become the usual thing in the economy or the entertainment departments of information systems—the game, the quiz, the contest—is a form of what has become the everyday rehearsal of narrative advertising and sales strategies and thus a kind of ‹media fitness training.› In the case of an excess of information, meaning and context are the decisive factors. ‹Interactivity› and ‹feedback› then mean collaborating on a story, on an ‹image,› so that in the end consumers voluntarily adorn themselves with logos and demonstrate their agreement with a corporate philosophy. An unbelievable need for stories arises; although subjects transform themselves and visibly dissolve, the ‹I-share› and ‹self-marketing› become a survival strategy in the form of telepresence, and we all become publishers of new stories. It is the era of total publication.

«Roland Barthes remarked that the ‹bastardized form of mass culture is a disgraceful repetition›; the contents, the ideological schemes, the erasure of contradictions repeat themselves constantly; the forms on the surface vary: ‹More and more new books, new broadcasts, new films, various little stories, but always

the same meaning.›» [10] The economization of life and our attention [11] creates a connection to function via a series of product and price, which reaches a narrative climax in the advertising strategies where the following applies: Story before product. The product has become unthinkable without the narrative context, whose purchase leads to a happy ending at long last. The commercial weaves the product to be sold into a story; it is given an aura and charged with meaning.

Advertising psychologists apply the available scientific insight—from empirical field data to subliminal messages—to achieve profit. The power consists in the repetition at the disposal of the strategies and which can be bought by the strength of capital. These dramatic connections continue smoothly over into the malls, the temples of consumption, where every absurdity is raised to the status of an ‹event,› but where one thing, however, is always the focus: the conveying of passive obedience. One finds an interesting indication of this—in this regard comparable with the content of many mass media—on the packaging of an American fast food chain: «At Burger- King you can expect a delicious meal as individual as