People in distant parts of the world, impoverished, subjugated, still have enough time to watch American television shows like Baywatch, dreaming of a better life overseas. Locally, movies like Runaway Train, The Matrix, and Blade Runner send out mixed messages on technology. In Runaway Train, a new computer controlled train fails; Blade Runner portrays a race of genetically engineered humans as the failure of technology, but makes one feel sorry for this race at the very end, by finding out that our protagonist, and the female interest are also part of this race.[1, p. 34] A Clockwork Orange takes one through a similar experience.
Overwhelmingly the news media, however, comes out unquestioningly in favour of technology. Consider the recent ``discovery'' of viagra, for example. And the advent of the ``jet-lag'' pill. They come out entire for the product without critical thought. They hail it as innovative medicines which will help all. Let us consider the jet-lag pill. Your body goes through jet-lag because it is going through a shock. The correct action for one to take is rest. But precisely because of technology, the jet-liner, and the need for businessmen to travel often, work, they cannot rest. In effect, the technology that we have created to ``solve'' our problems is a result of the very problems it created.[13, p. 31]
Advertising has a major effect on the way we view the world. As was demonstrated in the introduction to this section, commercials carry social meaning, if even indirectly and unintentional. Advertisers want to sell you their client's wares; they create a need for product x where none exists.
As Benjamin Barber aptly noted in his speech at Colorado State University, records was not good enough, so tapes were presented; tapes were not good enough, so CD's were presented; now DVD's2 are presented as the latest need. All of these format differences in recorded audio came about through the need of wanting to hear hi-fidelity music. Apparently, listening to Beethoven's 5th preformed by the New York Philharmonic, which sounds slightly less ``real'', in the comfort of your living room is much more appealing to listeners than going to a real concert.
Further, why would one see a vehicle going through miles of wooded forest, while the narrator announces the new vehicle's convenient television set, displaying the mother and children with their eyes zoned out of the real natural world and attuned to the television set. Ritzer argues that it is attributed to simulacra: it is not enough to perceive things as they really are. The perceptions must be bigger and better than even real life. Keeping these perceptions hyper-real is advertising's business.