著者

天野 祐吉

出版者

日本マス・コミュニケーション学会

雑誌

新聞学評論 (ISSN:04886550)

巻号頁・発行日

no.35, pp.166-172, 285-284, 1986-04-30

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Advertisements are, so to speak, "sketches of the unconscious" of people's everyday lives. And because of being "unconscious", they sometimes have more reality than intentional sketches. If we regard advertisements as "diaries of the age", then we see them not only as sourses of news information about commodities but also as sketches of ordinary people's everyday lives in ordinary words and seen through the goods they advertise. Advertisers order adpersons to sell goods, and adpersons always have to take advantage of ordinary people's ordinary desires. These pressures make advertisements sketches of ordinary people's everyday lives. If advertisements fail to grasp the "new", then at that very moment they lose all value. Japanese poet Junzaburo Nishiwaki said that "Life is a concept created by literature." We may rightly say that what we refer to as "the masses" is an image created by advertisements. Of course, the vital image of the masses appears not only in advertisements, but it is in them that the masses present their most journalistic form. It seems almost impossible to capture the masses without advertisements which depict ordinary people's lives along with their feelings and make them visible. Nevertheless, it is far from an easy matter to capture the vital image of the masses without debasing them by superficial interpretations because what appear only in expressions often lose their vividness when discussed by words. If we are to capture "the masses merely in the advertisements", then we may have to create some methods of expression which are free from the already established academic ones.