A lot of articles, I have noticed, say things like, “Advertising needs to go under a revolution”
Or, “when will
advertising evolve?”
Or, “When will
advertising realize what’s wrong?”
Such a situation is called a category error. It is an
error in the thinking process. Because, in the actual world, there is no such
thing called “advertising”. “Advertisements” is the word. Advertising is the
main thing and the people who make them as in advertising agencies in new Delhi. But advertising, which is a grouping
of all this, is only a concept in our heads. It does not exist in the actual
world.
Gilbert Ryle explains this error as follows.
A student’s mother tells him she wants to see his
university. The student takes his mother to the Science building, the Arts
building, the English literature building, cafeteria, administration offices.
Still, at the end of the tour, his mother says, “the buildings are all very
nice but I still haven’t seen your university.”
Gibert Ryle the category error is categorizing physical
things into a category/concept and assuming that the category/concept actually
exists in the actual world. But obviously it doesn't it is just a concept,
not something tangible.
One cannot change a concept like it’s something physical
and tangible. You cannot say “University needs to change and sit back and wait
for it to change.
You have to determine which part needs to actually be
changed and physically change it. For example, you can’t say, “English building
you need to change.”
Same is the case with Advertising.
Sitting in your office and saying “Advertising needs to
undergo a change” will not change it. You need to physically fix things. And,
perhaps, the only thing you have control over is your own work, you can start
with changing that.
Pleading a non-existent, indeterminate “advertising” to
change will not change it, since it does not exist in the real world. Advertisements
are the ones that actually exist. Changing the advertisements will actually
make a physical change. Doing that, you will have actually made a difference in
the physical world.
I will, here, quote an infamous saying by Gandhi here, “We
must become the change we want to see.”
No comments:
Post a Comment