Branding Encourages You to be "More Yourself"
When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to “be yourself,†what it really means is “be more yourself,†where “yourself†is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital. In fact, I don’t know what a personal brand is other than a reliable, unchanging pattern of snap judgments: “I like this†and “I don’t like this,†with little room for ambiguity or contradiction. Thinking about what it would mean to submit to such a process, becoming a more and more reified version of “myself,†I’m reminded of the way Thoreau described unthinking people in “Civil Disobedienceâ€: as basically dead before their time. If I think I know everything that I want and like, and I also think I know where and how I’ll find it—imagining all of this stretching endlessly into the future without any threats to my identity or the bounds of what I call my self—I would argue that I no longer have a reason to keep living. After all, if you were reading a book whose pages began to seem more and more similar until you were reading the same page over and over again, you would put the book down.
Notes:
Folksonomies: advertising attention economy
Taxonomies:
/business and industrial/advertising and marketing (0.731559)
/business and industrial/advertising and marketing/brand management (0.715871)
/business and industrial/advertising and marketing/advertising (0.705106)
Concepts:
Advertising (0.965221): dbpedia_resource
Consistency (0.920801): dbpedia_resource
Brand (0.905532): dbpedia_resource
Argument (0.877423): dbpedia_resource
Personal branding (0.853924): dbpedia_resource
Death (0.780676): dbpedia_resource
Time (0.676536): dbpedia_resource
Science (0.594049): dbpedia_resource