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Rapid Review

THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 174-176
© 2001 National Communication Association

Contexts of Coercion

Jake Harwood

Douglas Rushkoff. Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say.  New York: Riverhead Books, 1999.   321 pages.   $24.95 (cloth); $14.00 (paper).

If you don't know that car dealers use sleazy tactics, then this is the book for you!  In this book, Douglas Rushkoff documents some coercive tactics used in a variety of contexts, from mechanical bed sales to web-page banners.  He does so in considerable detail, providing (at times) enlightening elaboration on the complexity of certain coercive processes.  The book moves from relatively “primitive” face-to-face strategies in which misrepresentation and deception are used as tools against naive consumers, to the considerable sophistication of direct mail and telemarketing campaigns, and finally to coercive marketing on the World Wide Web (WWW).  The accounts in the book are based primarily on Rushkoff’s first hand experience as a consultant, and his conversations with individuals who work in sales, marketing, and related fields.  The book is almost certainly providing a service to naive consumers who might think that a salesman is their friend, or who might be tempted to take a sales pitch at face value.  Rushkoff is promoting a form of “consumer literacy” that is valuable, and his goal of raising awareness concerning coercive techniques is well realized in most sections of the book.  The book is engaging to read.

That said, there are limitations in a number of areas.  First, the book does not offer any real solutions to the numerous “problems” that are raised.  Having discovered that the car salesperson is likely to do sleazy things to cheat me, I don’t really feel any more prepared to face that salesperson after reading this book.  If anything, my apprehension is raised, and I may be more anxious and tentative than I would have been otherwise.  But I still need a car!  Likewise, having discovered that commercial websites may be tracking my every mouse click and targeting me with ads carefully tailored to my on-line habits, I still want/need to go on-line!  Rushkoff argues for increased “mindfulness,” and pays lip service to media literacy programs, but he doesn’t give much idea of what those literacy programs should entail, or how to become more “mindful” (except, presumably, by reading his book!).  So, this is consciousness raising, without a tremendous amount of practical guidance for where to aim the heightened consciousness.

An academic audience will probably have further gripes with the book.  References to systematic research are few and far between.  Meanwhile, unsubstantiated, broad claims are fairly frequent.  For example, we are told that the United States is the “only developed nation not to mandate media literacy as part of its public-school curriculum” (24), that soccer hooliganism is a byproduct of frustrated nationalism accompanying European union (119), and that the popularity of electronic dance music in the mid-1990s pushed platinum album sales to “dangerous lows” (139).  We are left to wonder the nature of the evidence for these claims.  In a more general sense, the writing is reminiscent of television news magazines’ “consumer expose” segments.  It has a “gotcha” feel that may be cathartic, but is far from being theoretically useful.

The nature of coercion is also left rather vague.  While the diversity of contexts covered in the book makes for good reading, by the end I was unsure of what wouldn’t count as coercion.  How coercion differs from persuasion, or simple social influence, is never really confronted. 

In addition, the chapter on Internet issues is packed with “doomsday” scenarios of the WWW. The growth in spam and increased commercial investment in the WWW is treated as an immensely negative development.  Rushkoff often harkens back to the days when the Internet was a wild frontier populated by himself and various computer geeks.  Understandably, he is not happy that so many others have invaded this rarified territory, but the result of his unhappiness comes off as undemocratic.  Apparently for Rushkoff, the web was a better place when the rest of us weren’t there, and he would like us all to go away.  Largely ignored are the positive impacts that the WWW may be having.  In the context of Rushkoff’s broader narrative, for example, the ability to buy a car on the WWW without having to deal with those sleazy salespeople was surely worth noting.

Perhaps most ironically, Rushkoff’s book arrived on my desk complete with 21 pages of promotional materials—quotes from other reviews, publicity summaries, and the like.  Rushkoff wants us to be aware of others’ coercion, but he also depends on coercive means to sell his book.  This extends to the text itself.  The writing is liberally peppered with references to his previous books, his high-powered consulting jobs, as well as more subtle suggestions that while he is in positions of power he is really on “our” side—he is a mole in the system uncovering its coercive strategies and revealing them for us to see.  It has to be said that Rushkoff does confront this irony in a rather abstract fashion early in the book, but the point is not really developed, and the majority of the book adopts an “us versus them” approach, whereby “they” are trying to coerce us.

This is a book that will engage many consumers, and may enlighten them as to particular strategies being used against them.  It might also be a nice supplement for instructors teaching courses in persuasion, public relations, advertising, and the like.  While Rushkoff is critical of those professions, he does do a good job of documenting their strategies, and the ways in which they respond to increasing consumer sophistication.  Those wishing to use the book in an academic context, however, may have to hunt down a lot of un-cited sources, and will have to work to integrate the issues raised in the book with more standard, empirically-derived theoretical approaches.  The book does suggest some interesting lines of future research for those in Communication and related fields.  To what extent does being aware of coercion actually help defend against it?  What sorts of interventions might be useful to help the “aware” individual spot coercion and/or react to it?  On a broader level, Rushkoff suggests that the WWW is moving towards a broadcast, rather than an interactive, model.  Communication scholars might productively examine the detail of people’s WWW use to understand more about how much of it is interactive, and how much is simply absorbing information that is “broadcast” by others.  Perhaps such work is already occurring.  I found the book thought-provoking in places but annoying in others, enlightening at times but rather obvious at others.  Rushkoff is not afraid to go out on a limb, and it will be interesting to see how his prognostications on some fronts (particularly with regard to new media) play out.

Jake Harwood is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas.