Article:
Sut Jhally, Commercial Culture, Collective Values, and the Future, 71 TEXAS L. REV. 805 (1993).
 

Abstract:
Professor Jhally explores the implications of First Amendment protection of commercial speech by describing the nature of such speech and the long-term implications of its protection, which are worrisome. Insofar as industrial capitalism has provided a means of producing more goods than any form of social organization before it, it has shifted public discourse and thinking into a goods-oriented mode; economic growth and production have become independent loci of pleasure. A natural extension of this phenomenon has been the growth and influence of commercial speech, which reinforces the system, shapes individual expectations and utilities, and, by targeting people qua people, suppresses collective values. Professor Jhally suggests that commercial speech has become so ubiquitous and effective that it dominates our cultural spaces, driving out societal discourse, future considerations, and cultural competitors in favor of its narrow agenda. To allow this to continue under the shield of the Constitution, Professor Jhally suggests, is a form of ideological idiocy that risks the future of the species.