Heartfelt double clicks

unburyingthelead:

There is, then, an America of furious hyperreality, which is not that of Pop art, of Mickey Mouse, or of Hollywood movies. There is another, more secret America (or rather, just as public, but snubbed by the European visitor and also by the American intellectual); and it creates somehow a network of references and influences that finally spread also to the products of high culture and the entertainment industry. It has to be discovered.

[…] We can identify it through two typical slogans that pervade American advertising. The first, widely used by Coca-Cola but also frequent as a hyperbolic formula in everyday speech, is “the real thing”; the second, found in print and heard on TV, is “more”- in the sense of “extra.” The announcer doesn’t say, for example, “The program will continue” but rather that there is “More to come.” In America you don’t say, “Give me another coffee”; you ask for “More coffee”; you dont’ say that cigarette A is longer than cigarette B, but that there’s “more” of it, more than you’re used to having, more than you might want, leaving a suprlus to throw away- that’s prosperity.

- from Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco