact. The digests—The Literary Digest and The Reader’s Digest, for example—and the many new forms of opinion reporting in other magazines and newspapers gave public opinion a specious new reality.

  In his brilliant pioneering book, Public Opinion (1922), Walter Lippmann made a valuable distinction. “The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters.” After the Graphic Revolution it was possible to make “images” of Public Opinion—with many of the general characteristics I have observed for all images. Public Opinion now became synthetic, believable, passive, vivid, concrete, simplified, and ambiguous as never before. If you wanted to know what the public thought, you could simply pick up a newspaper. Changes were recorded daily, or twice daily, opinions were vivified by journalese and by photographs, they were forced into being by earnest newspapermen trying to make news, they were played against one another.

  Inevitably, then, “Public Opinion” became itself a kind of pseudo-event, forced into existence for the primary purpose of being reported. Expressions of public opinion became among the most powerful, the most interesting, and the most mysterious of pseudo-events. The more fabricated and factitious public opinion became—true to the law of pseudo-events—the more interesting and titillating the news about it became. “Democracies,” Lippmann shrewdly observed, “have made a mystery out of public opinion. There have been skilled organizers of opinion who understood the mystery well enough to create majorities on election day. But these organizers have been regarded by political science as low fellows or as ‘problems,’ not as possessors of the most effective knowledge there was on how to create and operate public opinion. The tendency of the people who have voiced the ideas of democracy, even when they have not managed its action, the tendency of students, orators, editors, has been to look upon Public Opinion as men in other societies looked upon the uncanny forces to which they ascribed the last word in the direction of events.” Lippmann made a plea for a better, more effective, more widely understood news apparatus. He observed that the quality of the news about modern society was an index of its social organization: the better the institutions, then the more objective the news, the more effectively issues could be disentangled, and “the more perfectly an affair can be presented as news.” Lippmann’s interpretation did not take sufficient account of how the mere existence and proliferation of media would produce pressures to fabricate, complicate, and dramatize; and hence to misrepresent. And how the interestingly contrived account would tend to overshadow the naively accurate facts.

  Again, true to the laws of pseudo-events, public opinion bred its own interest-awakening novelties. Even if there was no opinion spontaneously expressed, elaborate new devices would incubate opinions into expression so they could be reported, discussed, and set against one another. These devices, one critic warned, “seek to turn the people into a great beast which is asked to roar when it is not ready to do so.”

  Public opinion polls are an example. There had been “straw” polls in the United States as early as July 24, 1824, when the Harrisburg Pennsylvanian sent to Wilmington, Delaware, to gather samples of opinion on the Presidential campaign and reported: Andrew Jackson, 335 votes; John Quincy Adams, 169; Henry Clay, 19; William H. Crawford, 9. Since then there have been many straw polls. They have often helped increase the circulation of magazines and newspapers. The best known in this century were the Literary Digest polls between 1916 and 1936.

  The modern scientific sampling technique for surveying public opinion did not, however, develop out of these crude earlier polls. Instead it grew, appropriately enough, out of research in marketing and advertising. Market surveys were devised about 1912 by Roy O. Eastman to find out who was reading the magazines in which his breakfast food ads were appearing. By 1919 a survey department appeared within an advertising agency; then independent surveying organizations were established. More recently
opinion surveying has become a sizable industry, training and employing thousands of interviewers, mailing out hundreds of thousands of questionnaires, sparing neither time nor expense in lengthy depth-interviews. A host of novel techniques have been elaborated for securing expressions of opinion and for finding the motives behind the opinions. These have been directed mostly to consumers.

  In 1935 market research techniques were applied to politics and public issues. Fortune was the first to publish widely the results of such surveys (conducted under the direction of Elmo Roper and others), and then George Gallup offered his features on a regular syndicated basis to numerous newspapers. Beginning in 1936 “what the polls say” during national campaigns became one of the most interesting and widely featured pieces of news.

  The spectacular failure in 1936 of the Literary Digest poll—which until then had been remarkably accurate, but which forecast a sweeping victory for Landon over Roosevelt and mispredicted the popular vote by a full 20 per cent—actually stimulated a wider interest in opinion polls. The Digest fiasco was itself one of the biggest pieces of news about the election. When the Digest collapsed, other polls—for example, those by Fortune, by Archibald M. Crossley, by George Gallup, by the National Opinion Research Center—took over. In 1944 a poll by a national polling agency showed that over half of its informants had heard of public opinion polls. In 1948, once again, the best known national opinion polls predicted the wrong result, choosing Dewey over Truman. Elmo Roper’s Fortune poll missed the actual popular vote by 12 per cent; both Crossley and Gallup had given Dewey a 5 per cent popular lead. Yet, again, within six months of this fiasco, market research agencies and public opinion polls were functioning at their 1948 levels. In the succeeding Presidential elections, as more elaborate polling techniques were perfected and as voters became accustomed to following the polls, the polls became the political equivalent of the Racing Form. They became more and more interesting for their own sakes. Now politicians and pundits were constantly being asked not merely about the issues and the candidates and the state of public sentiment, but about the meaning of specific polls. People speculated about the effect on voters of revealing this or that set of figures. After each election, one of the most widely interesting news items was the degree of accuracy of each of the different polls. Prominent pollsters were interviewed, encouraged to speculate, explore, defend, and wonder over their results.