sales. The continuing proliferation of words like “best,” “most,” “cleanest,” “purest,” “whitest,” etc., testify to the agency proclivity for leaning on a truth image. For years, the agencies produced ads that made incredible claims for products, and that created arbitrary product differences where none in fact existed. The effect of such advertising was to produce a general cynicism in the public mind regarding all radio and television advertising. Perhaps to combat this, many large agencies recently adopted a policy of faking “straight talk” in commercials. That is, since the effect of their commercials was to create a negative attitude toward the product being advertised, maybe they could use a tone of voice that would sound truthful. Of course, the result has not been “straight talk,” but announcers who sound like they are faking “straight talk.”
The only important question for the FTC and advertising agencies alike is: What are the effects of electronic media advertising? For an advertiser, the issue of concern should center on how the stimuli in a commercial interact with a viewer’s real-life experiences and thus affect his behavior in a purchasing situation. Here the key is to connect products to the real lives of human beings. As long as the connection is made in a deep way, and as long as the experience evoked by the commercial is not in conflict with the experience of the product, purchase is possible, or probable. At the moment, agencies could skirt an end run right around the FTC by producing commercials that get to the heart of the human use of products. People take aspirin because they need relief from a headache, not because it has monodyocycolate in it. People enjoy soup for much simpler reasons than the Heinz commercials would lead one to believe. Eating Heinz soup does not give one the feeling that he is part of a 102-piece band riding on top of a gargantuan can of Heinz soup. Commercials that do not connect and resonate with real-life experiences build an incredibility gap for everyone who uses the medium.
From the FTC point of view, “telling the truth” should be the least important social concern. If electronic communication deals with effects, then government agencies responsible for safeguarding public well-being should concern themselves with understanding the effects of a commercial, and preventing those effects that are not in the public interest. A recent television commercial for children’s aspirin was 100 percent truthful by the most rigid FTC standard, but the effect of the commercial was to make children feel that aspirin is something to take when they want to have a good time. The commercial clearly demonstrates that truth is a print ethic, not a standard for ethical behavior in electronic communication. In addition, the influence of electronic media on print advertising (particularly the substitution of photographic techniques for copy to achieve an effect) raises the question of whether truth is any longer an issue in magazine or newspaper ads.
At present, we have no generally agreed-upon social values and/or rules that can be readily applied in judging whether the effects of electronic communication are beneficial, acceptable, or harmful. Our print-based conception of electronic media prevents us from making social decisions based on a correct understanding of our new communication environment.
Toward a Resonance Theory of Communication
In discussing electronically based communication processes, it is very helpful to use auditory terms. Words like feedback…reverberation…tuning…overload…regeneration… fading describe many of the characteristics of social behavior in relation to electronic media. Similarly, the elements of electronic auditory systems serve as useful analogies for social communication problems. In a public address system, for example, too much output produces feedback. This “fed back” sound becomes re-amplified until the system overloads, producing distortion. Someone using such a system must learn to control the output and anticipate feedback. In mass communication, we experience a parallel problem. The interaction of program output with audience feedback can easily produce an information overload.
These analogies suggest a new theory of electronic communication, based on the patterning of information inherent in auditory communication. Transportation theory assumes that communication is difficult to achieve and that a message encounters resistance at each step in its movement across space, over a period of time. In our electronic communication environment, it is no longer meaningful to assume that communication is a low-efficiency process, or that messages must be pushed across a vast chasm in order to be received and understood. The space between phoning from one room in a house to another room in the same house is equivalent to the space between a caller in New York talking to someone in London. In both instances, space has no effect on the flow of information. Similarly, time is no longer relevant when communication takes place at electronic speed, and editing of film, sound, and video tape replaces the linear sequence of events in time with events juxtaposed in a time relationship established by the communicator.
In formulating a new theory of communication, it is valuable to build on Ray Birdwhistell’s finding that a state of communication is nearly always present in our environment. This state of communication is like an electric circuit that is always turned on. The juice is present in the line, and our problem is to make the current behave in such a way as to achieve the desired effect. Today, there is a nearly constant flow of information at all times. Indeed, one has to expend considerable effort hypothesizing a situation in our culture in which communication does not regularly occur. We take in electronically mediated auditory and visual information as part of our life process. It is part of our immediate physical surround, and we sit in it, absorbing information constantly. The vital question to be posed in formulating a new theory of communication is: What are the characteristics of the process whereby we organize, store, and act upon the patterned information that is constantly flowing into our brain? Further, given these processes, how do we tune communication to achieve the desired effect for someone creating a message?
In electronically mediated human communication, the function of a communicator is to achieve a state of resonance with the person receiving visual and auditory stimuli from television, radio, records, etc. Decoding symbolic forms such as pennants, drums, lantern signals, or written words is no longer our most significant problem. Words transform experience into symbolic forms. They extract meaning from perception in a manner prescribed by the structure of the language, code this meaning symbolically, and store it in the brain. But the brain does not store everything in this way. Many of our experiences with electronic media are coded and stored in the same way that they are perceived. Since they do not undergo a symbolic transformation, the original experience is more directly available to us when it is recalled. Also, since the experience is not stored in a symbolic form, it cannot be retrieved by symbolic cues. It must be evoked by a stimulus that is coded in the same way as the stored information is coded.
The critical task is to design our package of stimuli so that it resonates with information already stored within an individual and thereby induces the desired learning or behavioral effect. Resonance takes place when the stimuli put into our communication evoke meaning in a listener or viewer. That which we put into the communication has no meaning in itself. The meaning of our communication is what a listener or viewer gets out of his experience with the communicator’s stimuli. The listener’s or viewer’s brain is an indispensable component of the total communication system. His life experiences, as well as his expectations of the stimuli he is receiving, interact with the communicator’s output in determining the meaning of the communication.
A listener or viewer brings far more information to the communication event than a communicator can put into his program, commercial, or message. The communicator’s problem, then, is not to get stimuli across, or even to package his stimuli so they can be understood and absorbed. Rather, he must deeply understand the kinds of information and experiences stored in his audience, the patterning of this information, and the interactive resonance process whereby stimuli evoke this stored information.
The resonance principle is not totally new or unique to electronic communication, It has always been an element in painting, music, sculpture, and, to a limited degree, even in print. However, resonance is now a more operational
