Technological Society by Jacques Ellul

¶ … Technological Society" by Jacques Ellul

In the discourse, "The Technological Society," author Jacques Ellul presented an analysis of the present trends that dominate and are prevalent in today's technology-centric society. Ellul attempted to provide a descriptive analysis of the true nature of today's society, and how technologies have a significant role in promoting this new kind of social order. In his analysis and discussion, there were two assertions that he have presented: firstly, that postmodernist society is a mass society (that is, the postmodernist man becomes the mass man); and secondly, that human society is gradually achieving the ultimate end of modernism, which is to make humans as an objective 'object' of today's phenomenon of techno-centrism.

In presenting his first assertion, which argued that today's humanity is postmodernist and mass -- that is, humanity has achieved a specific level of standardization. This phenomenon of 'standardization' leads to the creation of one image among humans, with each human attempting (and achieving) to become just what like others are. Ellul identified advertising as one of the products of technocapitalism that helped improve and further develop the concept of the "mass man."

Through advertising, standardization is promoted, as more and more people engage in activities and consume products and services that were considered symbols of human comfort. The idea of living a comfortable life, according to Ellul, is a universal need among humans, thus advertisements that aimed to project these images of comfortable lifestyle and living implicitly suggest that people must aim to achieve what other people consider to be the 'right path' towards 'right, healthy living,' as he explicated in his discourse on advertising and the production of the "mass man":

When men feel and respond to the needs advertising creates, they are adhering to its ideal of life. This explains the extremely rapid development, for example, of hygiene and cocktails. No one, before the advent of advertising, felt the need to be clean for cleanliness' sake...The human tendencies upon which advertising like this is based may be strikingly simpleminded, but they nonetheless represent pretty much the level of our modern life. Advertising offers us the ideal we have always wanted (and that ideal is certainly not a heroic way of life).

Advertising, in effect, became the medium through which humans are able to collectively standardize their culture, which includes their beliefs, traditions, attitudes, and lifestyle, among others.