CALISTOGA — First came the command, "Eat Popcorn," flashed on a movie screen too fast for the naked eye to see. Then the pronouncement, "It's OK for you to be relaxed," its endless reprise on a self-help cassette tape masked by the lapping of waves.
Now, into the murky, quirky nether world of the subliminal, where information is conveyed below the threshold of conscious perception, enter the video game Endorfun.
A puzzle game that aspires to be the next Tetris, the goal of Endorfun is to match the colored sides of a moving cube to the corresponding squares on a series of grids.
Then there's the game's other goal. By inserting 100 sub-audible messages in the background music, Endorfun's programmers and its publisher, Time Warner, say they hope "to uplift the heart and mind of its users."
And if, after subliminally absorbing such notions as "I am powerful," "I am at peace," "I am in harmony," "I love being alive," players are uplifted to the point of telling their friends to run out and buy the game--so much the better.
The subliminal messages--Time Warner prefers the term "positive affirmations"--seem innocuous enough. And all of them will be printed on the box.
Still, the game raises questions about the use of subliminals in digital media, a new and perhaps more potent platform for a controversial method of mass communication that dates to the 1950s, when advertising executive James Vicary flashed the subliminal messages, "Hungry? Eat popcorn," and, "Drink Coke," during screenings at a drive-in.
Moviegoers, he said later, bought nearly 60% more popcorn than usual and almost 20% more Coke. Whether or not he was telling the truth--and whether or not subliminals actually work--remains a topic of debate among advertisers and psychologists.
But the concept of subliminal suasion caught hold of America's cultural psyche, serving through the decades as a flash point for consumer suspicion of mass media even as it was embraced as a tool for self-improvement.
Like all forms of media, subliminals are taking new shape in the digital age. And the relative ease with which messages can be inserted into computer code, combined with the increasing hours people are spending in front of computer screens, leads some psychologists and media experts to believe that the potential for mind control--voluntary or involuntary--is greater in the new media than in any that came before it.
The Federal Communications Commission has banned subliminal messages in broadcast media since the 1970s, when controversy erupted over a TV ad for a memory game called Husker Du that displayed the words, "Get it," on the screen for a fraction of a second.
But software remains unregulated.
"It's open season as far as computer software is concerned," said Mike Bivens, founder of Screen Team, a Laguna Beach-based software firm that is experimenting with subliminal messages in some of its screen savers.
Bivens says several corporate clients have been interested in using subliminals to motivate employees to work harder.
"If you have a group of people and you want to inspire them with hitting the 100% Club and a trip to Hawaii, we can put a photograph in there, for example. We bury it in there so they see it all day, but they don't see it. So it reinforces the goal."
Still, Bivens said, "Everyone we talk to loves the idea, but they're afraid. You know what they're afraid of? They're not afraid of using them, but they're afraid of getting caught."
'It's the drug for the 21st Century'
The stigma associated with trying to influence behavior covertly has always inhibited media firms from using subliminals--or at least from admitting it. But technologists note that, in digital media, subliminals would be easier to create and harder to detect. Consumers rarely see the lines of arcane computer code that make a program run, and without being a programmer they would be unlikely to spot the specific commands governing subliminals anyway.
"It's [easy] to hide a subliminal message in software," said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park. "It's not like looking at a piece of 35-millimeter film, or watching a video frame by frame.
"Unless you had a sudden craving for Twinkies that you could correlate with a new software program you were using, it would be very hard to tell."
At a time when there is already a creeping discomfort with the dominant role technology has in daily life, Saffo says fear of subliminal messages in software "plays right into this growing unease around our information tools."
Not surprisingly, Gerald Rafferty, co-author of "Subliminal: The New Channel to Personal Power" and founder of the Institute for Subliminal Studies in Santa Monica, has a more positive outlook:
"The computer medium is the perfect medium for subliminal messages, because there are so many ways to mask them that you're not worrying about the things you are with film and video. This could really be a big new field."
