What is wrong with marketing on social media and elsewhere?
I am talking about marketing which refers to personal opinions of what is the best option. That’s the problem of platforms of Tiktok and Facebook. There is nothing wrong in giving personal opinions, but on social media, as with the millennia of other technologies, the intelligent thing to do is to condition the language to the conditionals.
For example, in a Facebook discussion on a TikTok post about an Chat GPT which thinks UU is an option for a religion for our times, the human presenter (using ChatGPT) on Tik Tok declared a personal opinion of an eclectic mix of secular humanism and Buddhism as the “best”. There is nothing wrong with this personal opinion, but it is insufficient, unless the topic in question is the personal preference of the informer. There is no knowledge other than that about the preference. To give the alternative, which is to appropriately the intelligent thing to do, is to condition the language to the conditionals, and communicate something along the lines of, “This is my personal option, but Studies-in-Religion knowledge propositions that no “religion” is actually better than another in a general sense, even as a personal experience”. Indeed, no belief system can be said, in generalities, to be better than another. Conditionality is needed. It is the conditionality which makes for a spectrum of belief. Then we can say something is better than another, based on a scale which is as larger in scoping as it can be. (i.e. judgement is always fallible, but it is necessarily so to be sufficient).
It is only that personal experience is limited, and ought to consider the comprehensive education; it is truth to be valued. Marketing is a fundamental dishonesty at some level. The more it dismisses the valuing and comprehension of others by not acknowledging these truths, the more dishonest it is. It is simply recognizing that we probably know much less than we think in the marketing campaign, but against the dismissive cynicism, we can and do, understand what is sufficient.
What is sufficient is to ask our audience, and better still, participants, to open their thinking by the discomfort of scoping out our own learning. This is the nature of truly understanding.
Featured Image:
Deepen Understanding. Dreamstime: 152918926
Neville Buch
Latest posts by Neville Buch (see all)
- Changeling Leadership - April 21, 2025
- ‘Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?’ (David Pinder) - April 21, 2025
- Bob Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man - April 19, 2025