Standing Ovation: 1984

Thursday, February 17, 2011

1984 - By Apple

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8&feature=related
The vast majority of people in the US watch television and absorb the commercials without giving much thought to the actual reasoning behind the careful placement of everything that is actually going on in the ad. In his essay “On Reading Video Text” Robert Scholes suggests it’s both interesting and important to give it some thought on a deeper level. Scholes believes video has a unique manipulative power over the way we view it. In using certain colors, music even culturally understood narratives as an undertone the videographers can conjure particular emotions in us. Scholes quantifies the use of cultural narrative as “The process through which video texts confirm viewers by their ideological positions and reassure them as to their membership in a collective cultural body”. Scholes then describes a Budweiser commercial in which a black umpire rises up and “makes it”. Scholes goes on to explain in detail the reasoning behind why we understand the commercial and why we side with the umpire. The main reason the general public can understand this commercial Scholes accredits to the fact that it’s a cliché story of the American dream.

With Scholes’ ideas of breaking down video texts in mind I recently watched a classic apple commercial. It was quite interesting after breaking it down piece by piece. In this commercial they were selling more than just a product but an idea. The commercial opened up with a drab colorless group of people marching together in perfect rhythm down a narrow corridor. The people who were marching had a very inhuman quality to them, appearing not as people but as automatons marching mindlessly. In the background there is a seemingly brainwashing voice spouting out promises of unity and idealistic benefits of conformity. The voice then materializes in the form of a face on a screen being not only watched but stared at by the marchers of the previous scene. The video then cuts to a woman carrying a sledgehammer and clad in the only color of the entire commercial other than a shade of gray, a beacon of hope, our savior. The woman is being chased by soldiers in riot gear, the strong arm of the dictatorship that is the man on the screen. The woman arrives to the screen, heaves her sledge-hammer and in a flash of brilliant light the over-mind is gone, the heroine has prevailed in saving us from the clutches of big brother. After the commotion of the commercial there is a voice stating “On January 24th apple will release Macintosh and you’ll see why 1984 won’t be 1984”.
The reference at this point is quite obviously “1984” a novel by George Orwell, a novel which depicts people conforming to follow an over-mind known as “Big Brother”. The commercial is instantly identifiable because the novel has become commonplace in high school English classes and is a culturally renowned work in the US. It is because we have this understanding that the commercial makes sense.

The commercial is designed to put ourselves into the role of the automaton, waiting helplessly to be saved by Mactintosh (the hammer-wielding heroine). I do find it kind of ironic that the point they’re trying to sell is that if we don’t want to become automatons, slaves to conformity, we should all go out and buy a mac. Irony aside the commercial still had a powerful quality to it, placing the viewing in their role in society. I’m not going out to buy a mac today, I’m a PC guy, I guess big brother will be watching me, but it was an interesting piece of film nonetheless.

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Welcome

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Standing Ovation”! The title of this blog refers to the audience of active readers we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?
As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! I encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later).
Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. I hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it!