Author Offers Theory That Politics, TV Are Mind-Numbing Combo

Feel a little woozy while watching political ads on TV?

Alka-Seltzer alone might not be the fix. An expatriate American author warns viewers to turn off the tube: they might be in a trance.

In “Trance: From Magic to Technology,” Dennis Wier says all those quick edits in political ads combined with the already mind-numbing effects of TV actually lower people’s ability to make judgments about what they’re watching.

“The announcer says, ‘This is the problem,’ and then you have all these images flashed across the screen,” Wier says. “This, to me, is a real clear form of trance abuse, where the candidate is using the disabled judgment in order to inject a political opinion.”

Wier, a 54-year-old computer consultant living in Switzerland, has taken his message to the airwaves on radio stations in Seattle, Texas and Canada. He has a page on the World Wide Web. His hardbound book has been selling for months in North America and Europe. The soft-cover edition was just released.

Wier says quick repetitive images or music have always been used to invoke trances. Shamans and yogis use it. And Wier says politicians do, too.

The ads he talks about are everywhere - from national campaigns to local races. One ad protesting Rep. George Nethercutt’s environmental record opens with a colorful mountain scene, then a black-and-white shot of the congressman. Viewers are shown a series of dark, spewing smokestacks while Nethercutt’s environmental record is scrutinized.

The ad ends with a boy in his father’s arms superimposed over an American flag, and a voice telling citizens to give Nethercutt the what-for.

Is it marketing - or mind control?

“I don’t think it’s mind control,” says Neal Robison, an associate professor who teaches mass communications at WSU. “It’s confusion, is what it is.”

Robison points to the ad that blasts Idaho Sen. Larry Craig and ends showing Democratic opponent Walt Minnick walking through the great outdoors toting a rifle. “It has nothing to do with anything,” but succeeds in sending a message: this Democrat is a guns-kind-of-guy.

It might be a veiled message, but Robison doesn’t think it will put people into a trance. Quick edits, he says, are just devices to pacify clicker-happy viewers.

But Wier is undeterred. He says politicians commit “trance abuse” in speeches, too; such as when Bob Dole refers to himself in the third person.

“It could mean he’s either in a trance or disassociated,” Wier says. “(People) can become suggestible with that. If he’s doing it deliberately, it’s trance abuse. If he’s not, he could be schizophrenic.”

Dole’s more conventional explanation is that it’s how his mother taught him to refer to himself. Otherwise, Dole has said, it’s bragging.

How did Wier come up with this stuff? He’s not a psychologist. Instead, he studied computers at Berkeley and English at UCLA, but never earned a degree. His theory comes from his own experience as a “meditation junky” and computer consultant. People’s brains, he says, can be programmed like their silicon counterparts.

Edmond Bruneau, owner of the Creative Consultants ad agency in Spokane and author of “Prescription for Advertising,” doesn’t swallow Wier’s theory.

“But that’s not to discount the powerful medium of television, because it can definitely influence behavior,” Bruneau said.

“(Ads) are constructed with definite images in mind … big bucks are spent on national political advertising, and the creation of it isn’t haphazard.”

Will the trance theory catch on? Wier admits it may take awhile.

“My theory is more high-tech, you might say. It might be something more useful in the 21st century.”

, DataTimes