Talking Returns
Trends in visual media indicate talking is fashionable!
Talking Is Back. Just Not With Each Other.
Have you noticed? Talking is back in fashion.
There was a time when advertisements treated talkative people as a public nuisance. The man who couldn’t stop talking would be gently rescued by a celebrity selling insurance. The woman bubbling away would be handed a fairness cream by a glamorous film star. The message was simple: if you talk too much, you probably aren’t thinking too much.
Remember the cola ad where the chatty fellow was told to “chill”? Or those neighbours who talked endlessly while the silent homeowner let the wall paint do all the impressing?
In advertising, wisdom was quiet.
Not anymore.
Talking has made a spectacular comeback. With one small twist.
People aren’t talking to people.
They’re talking to their cars. Their air-conditioners. Their watches. And, lately, their glasses.
A husband instructs the air-conditioner to follow his wife around the house. Someone strolling aimlessly through a mall asks their spectacles to photograph random objects. A couple doesn’t call anyone for travel advice—they ask the phone which train to catch.
Across commercials, the trend is everywhere. Young sports coaches. Elderly nurses. Kirana shop owners. Office workers. Everyone is enthusiastically chatting away with gadgets in every imaginable language.
It’s as though humanity rediscovered its voice in advertising—and misplaced common sense at exactly the same time.
There’s another not-so-subtle shift too. The celebrity has changed.
It is no longer the calm, composed human. The star of the commercial is now the washing machine, the ceiling fan, the smartwatch, or the phone. They are presented as the smartest characters in the room. Humans, meanwhile, are gently coached, corrected, reminded, advised and occasionally scolded to play a little dumb.
As we read in newspapers, the supposed ‘intelligent’ devices often fail to be consistent or reliable (something vouched by their high paid CEOs every time they face an enquiry) and so, humans are discreetly being conditioned by the commercials to play dumb or even better become dumber to accommodate these gadgets in their life.
The machines don’t merely obey us anymore. They are in a hurry to lead and run, even if they can’t crawl yet. So, humans need to grovel behind them.
Talking to objects, of course, isn’t new. We’ve long had a word for giving human qualities to non-human things: anthropomorphism.
What’s happening now, though, is something else altogether. Machines aren’t just being treated like humans—they’re being designed to sound, respond and behave like them. There’s even a term for that: anthropomimesis.
What we still don’t have is a suitably catchy word for the reverse phenomenon—humans gradually learning to speak, think and behave like algorithms or its dumb playing assistants.
But it is a matter of time before such a term is coined, this I am certain.