You Are Not Human by Simon Lancaster

Author:Simon Lancaster [Simon Lancaster]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785904080
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc.
Published: 2018-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

SPIN

John Ayrton Paris was the Brian Cox of his day. Throughout the early nineteenth century, he travelled the capital cities of Europe demonstrating science to children using an ingenious selection of little toys he’d invented especially for that purpose. One of the most enchanting of these toys was the thaumatrope.

Today, thaumatropes are rarely to be found outside of animation museums, but we have bought a few of them, which we keep at home. The thaumatrope is a circular disc with a hole on either side with a piece of string connecting the two holes. You draw a picture of one thing on one side, a picture of something else on the other and then, when you spin the disc around using the string, the two pictures blur into one. So, for instance, you can draw a bird on one side and a cage on the other: spin the disc quickly and, hey presto, it looks like the bird is in the cage. Or you draw flowers on one side and a vase on the other and it looks like the flowers are in the vase. And so on. You get the idea.

Paris invented the thaumatrope to demonstrate ‘persistence of vision’, which is the way our brain retains an image long after it’s gone. It was Aristotle who first wrote about ‘persistence of vision’, after observing how long the vision of the sun remained in the mind long after one had stopped looking at it. Thaumatropes demonstrate this point in a delightful way. In the film Sleepy Hollow, Johnny Depp’s character, Ichabod Crane, spins a thaumatrope to a young girl called Katrina. Katrina cries gleefully, ‘It is magic!’ Crane replies, ‘It is not magic. It is what we call optics. Separate pictures which become one on the spinning. It is truth. But truth is not always appearance.’

The thaumatrope sums up to me what we mean when we talk about spin: in the context of political spin, the art of spin and spin doctors. You spin two images together, repeatedly and rapidly. Eventually, the two images become blurred and inextricably interconnected. That’s what advertising, branding and political communication is fundamentally about: establishing connections between what a company is selling and what a customer needs. Dolce & Gabbana = style. Ferrari = machismo. ASDA = a sense of belonging.

Advertising works very much like a thaumatrope. On one side, you have your literal product; on the other, you have your customer’s dreams. On one side of the disc, you have what is real; on the other side, you have something surreal. Spin them together and you’ve created a new truth: something that far surpasses your real offer, enabling you to sell something which is much more desirable and valuable.

Take Jack Daniel’s. The literal reality is a drink, and a very successful one at that: it is the bestselling whiskey in Britain and the bestselling American whiskey in the world.206 But how many people actually buy it because of the taste? Do you remember the first time you tried whiskey? People usually wince and grimace on a first taste.

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