Nothing at Face Value?

Last Thursday, I participated in a focus group that looked at various marketing campaigns for Internet Security Software. The other group members were all pretty computer savvy, and all of us had been burned in some way by a computer virus, or security breach of some kind.

The interviewer gave us four paragraphs that basically presented a marketing pitch for each of the systems, after reading them we were to talk about what we liked and what we disliked and then say how much we would pay for it.

Immediately, it became clear that none of us were buying any of the marketing spin that we saw on the paper. We were more experienced than that, and at one point, the interviewer had to tell us..."Just assume that it is true, then how would you feel about it?"

But that's the problem, not a one of us was stupid enough to just "assume it was true." As much as marketers and their compadres would love it if we were that stupid, there are very few people who have grown up in our age of media bombardment that will willingly accept any claim made on an ad at face value. Its absurd to rely on any evaluation of an ad given that caveat.

Add to this absurd assumption that the product, internet security systems, have repeatedly shown to fail at some time or another, either via coordinated system hacks, or through simple human error or avarice and the level of requested assumption drops to less than zero.

Fine, so the focus group premise was a joke...this is not the point that I learned last Thursday. No, what I learned is that my own cynicism and mistrust runs extremely deep within me, as it may within many people. I have been repeatedly disillusioned, deceived and otherwise disappointed by advertising, corporations, politicians and humans in general, and these things have changed me.

I am not a paranoid who believes that the world is out to get me, rather I believe that I am a rational, reasonably intelligent person who has simply lived his life in this modern world and paid enough attention to recognize that there is a pattern of promises not meeting reality that runs throughout the types of interactions that I sited above.

So what do I do with this deep cynicism, because I also have come to recognize that this cynicism rests at the core of so much of my personality. My humor tends toward the witty observation of inequity, or world-weary reality check. Sure, it makes people laugh, but what's the underlying cost of just accepting a world that continuously fails to meet its own stated promises?

Right now, I feel as though I am on the cusp of a change. A decision about how I want to live my life...how I want to be. This decision carries a lot of weight as the choice means that I may have to abandon this core foundation of cynicism, and with it so much of who I seem to have become.