MICHELLE SHIR-WISE, PHD
SOCIOLOGIST AND AUTHOR

We are getting used to asking machines questions. Not just practical questions, like how to fix a setting on a phone or plan a route, but more personal and complicated ones. What should I eat? How should I respond? Is this symptom serious? Why do I feel this way? What does this article really mean? Is this source reliable? Not long ago, when we wanted to know something, we usually had some sense of where the answer came from. We might ask a teacher, open a book, search online

Advertisements are everywhere, from television screens to social media feeds, offering far more than products. They sell ideas about who we should aspire to become. In many ways, they quietly shape our sense of what is desirable, normal, and worthy. Many of the ideas I explore in my forthcoming book, Everybody Knows That, began with my research on representations of the self in prime-time television advertising. What fascinated me was not simply how advertisements sell produc