I. Media as a Constructed Reality
The message of the media is always what the messenger wants you to see. The relationship between the portrayed and the portrayer can never be forgotten. It is artistic in the sense that a stimulus is being absorbed, manipulated, and finally (re)presented. A commissioned artist has the freedom to manipulate her subject in any capacity so long as the commissioner considers the finished product acceptable. Because the commission of the artist depends on the commissioner’s interpretation of acceptable, the artist is never at absolute freedom to present the subject as she interprets it, regardless of the amount of freedom the commissioner agrees to. Truth can never co-exist with restriction. It is this juxtaposition of freedom with acceptability which automatically destroys the notion of truth, altering its lexical definition to that of acceptable truth.

It is under these terms that we can begin to understand the relationship of product to worker, as well as that of truth to owner; and it is from this point that we can begin to examine the relationship between media and viewer.

II. Advertising as a Conditional Present
The principles of any single advertisement are constructed by the intent of all advertising: to convince the viewer that she would be better off if she had the advertiser’s product or service. It is because of this that all ads must address the viewer in the future conditional tense: "If you bathed with our soap, you would be more lovable." "If you bought our life insurance, your future would be more secure."

This manipulation forces the viewer to reassess her immediate surroundings. The success of the ad depends on the viewer’s response: if she finds the solicitation to offer a more alluring world, it works and the product succeeds.

Ads represent a connection to happiness expressed through a product, and, although it sounds devilishly backhanded, advertising is not inherently evil; the harm surfaces in deceptive advertising: the marketing of pharmaceuticals as a replacement for happiness; automobiles as a symbol of fun; diamonds as a metaphor of trust.

So now comes the big question: Why has Prozac become the contemporary cure-all? Why is Manpower Temp Agency the largest employer in the world? Why so many two-wheel-drive SUVs? Why are people buying into these things?
Predictably enough, the answers have relatively little to do with people’s relation to actual products, and even less to do with their intellect. What matters is not which sweater is being sold at any given time (the models constantly change), but that we become convinced that we need a new sweater, even if we have ten extras in our closet.

This is not a question of any particular product; it’s an open diagnosis of the way products in general have been related to our lives. The presentation of products is advertising; our relation to the presentation is cognition- how we perceive and understand stimuli.

Large-scale pharmaceutical advertising has exploded in the last few years, consciously encouraging the public that it’s OK for medicine to be used as a lifestyle enhancer. Unlike the sweater that only promises warmth, you can now buy a product that guarantees the exact emotion you are in search of! It sounds great, but there are always the metaphorical [and sometimes extremely concrete] side effects that the advertisers attempt to gloss over.

The root problem is this enigmatic, mythical quality of life that people crave. They desire so much to attain an unattainable end (be it weight, wealth, style, etc.) that they are willing to compromise their logic in order to buy the empty signifiers of such a life. The end result is the new skirt or bottle of pills or home theatre. Advertisers strive to attach this alluring but unattainable ideal to their products. In doing so, they commodify our very being, making us a product of their products.

III. The Need to Reconstruct Reality
Big market advertising has infiltrated our lives and numbed our senses, blurring the line between the way we live and the way the advertisements say we should live. Marketing and sales have positioned themselves at the forefront of defining popular culture, which inherently subverts the lexical idea that popular culture is a reflection of mass culture. Businesses have created our pop culture and played us into believing that their sales schemes and merchandise are products of our culture, not the other way around. There is an explicit need to redefine truth in this context: to re-gain control in our world.

IV. Defining the New Media
The practice of politics for the sake of politics is dead in America. The interest has shifted from traditional politics to an ambiguously inoffensive term: personal politics (don’t personal decisions define political practice?). With this recognition, the success of the New Media will rest in its ability to effectively present the consumer with counter-images to mainstream advertising. It must work towards the deconstruction of social norms (image with product, slogan with corporation, stigma with event, body image with product, etc.) and industrial philosophies (industry with social consciousness v. industry in actual practice), in a manner which encourages the viewer to question the practices of the consumer, and, by extension, the producer. The

New Media must break down the political into the personal in order to reach the targeted group effectively.
We have entered a time in which the people opposed to manipulative advertising and corporate dominance must turn to the very institutions they oppose as a means of reform. We have come to the turning point where this is the final recognition: the only way to make our space less crowded is to initially overcrowd it to the point of suffocation. This can not be achieved solely by image de-construction or culture-jamming, but must initiate a new school of thought in which all media is deconstructed, analyzed, and reassembled. We must begin to demand closer representations of the truth in all our media, from magazines to pop songs to product packaging. This idea of the New Media is the concept of a movement that screams for truth as loudly and adamantly as Coca-Cola screams for sales.