Manipulative Advertising

When photography was first invented, people believed that what they saw on the image was the most accurate and realistic portrayal of reality. They believed it to be "the truth". Nowadays people will think twice before they believe anything portrayed on a photo or billboard. Photoshop makes it possible to alter something that is "normal" and change it into something that is more pleasing to the eye. You could even create entirely new things with Photoshop. With today's technology, people can do literally anything they want with images. How can anyone believe what he sees anymore?

Manipulating images that are to be seen in commercials or on billboards have reached the point where it becomes unethical and give people a distorted view of reality. Due to this manipulation a conflict arises between ethics and aesthetics and how these two are used in advertisements. Ethics are a set of rules that define what is thought of the be good and bad, whilst aesthetics deals with the nature of beauty, taste and things that are pleasing in appearance.

The problem that has occurred is that there is almost no limit to what man is capable of doing to an image, even though many things are done to images with the best intentions. The major issue here is when does the pursuit of aesthetics exceed our ethics? When people go to the movies, they can see aliens or dinosaurs that appear almost real. In this situation it does not matter when the film is digitally altered because people expect it. When looking at an advertisement, however, people expect to see the truth and they will feel betrayed or fooled when it does not portray a real image.

The difficult question to many people is 'how far is too far?'. It is very difficult to say so since there is not just black and white. There is an immense grey area in between with a lot of controversial topics. Enhancing a faint detail in the original image to make it more visible, or more aesthetically appealing, is ethically acceptable. Adding something that was not there in the first place is not. Even here it is difficult to say how much is too much. In 2006 Cosmetics company Dove made an eye-opening commercial that shows how easy it is to enhance an advertisement and to send out a misleading message to the public, called 'The evolution of beauty'.

Unfortunately this happens far too much, especially in the cosmetics industry. Because only the most perfect models are portrayed on advertisements, 'normal' people are lead to believe that that is the way to look. Especially the younger generations, girls in particular, are easily influenced by these ads. They do not know what is 'normal' anymore and the only way to look perfect is to be super skinny. This issue is ethically challenging and many people think it should be dealt with. However, aesthetically speaking people do find it pleasing and they prefer seeing perfect supermodels to ordinary looking people that resemble the average girl next door more. Yet another difficult matter in the battle for ethical acceptability.

Manipulative advertising is wrong. It only becomes a question of ethics, and therefore a problem, when there has been lied about the motivations and if images are being portrayed with the purpose to intentionally deceive. What is important is the motivation. Why are certain things done? Are they done to deceive people? Most advertisements are altered to become visually more interesting, not to deceive the customers. Most of the time people are just trying to make a better picture. Just as a writer may enhance his stories with metaphors and adjectives, photographers and the people behind advertisements try to enhance their images with digital techniques and color enhancement.

Luckily today most advertisers strive to achieve and maintain fair ethical standards and practice socially responsible advertising. Employees of an advertisement company are rarely forced to work on accounts they morally oppose. To protect the consumer, the advertising industry has become a heavily regulated profession. Many laws, regulations and regulatory bodies have been created so far. Advertising now is being reviewed, controlled and modified by governments and consumer groups in order to stop manipulative and deceptive ads. By Alexander T Dixon

Why trying to kill yourself may be a smart business decision

When Kirk Jones jumped over the guardrail at Niagara Falls last week and fell 180 feet alongside 150,000 gallons per second of rushing water, traditional explanations for his leap were plentiful. Jones' parents said he had lost his job and was depressed. A suicide expert pointed out the appeal of dramatic farewells. And everyone called the jump suicidal: Jones is the first person to survive a Niagara fall without safety gear.

But when it later came out that Jones had boasted to a friend, "If I go over and I live, I am going to make some money," it was time to call in the economists.

Jones is now negotiating with tabloids to sell his story for thousands of dollars. His case, however, will complicate a debate that is roiling suicidology, one that pits economists against psychiatrists over a basic question: Is suicide a rational decision?

This controversy began in 1974 when two Princeton economists created a model to forecast suicidal decisions. Admittedly, the economists wrote, some suicidal behavior is purely irrational. But evidence suggests that economic theory explains some suicides. The economists proposed that the value of a life might be calculated the same way we value companies: Measure all the happiness a life might contain, discount it by the cost of achieving that happiness, and if the net present joie de vivre is less than zero, suicide is a viable option.

The economics of suicide were largely ignored in the ensuing decades. But last year Dave Marcotte, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, pushed the field forward when he wondered what happens to people like Jones who attempt, but do not achieve, suicide.* There are about 20 attempts for every successful suicide. (Approximately 2.9 percent of the U.S. population has attempted suicide—1,760 attempts per day.)

Previous studies had demonstrated that as personal incomes rise, the propensity for suicide falls (presumably, money does buy some happiness). Marcotte's insight was that individuals contemplating suicide do not just choose between life and death. Rather, they choose between three alternatives: life, death, and the gray area of unsuccessful suicide, which may be negative (expensive injury and permanent disability) or positive (a "cry for help" that elicits attention).

The resulting formula contains a somewhat paradoxical conclusion: Attempting suicide can be a rational choice, but only if there is a high likelihood it will cause the attempter's life to significantly improve.

Marcotte couldn't test the relative "life improvement" of successful suicides—since they were, of course, dead—but he could study those who had failed at suicide to determine if their lives improved after the attempt. The results are surprising. Marcotte's study found that after people attempt suicide and fail, their incomes increase by an average of 20.6 percent compared to peers who seriously contemplate suicide but never make an attempt. In fact, the more serious the attempt, the larger the boost—"hard-suicide" attempts, in which luck is the only reason the attempts fail, are associated with a 36.3 percent increase in income. (The presence of nonattempters as a control group suggests the suicide effort is the root cause of the boost.)

Why should suicide be an economic boon? Once you attempt suicide you suddenly have access to lots of resources—medical care, psychiatric attention, familial love and concern—that were previously expensive or unavailable. Doubters may ask why the depressed don't seek out resources earlier. But studies have demonstrated that psychological and familial resources become "cheaper" after a suicide attempt: It is difficult to find free medical care when you are sad, but once you try to kill yourself, it's forced on you.

Suddenly the calculus of suicide has become even more complicated. Now attempting suicide seems a rational choice, as long as the attempt isn't too successful. But this conclusion alarms suicidologists: Treating suicide as a logical act runs counter to everything they have been advocating for the past 40 years.

The suicide-prevention movement of the 1960s was founded upon the idea of "suicide crisis moments"—relatively brief periods when "psychological pain and mental illness causes irrational thoughts, which are treatable and temporary," explained Dr. David Rudd, president of the American Association of Suicidology. This idea is the basis of suicide hotlines, which studies prove are effective in saving lives. Suicidology suggests that most failed suicide attempts are not caused by permanent mental illness. Rather, they are the products of momentary lapses in reason. Once the crisis moment is resolved through intervention and care, suicidal instincts pass and would-be attempters go on to fruitful and healthy lives. (Many economists and suicidologists agree that multiple suicide attempts and successful suicides are often products of longstanding mental illnesses.)

Constructing suicide as a momentary loss of reason is vitally important to the suicide-prevention movement because it suggests that men and women who have attempted self-murder should be allowed to shrug off social stigmas. If suicidal instincts are just momentary delusions, they are easily explained and dismissed. The suicide-prevention movement fears that if suicide is deemed the rational product of someone's mind, we may feel justified in suspecting that mind forever.

But by objecting to rational explanations of suicide, the suicidology community may be undermining its own cause. Although suicide attempts cost the nation more than $3 billion per year, and suicides claim more American lives than homicides, suicide prevention is hampered by scarce resources. Ultimately, say mental health advocates, legislators don't like to fund suicide prevention because they believe that suicidal people must be crazy, and crazy people don't really want help. Perhaps if suicide were considered a rational and combatable disease, like skin cancer or high cholesterol, we might see well funded educational campaigns similar to those for more socially acceptable ailments.

http://www.slate.com/