Most people develop mental filters to soften the sensory blitzkrieg, lest they go bonkers, and they respond to the barrage with boredom, which is a kind of criticism. So argues James Twitchell in an essay published in WQ, the invaluable quarterly of the irreplaceable Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Americans do not always suffer sensible people gladly, so Twitchell, who teaches English at the University of Florida, should not expect thanks for pointing out that people are paying for advertisements twice. They pay in the price of the product advertised, and they pay in the coin of the attention they pay to the advertisements.
Advertising agencies exist to rent our attention to people with goods or services to sell.
Try to think when your attention is not rented. Many college sports teams have Nike's swooshes on their jerseys. When you are put on hold on the telephone you often are plied with commercial communications, which also appear in urinals, on grocery store shopping carts, on video screens attached to StairMasters in gyms, in the first five minutes of rented movie videos. Twitchell is not scandalized by these transactions, which is what they are. Given the choice between paying money and paying attention, we prefer to pay attention.