Tanka is not a off-brand of toy truck sold at 99-cent stores but rather a traditional form of Japanese poetry that dates back to the eighth century, when poets somehow managed to write the brief verses without the aid of a cell phone, whose tiny screens, today’s Wall Street Journal informs us, “are just right for 31 syllables in 5 lines dashed off on the run.” Call me a Wordsworthian, but I have always generally believed that the composition of poetry took place ideally in moments of repose when the “spontaneous flow of emotion could be recollected in tranquility” as opposed to idle moments on the subway or in a grocery-store line. Perhaps such moments have been extinguished from modern life, along with the idea that any sort of artistic production can take place without some form of technology authorizing and legitimating it, shaping it with the restrictions it affords. Viewed in that light—that contemporary art requires technological limits to dictate its form and make it seem socially relevant—it makes perfect sense that Japanese teens would compose poetry exclusively on their cell phones. The limitations and eccentricities of the new medium afforded by technology lets poets feel liberated by the new constraints, which they eagerly adopt to seize on society’s most routinely celebrated phenomenon, new communication gadgets. “The tanka I write on my cell phone feels closer to me,” explains one poet trained in the traditional cloisterlike poetry schools called kesshas. Here we see the real crux of the story, the intimacy between an individual and her phone enabling her to draw more out from herself, to learn herself better, to understand more about herself. Earlier in the piece, another teenager interviewed noted that “it’s summer break now, so students are probably close to their phones.” Maybe this was an odd translation, but it struck me as an extrememly telling turn of phrase—“close to their phones.” I wasn’t really sure what it meant until I began to think of the intimacy with which one is expected to relate to the gadget, as if it were an extension of oneself, the crucial portal that allows one to dock with others and communicate. It is becoming a requisite conduit to reach the intimate spaces of one’s mind. Conversations on one’s private, personal phone become inherently more intimate, specific as they are to you and not the location where the phone may once have been connected. Composing poetry on the phone is just an evolution from this fundamental recognition of the mental space carved out by one’s own personal phone being extremely private, personal, intimate. Cell-phone technology is essentially taking the space in which intimate exchange can happen and making it virtual, unreal, dependent on satellites. And as the phone becomes the fetish of intimacy, it suffices to conjure the feeling of intimacy, so that other people, once a humdrum, troublesome requirement for close relationships, can be at last be done away with altogether.

When a consumerist society funds technology, the resulting developments should be expected to further consumerism and the mind-sets, the assumptions, that enable it. Thus much technology allows us to expedite our consumption, a process labeled convenience. One would also assume it would be directed toward making us view more advertising, as advertising is the primary vehicle for reproducing the consumerist ideology. But much of the latest home entertainment technology seems driven by the power it gives consumers to circumvent ads. This would seem to foil my little argument, however the technological screening of overt ads has had the effect of pushing ads deeper into the fabric of our entertainment and our society, thus if anything, enhancing their ideological potency (if not their selling power of a specific product).

This development is chronicled in yesterday’s New York Times story “When the Ad Turns Into the Story Line.” Because the independent ads are tuned out, advertisers have partnered with television production companies to integrate the ads directly into the narratives of the programs. Whenever this sort of change is reported—and it happens often; it’s a business-section evergreen—advertisers are usually depicted as “scrambling” to keep up with consumers, struggling to “adapt” to those ever more crafty consumers, who are remorseless and ever resourceful in their drive to thwart Madison Avenue. It’s a flattering enough rendering of the situation for consumers, making it seem as though they have all the power. But it flatters advertisers too and plays into their industry’s rationalizations that they somehow serve the public or are consigned to chasing after them in our “consumer-driven society.” And it grants a preposterous air of inevitability to the infiltration of ads deeper into all forms of social space. This absurd statement illustrates what I mean: “Network, advertising, and production executives say that this season, more and more brands will venture outside the confines of 30-second ads. They may have no choice: As technology and clutter blunt the effectiveness and reach of commercial spots that have underpinned the business…the various players are scrambling to adapt.” They have no choice? Consumers, in fact, have no choice but to have their entertainment come packaged with brands. Advertisers are choosing to seize upon technological innovations as an excuse to penetrate further and insinuate marketing messages into areas that individuals have become increasingly desperate to protect from such exploitation.

But TV execs and advertisers have one specific message for you if you don’t happen to like this infiltration: tough shit. “If people get insulted they can go watch PBS or go rent an independent movie. Seriously, this is the real world,” says one advertiser, again drawing on the “ads are inevitable/we have no choice” ruse. The “real world” is one in which everything must be commercialized in order to be legitimate, in order to survive. The real world is branded with the product names that this flunkey pimps to the world. The world of PBS and independent movies is not “real”—insignificant and underfunded, reduced to mere alibis for consumerist expansion, they are bogus alternatives that allow the commerical hegemony to present itself as a free choice made by individuals. If you don’t like that hegemony, not only are you being naive and unrealistic, you are also failing to avail yourself of your freedom of choice, and are thus irrelevant and anti-democratic. Never mind that the either-ors of how you entertain yourself personally has nothing to do with a desire to see commercialism’s infestation restrained by some counterveiling force.

With the extension of advertising into the fabric of narrative, advertisers hope we’ll just accept the presence of brands in entertainment as a given, as an entirely natural part of any given universe—“The fact is brands are part of our lives…so why not showcase them?” Again, don’t blame advertisers, they are just trying to see that the existing reality is reflected. The underlying result of these product-placements is not merely to expose us to more ads but to wear down our collective resistance to the idea that there is a difference between marketing and entertainment. Advertisers must hope that eventually we will see them as the exact same thing, part and parcel of one another. It’s already happening in consumer magaiznes, which are harder and harder to distinguish from catalogs.

It may seem like advertisers merely want to convince you to buy whatever specific product they’re implanting in these shows, but in fact it’s more insidious than that. They are hoping that you’ll begin to sturcture the episodes of your life around brands, just as the TV shows are, to see them as major life events, like the narrative hooks of typical episodes past wherein the relationships of the characters are transformed in some specific way. The presence of brands commercializes those rituals, and leads us to expect them to be comercialized to be “real,” or it may make our relationship to brands equivalent to our relationship with others, something that develops our trust and evolves through various crisis moments that these shows can depict in placing products. Without brands our lives become increasingly unreal, unverified, unauthorized, invisible to others, who have become more and more accustomed to gauging brand relationships in attempting to integrate others into their lives. So we must adopt the appropriate brands or else risk disappearing.