Songs
broadcast on the radio have a quality all their own, even if we scarcely attend
to this quality today.
Nor do we have trouble recalling the particular acoustic
quality of radio: we know the sound radio makes and we can notice the quality
of radio transmission as such and very specifically, say, to use Adorno’s own example
in his Current of Music, if we are
tuning a radio set.
But
if new technology can (and it is
important to note that it does not always) make this a less common experience —
even satellite radio drifts, and the internet has a rather famous instability
from time to time — we nonetheless notice the ‘sound’ or the fact of radio
transmission when the weather changes or else when we are moving about or driving,
due to the call letters constantly announced as well as the character of
broadcast sound.
As in the case of cellphones,
this fading quality of wireless broadcasting is one of the things that has not
changed since the beginning of publically accessible radio broadcasting in 1922
(which public broadcasting should thus be distinguished from Nikola Tesla’s invention
of the technology needed for radio broadcast or Guglielmo Marconi’s first
transmission in 1895).
Although what I call The Hallelujah Effect is all about cover versions, I did not heard Cohen’s Hallelujah for the
first time in such a version by another singer, but as sung by Cohen himself.
Naturally enough and to be precise, I
should say that I didn’t actually “hear” Cohen at all or in a “real” sense, because
I was not in his physical presence. Of course not.
And the point here is that
the claim that one has “heard” a singer, any singer, any performer, is almost never meant as
the report of an immediate or direct experience.
This
is different in practice from the classical enthusiast who usually means that
he or she has heard this or that performer in concert, but even there,
familiarity with a recorded performance can also be what is meant.
In
general, we take technical reproduction or mediation for granted, and we pay no
particular mind to the where or the how of it.
Covert
priming corresponds to what Vance Packard triumphantly reported as having made
the front page of the London Sunday Times
in 1956:
“certain United States advertisers were experimenting with
‘sub-threshold effects’ in seeking to insinuate messages to people past their
conscious guard.”
To
this day we speak of prime time, just as we speak of radio and television
programming. And we think nothing of it.
At
the same time, social science scholars seem to fall over themselves to argue or
better said to insist that there is no such priming effect or else that it is
very general or very minimal, seemingly to reassure confidence in consumer
choice and free will: it is not for nothing that a leading research trend in
the social sciences is called rational choice.
Thus an abundance of studies
(particularly in disciplines not
contributing to marketing research) insist upon the inefficacy of priming, not
unlike US academic confidence in the non-existence of propaganda in United
States.
Yet and at the end of the day, empirical research repeatedly confirms
that “priming” (that would be what the popular press calls “subliminal
persuasion”) does indeed work, down indeed to the brand itself.
The term "priming" is a technical one in behavioural and cognitive studies in psychology as well as marketing and advertising research.
See for a retrospective account/reflection, John Bargh's “What Have We Been Priming All These Years? On the Development, Mechanisms, and Ecology of Nonconscious Social Behavior,” European Journal of Social Psychology, 36 (2006): 147-168.
The researcher noted above, Yale's John Bargh, has faced a number of obstacles, not least our own cherished sense that such things cannot, could not, dare not be true. Even a recent article in the Chronicle, so beloved (by mid-range academics) for its solidly middle of the academy perspective on academia, suggests this in the title (subtitle really, but the rhetoric of that also plays on the technique in question) of an article on his work published 20 January 2013:
Power of Suggestion
The amazing influence of unconscious cues is among the most fascinating discoveries of our time—that is, if it's true
See the full Chronicle text here.
Or see this nice quiet unobtrusive little report on his work in the New York Times from a few years back here.
Or this rather less benign and more recent reflection vis-a-vis the economy here.
Priming also applies, although Bargh and fellow psychologists would never note this, if some brave marketing experts might, to what Adorno characterizes as the “ubiquity” standard as the standardizing impetus for conditioning of all kinds, especially qua “covert priming.”
Excerpt from Babich, The Hallelujah Effect (Sussex: Ashgate, 2013).
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