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And who will control our will now?

Last week I asked who is going to control our minds, because soon there will be in the market several devices that will establish a direct link between the human brain and a computer.

 

The question I am asking this week is based on the previous question, because if we cannot think for ourselves we cannot decide for ourselves either.

 

The question about who is controlling our will to live, act, decide, be who we are and become who we want to be came to me because, due to a professional commitment, I had to review some material about a topic I was familiar with, but I never took the time to understand in detail: social marketing.

 

Social marketing is basically the use of some techniques and marketing principles to get a group of people (the “target audience”) to change their behavior, either to stop doing something they now do (for example, smoke cessation) or to start doing something they don’t do (exercise). In some cases, social marketing wants to change an already existing behavior. (For details, read books by Philip Kotler.)

 

The ads and projects developed by experts in social marketing are usually paid by government agencies or by large corporations. Those ads include rational, emotional, moral, and environmental elements that will appeal to the brain and the heart of the target audience to change the behavior or opinion of those persons.

 

There are other methods of behavioral change, such as laws, sanctions, or jail. Social marketers, however, want to promote a gradual and internal change, so the person who receives the message develops a process inside him or her, leading to a self-imposed and often permanent behavioral change.

 

Social marketing appears to be “innocent,” for example, when you receive a loyalty card from your supermarket or some kind of rewards from your airlines for using their services quite often. However, even when everybody says social marketing is not a manipulative technique, there are some not so innocent aspects of this activity.

 

For example, who has the right to decide that my behavior has to change? Perhaps some bureaucrat at some obscure office or perhaps a researcher at a university lab. And who pays them and provides resources for them? Could it be that whoever is paying them is also telling them what to say?

 

Are the ads created by these experts telling the truth or are those ads only a very intelligent and effective way of promoting the message they were told to promote, regardless of the “truth” of that message?

 

The more I think about social marketing the more I see that a presidential campaign is just social marketing taken to the extreme, because people are being asked to change their opinions and even they values to accept the ideas of a certain candidate or political party.

 

My new question then is this: If we are neither thinking not deciding for ourselves, are we still free or is freedom just an illusion? You decide… if you can.

 

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