I disagree.
People are manipulated by advertisements every day, and most of the time they're so good, you don't even realize it. This is called introspection and as humans, we suck at it. Nisbett & Wilson did a study in 1977 to test this, so if you don't believe me, take it up with the Ph.D.'s.
Participants were asked to use introspection to answer how they came up with an idea fabricated by the experimenters. All of them failed to report the correct stimuli AND the participants credited their idea to irrelevant and ineffective stimuli.
Good advertisers and marketers know this and they can trigger subconscious stimuli to make people think they thought of something on their own when in reality, you did not, and that's exactly how the companies want it. I could go on with how much I disagree with this passage, but I feel like I'd just be beating a dead horse with a stick so I'll move on...
Foucalt needs to learn how to edit.
Foucalt also presents a juxtaposition of heterotopias (real spaces) and utopias (imagined spaces). Utopias are not real places; they are perfected reflections of heterotopias that exist in a realm separate from our reality. The heterotopias are places that exist in the real world and serve a specific purpose to society, according to when they occur in time. The same heterotopia could have a vastly different function in one time period of a culture than if it occurred at a later time.
Heterotopias are defined by a list of characteristics: they are ubiquitous across cultures, they can affect the role of other heterotopias in a culture, they can have many meanings, they occur at a specific point in time, and they can be both exclusive and inclusive.
Foucalt said, "These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space" I found this strange because he contrasted useful space to cultural space. Is he saying that a place cannot be both? If a site is deemed cultural is it also deemed useless? Or if it is considered useful, does that mean in cannot be cultural?
If cathedrals are cultural and malls are cathedrals, are malls cultural? Are malls and cathedrals both useless? Or does it just mean that a useful space cannot be occupied by a mall or cathedral?
That's the end of my blog post, if you made it all the way through, congratulations! and here's a reward: go listen to Neon Cathedral by Macklemore.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-gmGiN3Cjk
Roger, you have an interesting way at looking at this. Looking at it that way, I do agree that advertisers and markets exploit consumers to purchase their products.
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