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When my sister and I were young, we watched a television program called "Zoom", which was a remake of an earlier program that aired in the 1970s. The show was hosted by seven children and featured games, jokes, recipes, science experiments, and other content submitted by viewers. I discovered yesterday that someone had uploaded the majority of the program's early episodes to YouTube, leading to a night of nostalgia binging.
Aside from the jingle triggering strong memories from my childhood, a lyric in the show's theme song stuck out to me. The hosts invite viewers to contact the show and submit ideas, after which they say "If you like what you see, turn off the TV and do it!"
Zoom aired on PBS, a television channel that is not reliant on advertisements for funding, so I believe them when they push children to reduce their television time. However, I've seen many other channels run campaigns to get kids to be more active and break addictions to TV. Nickelodeon for example famously runs the "Worldwide Day of Play", during which they suspend some of their programming to encourage kids to play outside instead.
For the most part, I find these initiatives to be disingenuous. The entire goal of having advertisements on television is to get people to watch them, and networks that receive funding via advertisements will never want their viewers to actually lose interest in their channels. By enacting a campaign to turn off the TV one day a year, Nickelodeon can claim to care about children's fitness and health, while still suckering them into spending hours in front of a screen every other day of the year.
Social media campaigns to break smartphone addiction have the same air of dishonesty to me. Someone who has successfully been weened off the dopamine triggers of social media likely won't be online to notice such a movement in the first place.
A common marketing strategy of corporations is to present to its customers a problem the corporation itself created, claim that it's restructuring or changing its practices to solve the problem, and convince the customers that their continued purchases will make the change successful. It's a simple tactic and, unfortunately, it's often highly effective.
Of course, health and awareness campaigns are not bad things in and of themselves. These days, however, many corporations pretend to care about issues than their own profit margins, undertaking an effort to seem socially conscious and improve their brand value.
How do we deal with hypocrisy like this? An effective strategy is to call their bluffs. We should be more aggressive about uninstalling apps from our phones and unplugging televisions. If the companies foment fear of missing out in the aftermath, they are simply showing their true colors.
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[Last updated: 2024-10-06]