2004-02-02 06:15:00SLEEPING
[英文社會學日記1] 美國哪來那麼多藥的電視廣告??
The medicine advertisements on TV
Every time I watch TV I was wondering why there are so many medicine ad there. Most of them are for psychic problems including anxiety, sleepless…etc. Tonight I saw one ad saying that “ Do you have anxiety when you face a social group? XXX could help you. You will no longer as a isolated person…..” at the end of the ad, there is a happy guy jumping, running with his friends cheerfully……
It’s so strange here. Just like that you individualized the problem to yourself, not the social settings or environments. Although you have to take this medicine under doctor’s prescription, but this ad is on the TV, which means it may change the mass to think---maybe it’s my own problem….My anxiety is not from social change (anomie) or alienation. My anxiety is just a kind of sick, and medicine could help me to solve it!
Moreover, it seems that, instead of religion, medicine pills become the opium in modern (or post-modern?) society. Durkheim need not to worry how social moral or order collapse because in the future, people will take these happy pill to prevent it. People could be so individualized that solidarity seems not so important to him. It seems like those pills will help you to solve all the problems in your life, because you are not suffered anymore from social structure!
Marx may be very angry at this because this is a very powerful opium to prevent class consciousness and to destroy the possibilities for class-for-itself. (because people have no motive to aware social problems.)
You see, what terrible it is. (Is this reaction too sensitive? I’m not so sure.) We really found a BEAUTIFUL NEW WORLD here ‘cause everyone found his solution by such fantasy. Oh….That seems a little like the dramatic situation in the movie”—Matrix.
Every time I watch TV I was wondering why there are so many medicine ad there. Most of them are for psychic problems including anxiety, sleepless…etc. Tonight I saw one ad saying that “ Do you have anxiety when you face a social group? XXX could help you. You will no longer as a isolated person…..” at the end of the ad, there is a happy guy jumping, running with his friends cheerfully……
It’s so strange here. Just like that you individualized the problem to yourself, not the social settings or environments. Although you have to take this medicine under doctor’s prescription, but this ad is on the TV, which means it may change the mass to think---maybe it’s my own problem….My anxiety is not from social change (anomie) or alienation. My anxiety is just a kind of sick, and medicine could help me to solve it!
Moreover, it seems that, instead of religion, medicine pills become the opium in modern (or post-modern?) society. Durkheim need not to worry how social moral or order collapse because in the future, people will take these happy pill to prevent it. People could be so individualized that solidarity seems not so important to him. It seems like those pills will help you to solve all the problems in your life, because you are not suffered anymore from social structure!
Marx may be very angry at this because this is a very powerful opium to prevent class consciousness and to destroy the possibilities for class-for-itself. (because people have no motive to aware social problems.)
You see, what terrible it is. (Is this reaction too sensitive? I’m not so sure.) We really found a BEAUTIFUL NEW WORLD here ‘cause everyone found his solution by such fantasy. Oh….That seems a little like the dramatic situation in the movie”—Matrix.