The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.
Interpretation
Modern individuals are easily influenced by images, making them vulnerable to advertising manipulations.
In this quote, Johan Huizinga highlights how the contemporary person has become more susceptible to visual stimuli, particularly from advertisements. This susceptibility leads to a diminished ability to critically evaluate information and make sound judgments, allowing advertisers to manipulate perceptions and desires effectively. As a consequence, individuals often consume and accept messages without the necessary scrutiny, reinforcing the power of advertising in shaping opinions and choices in the modern world.
In practice
In a marketing class when discussing the impact of visual advertising on consumer behavior.
If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's.
The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.
Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
The sum of a man's problems come from his inability to be alone in a silent room.
Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me--
Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
When advertisers ignore diversity, it is because they don't think the lives of others matter. There is not enough of a financial imperative for those lives to matter.
A large portion of our citizens, who will not believe, even on the evidence of facts, that any public evils exist, or are impending. They deride the apprehensions of those who foresee, that licentiousness will prove, as it ever has proved, fatal to liberty.
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