Subjectifying the Object

One of my favorite topics is the way in which our techno-centric society tries to deny the humanity of the people it is supposed to be serving, preferring to treat them as objects in some vast "information management system" (usually so complex that no one can understand it), rather than the motivated subjects that they really are. If you hang around too much with the right (or wrong) postmodernist types, you might even slip into calling this "the objectification of the subject." However, as I discovered in my examination of the Cluetrain mantra ("markets are conversations"), the best thing to do with a motto is stand it on its head. If you are lucky, that will not only ground the motto in a more solid reality but also reinforce your understanding of the world beyond that motto.

Not too long ago, my wife bought some shampoo. (I suppose a few cognitive wheels just started grinding. Was that a deliberate non sequitur? Is he playing games with the noun "head?" Relax, reader; or, as the Brits like to say, "Wait for it.") The name of the product (honoring the use of case on the bottle) was "hello hydration;" but what really got to me was a sentence just above the line giving the quantity of shampoo in the bottle. That line read, "I'm a moisture packed multi-tasker." This really got to me. Here is a bottle of shampoo that starts out by greeting me with a salutation ("hello") and then wants to talk to me in a first-person-based declarative sentence! This bottle of shampoo, which has got to be an object by just about any criterion you can imagine (even before getting to all the databases that keep track of its production, distribution, and sales) is trying to act like a subject! Yes, dear reader, your wait is over: The world of marketing is now assaulting us with the subjectification of the object!

Can any good come of this; or is it just the clever idea of someone who figured that, if it worked for the pet rock, it could work for the "testifying shampoo bottle?" Well, I may be making too much of a silly marketing gesture; but something bothers me about a society that is willing to treat a shampoo bottle as a "subject" but cannot afford the same recognition to the members of some poor black family who lost everything to Katrina. Once I might have thought it extreme to view simple products like shampoo as a sign of creeping racism; but the more I look at how we reveal ourselves in how we use language in even the most mundane setting, such a perspective just does not feel that extreme!