Who among us could deny that computers have revolutionized the world? After all, you're reading this ad review using a computer. Heck, I'm writing this using a computer. Before we had computers, none of this was possible. I mean, I'd have to use a typewriter or a pencil, and you'd have to read what I'd written off of a piece of paper.
It's this revolutionary power of computers that frightens many of us and serves as the ultimate justification for the bulk of computer advertising. Our fears must be calmed. New technology must be tamed and domesticated. And, just like our ancestors whose high technology consisted of scraping an edge onto one of the ends of their sticks, our best method of overcoming our anxiety is to mythologize it.
Ironically, this means that when we thus face this thing that we don't understand, we transform it into something else we don't understand. The puzzling becomes the mysterious. "What is it?" is glorified until it appears as ganz andere.
IBM's letterbox-format ads for its hardware and for its Lotus software attempt this godfearing pitch, but I think they fail, which is to say I'm confused. The ads follow the usual course of pretending the computer isn't a typewriter that wrecks your posture and occasionally chirps at you, but it's never entirely clear what kind of angel or devil the machine is supposed to be instead. Playing softly behind the Lotus ad is a not-overly-schmaltzy version of "I am Superman." In the ad I most often see, the video is of people in crowded city streets holding up laboriously, artfully makeshift signs that all say "I am." Following a popular convention of the day, the ad is edited so that the people lift the signs not quite in time with the lyric (somebody somewhere must believe this gives the ad an authentic, spontaneous feel, whereas it gives the sense of a deliberate ploy to appear spontaneous and authentic). My immediate problem with this is my own association of this song with REM's version on Life's Rich Pageant, which includes the verse "You don't really love that guy/ you make it with now, do you?/ I know you don't love that guy/ 'cause I can see right through you." With that gem of cynicism in my head, I can't help see through Lotus.
Even leaving aside my own difficulty accepting the ad's gambit, the producers have left out something of this myth. The briefest way to put it is: What the hell is that all about?
Lotus used to make one of the best-selling and simplest spreadsheets. I know this because I used it on an ancient IBM clone I once owned. Now, if I'm following the whispered text of these ads, Lotus is selling web software that allows business people to sit in their regional offices and all look at the spreadsheet and use it simultaneously. If that's what the ad is saying, it sounds kinda neat. It would be interesting to hear about it. But the purpose of advertising Lotus softwware isn't to inform anyone about Lotus software. It's got something to do with a sleazy faux populist superhero democratic mensch-ism, I think. Either that or the Lotus people know that I don't really love that guy I make it with.
The IBM ad I see most often, also in glorious letterbox format, features a bunch of middle managers sitting around a conference table, making quiet but unmistakable complaining grunts. The ad gives a terrific picture of the ennui of the scene and a profound sense of the uncomfortable passage of time. That 5 seconds or so is a great bit. Finally, it seems (at long last!), one of the managers speaks up: "Who called this meeting?" Looks are exchanged. Another manager blurts out, relieved, disgusted, insulted, insulting and attempting not to insult all at once, "I'm outta here." Quick flash of factoid about an IBM product, which, it is asserted, would make meetings more productive.
Wha - huh - er - uh - - HEY! Wait! What do the products do?
Never you mind what they do. They make it possible to spend less time with those insufferable geeks who breathe the common, recirculated air in your building. You may not be able to avoid their germs, but you'd be able to avoid their snide remarks and rotten attitudes, if only you had IBM products on your side.
It's not a very pleasant image, but those weren't very pleasant colleagues. Besides, helping to avoid human contact is one of the great powers computers really have.
Finally, there's NorCom. This is the ad that uses John Lennon's "Come Together," one of the creepiest rock songs ever recorded. It has never been clear to me that the song is about anything, but I've always enjoyed the aftertaste of spoiled meat washed down with fermented orange juice that it leaves in my mouth. In NorCom's ad, whatever it is that NorCom does (which we don't know in any detail) permits far-flung people to 'come together,' or at least that appears to be the tenuous rationale for using the tune. Some Very Important Suit addresses his audience, through a video link over the internet (I'm assuming), using his notebook computer, and while the human bodies in his immediate presence hum in anticipation of his Very Important Suit-Speech, he begins reading the lyrics to the song. A very nicely underplayed giggle plays among the audience, and the Suit throws himself into his recitation.
His reading of the lyric speaks volumes about what we understand about computers. He can't make it scan, he skips all the allusions to shooting smack (which for my money are the best parts), and he finishes making Complete and Total Suit-Gobbledygook of: "I know you/ you know me/ One thing I can tell you/ is you got to be free." It would be ludicrous to point out all the fallacies of this presentation. What I find most amazing is that the unconscionable crassness of attempting to use this song, based on nothing but what some ad agent moron thought was the meaning of the title and the line about freedom, is trumped by the fantastically idiotic conception of computer communication presented in the ad.
Ah, irrepressible American myth of progress and freedom! Ah, irrepressible stupidity of computer companies!
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