Common sense is slowly dying—let it rest.
Was it helpful at times? Without a doubt. It’s been down right comforting, shielding you from the unfounded claims of venom spitting know-nothings, sheltering you from the nightmarish confusion of the unexpected. So much warming security is taken from common sense.
Yet so much of it is just a daydream.
“Buyer beware”—an idea derived from experience, shaped into a defense against the malevolent seller.
Times change.
Contexts change.
All the while you’re still making calls with old-fashioned know-how. Then common sense is no longer savvy. It’s obsolete. You’re weighing the world on a broken scale.
How do the buyers beware if they don’t know when they’re buying?
The buyers have been conditioned to scrutinize the seller, learning well that it is wealth alone that motivates business. To whom, then, does the buyer look for relevant information on a product or a service? Not advertisements. Those are pitches, not fact lists.
The buyers look to third parties—scientists, think tanks, consumer interest groups—as independent sources of information, fountains of untainted facts, unbiased voices from the ether giving the straight shit.
But it’s not a sure thing. Not when cancer-cause research can be funded by tobacco corporations, or when “objective” think tanks can be underwritten by eminently biased politicians. It’s preposterous. It’s sick.
Worst of all it’s true.
Innumerable organizations and individuals, presented as unbiased sources of advice and information, are no more than PR fronts. This is the third party technique, an advertising strategy built around the fundamental tenets—the common sense, if you will—of buyer beware. The buyers put their trust in an outsider—someone who would have no reason to deceive the buyers. Ostensibly, this is sound reasoning.
Unless businesses start buying up the elsewhere, that is.
Each day masses of the unknowing obliviously accept the opinions of PR firms as scientific fact. Their common sense can’t detect such an underhanded ploy. It is time to adopt expanded and, necessarily, more vigilant notions of how to judge trust worthy sources of information. It is time to adjust our common sense; put some of it to rest, as it were.
Common sense once aided and comforted us in our trials against the malevolent seller.
But it doesn’t work anymore.
This piece was heavily influenced by the work of John Stauber, Sheldon Rampton, and Robin Lakoff.
Was it helpful at times? Without a doubt. It’s been down right comforting, shielding you from the unfounded claims of venom spitting know-nothings, sheltering you from the nightmarish confusion of the unexpected. So much warming security is taken from common sense.
Yet so much of it is just a daydream.
“Buyer beware”—an idea derived from experience, shaped into a defense against the malevolent seller.
Times change.
Contexts change.
All the while you’re still making calls with old-fashioned know-how. Then common sense is no longer savvy. It’s obsolete. You’re weighing the world on a broken scale.
How do the buyers beware if they don’t know when they’re buying?
The buyers have been conditioned to scrutinize the seller, learning well that it is wealth alone that motivates business. To whom, then, does the buyer look for relevant information on a product or a service? Not advertisements. Those are pitches, not fact lists.
The buyers look to third parties—scientists, think tanks, consumer interest groups—as independent sources of information, fountains of untainted facts, unbiased voices from the ether giving the straight shit.
But it’s not a sure thing. Not when cancer-cause research can be funded by tobacco corporations, or when “objective” think tanks can be underwritten by eminently biased politicians. It’s preposterous. It’s sick.
Worst of all it’s true.
Innumerable organizations and individuals, presented as unbiased sources of advice and information, are no more than PR fronts. This is the third party technique, an advertising strategy built around the fundamental tenets—the common sense, if you will—of buyer beware. The buyers put their trust in an outsider—someone who would have no reason to deceive the buyers. Ostensibly, this is sound reasoning.
Unless businesses start buying up the elsewhere, that is.
Each day masses of the unknowing obliviously accept the opinions of PR firms as scientific fact. Their common sense can’t detect such an underhanded ploy. It is time to adopt expanded and, necessarily, more vigilant notions of how to judge trust worthy sources of information. It is time to adjust our common sense; put some of it to rest, as it were.
Common sense once aided and comforted us in our trials against the malevolent seller.
But it doesn’t work anymore.
This piece was heavily influenced by the work of John Stauber, Sheldon Rampton, and Robin Lakoff.
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