It is a curious fact of modern life that we recognize “product placement” as a thing unto itself when it occurs in movies, television and other media, but we are mostly oblivious to its impacts in everyday life.

This occurred to me last week sometime when I went to see the movie, “Babel” with a friend. There is a scene when the husband and wife pair are dining at a remote desert restaurant. Their relationship is already strained and the woman is uncomfortable being in such a foreign environment. There is a very brief shot of her taking out a small plastic container of hand sanitizer - the kind with alcohol in it, where you rub it into your hands when you can’t wash normally and then it evaporates. I didn’t actually catch what brand this was, probably Purell by the shape of the bottle.

The thing that struck me about this was that it wasn’t just an example of product placement within the movies. It was an example of product placement in real life. What I mean by that is that the people who made the movie understood our cultural language in such a way that they used a product as a shorthand expression of a human emotion. In this case, discomfort and insecurity - which is what these hand-sanitizer products actually signifiy in real life.

Washing our hands is one of those things that we don’t often give a lot of thought to. And this is because training for that behavior is ingrained at such a young age - before we are really even conscious of what we are doing. We are trained to wash our hands in order to be “clean” and maintaining this often fictional state of cleanliness is really just a cover for wanting the approval of our parents, and thus continued security and well-being in our relationship with them.

And so personal hygiene products are imprinted upon this original point and then modulated through your life, re-attaching themselves with the new purpose of self-confidence and self-acceptance at puberty, and social standing upon your joining the work force, etc.

Working outside a great deal over the past few months, I have to say though that this learned behavior is one of the first things that gets jettisoned when the need arises. If you spend ten hours a day with your hands in the dirt, on plants, in gloves or with water, there is just no way to keep your hands clean. It’s very simple. And you only have a short amount of time to eat lunch, so you’re only very occasionally able to find someplace to wash up properly. At first, this drove me slightly nuts. But after only a couple weeks, I didn’t think twice about it. My hands were dirty? So what. Gotta eat lunch either way.

[A bit of a tangent: people who get into obsessive-compulsive behaviors with things like hand-washing - what is it they are really doing? It seems to me that they are possibly trying to directly access the underlying feeling mechanism associated with a behavior by repeating it endlessly. Why would learning how to directly trigger these hidden parts of your brain - without the crutch of social ritual or marketable product - be such a threat?]

The point I’m making, then, is that the reason products fail or succeed has to do with how well they manage to imprint over one of these open access-points in our lives, our behavior, and our cultural language of what things mean. What does an iPod really mean? It doesn’t have anything to do with music - I’d wager - so much as it has to do with our desire to coccoon ourselves in our own little world, and take that world with us whenever we go out into the larger reality.

That’s just one example and one possible interpretation, of course. You might find it a useful example for your own life to look at the products you surround yourself with. What is their stated purpose? What do they say that they do for you? And then begin examining the imprint points which those products affixed themselves to in your life. How do they make you actually feel? What do they really mean to you?

The reason I think this is such an important subject matter has to do with the future of technology. As our brains and bodies become increasingly wired-in with products and services, I believe we are going to start seeing a tremendous shift. Right now, we essentially buy a product because we want to feel a certain way. Buying products helps us to ritually access the mechanisms which regulate emotion, and thereby stimulate how we feel in particular directions. At some point though, cognitive science and neurobiology are going to figure out how to do away with the empty ritual container of the product. Through implants in our heads and bodies we will essentially be able to dial-in emotional states. Which maybe sounds like a great thing - but who do you think is going to be controlling the technology that allows you to do this? Do you think they are going to give us all a free ride to the emotional wonderlands which wait inside us? Of course not. Because what would be in it for them? The way I see technology more likely going is that it will enable us to trigger directly the mechanisms associated with our emotions. But that it will be heavily restricted. Instead of necessarily buying a product to feel a certain way, you’ll simply have to pay to access that particular emotion.

I imagine a world in which we’ll have to pay even to laugh or cry, crack a smile or experience feelings of love. Hell, take it far enough and you’ll have to pay your service provider a monthly fee even to have access to your own dreams, memories and desires about the future. Not saying such a techno-dystoptian future is an absolute certainty, but I think the writing is on the wall in regards to the direction things are going. It’s up to us, now, to learn how to activate and control by ourselves those things which we’ve come to look for externally through products or other social ritual experiences.