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The commercial says: "Be smart. Be attractive to the opposite sex!"
What is this commercial about? You have three guesses:
- Excel, the gum that whitens your teeth.
- Toyota, the car that makes you socially desirable.
- London School of Economics, the higher education institution that makes you very employable.
If you guessed "Toyota", then you've got it! Not because there's something intrinsic to Toyota (the car or the brand) that makes you both smart and sexually attractive. But because the advertising/ marketing team has decided that wits and sex cannot possibly go wrong. Who doesn't want to have them both? And if all you need is a car, then hey, I'm in! The political correctness of this commercial - as well as its stupidity, unfortunately the two go hand in hand here - was compelling. It's a little treasure, revealing how intellectual concerns and criticisms about economic issues make their way back into the world of economics and get reincorporated in the economic logic of profit making.
This commercial may be a nice example of what sociologist Anthony Giddens has once called the reflexivity of the modern world:
“The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming informatoin about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character.” (Giddens, 1990, p. 38)
When some consumers get upset or feel left out, the good advertiser knows that all you need is a re-branding, the miracle touch that transforms the gender-oppressive product into a gender-bender, gender-celebratory one.
- Buying the product gives you the two things feminists have nagged us about: sexual attractiveness and intelligence. Because we all know how hard it is to be both smart and attractive. Yet, with this product, the two become seamless.
- The product is not designed exclusively for men or women. And while it is unfortunately still designed for the heterosexual group (I guess the creative team could not come up with a word that would please everyone... And you have to agree that 'Be attractive to whomever or whatever you are attracted to' does not really sound very neat...), both men and women can benefit from its magical, sexual effects. No more "Mini-Cooper is a car for gays" or "VW Beattle is car for women"... No, sir/mam, this car's magic bestows sexual attractiveness in a (almost) politically correct manner.
Photo credits: DavidHT
References: Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990
As I was browsing through Autist's Corner latest posts, I saw one which quickly caught my attention: a software able to identify the gender of the writer. This is not something new, and I could probably guess what type of things the software is trained to identify and classify as male/ female. But I still find it amusing that, in these times and ages, people would sit down and occupy their time with creating this type of software. Ah, the desire to classify, to order things, to create order out of chaos...
Anyway, if interested, I'm 57.9% female and 42.1% male. This says a lot about me, really... (no, it doesn't!). You can also analyze what type of blog you have: this one's an INTP category = the thinkers... (Oh, yes, this does indeed make my heart burst with pride... finally, recognized as such... - in case you had doubts, this is meant to be sarcastic!). And, fair enough, the soft goes on to recommend some books I can purchase from Amazon... Oh, so this has been just a marketing stunt?
I had an epiphany the other day. I do wonder sometimes what's the use of being in the academia, of teaching those complicated theories that make my students sleep or the use of creating those complex researches that nobody -- besides you and your cohort of similarly indoctrinated peers -- makes any sense of. But every once in a while something happens and all the pieces of the puzzle finally fall in their place and you see it: those abstract theories and research become utterly important. Crucial. You see the power of their explanation. And it makes sense.
That's what happens to me the other night. I listened to an enthusiastic young man talking about how the Web 2.0 - or the new social software like this blog or Facebook - are changing the face of the world. About how they are constituting a new you, a new basis for economic activity, a new framework for our actions, thoughts and behavior. He was, of course, selling something: they all do, these enthusiastic young people who feel they got the future figured out (hey, I was one of them too!). Their energy is catchy, their vision is glaring.
But there's more to their story. Behind the optimism, there must be introspection. And we have to understand what is it that we do, and who gets to benefit from our deeds. In my case, I'm wondering how we build a technological vision of a social world which hides away the inequality, the oppressiveness, the divides. I wonder how technology is shaped by our values and visions, and how it comes to exclude, to tell us who we are or whom we should be. I remember a student saying that people are in Europe are technologically backward because they do not use Facebook. They only emailed, she said, and are not even doing this all day long... I wonder how come we do not see the economic interests behind these technologically driven visions. How come we buy into them and feel empowered, when we are becoming sources of profit - like the human bodies in the Matrix, providing energy for a society that develops at our expenses and in which we do not get to participate, but only to provide. I guess we need a new Marx, one immersed in the Web 2.0. lifeworld :)
Photo credits: http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/
I did this class activity with my students the other day. We were talking about our own understandings of technology in our society, and I made them look at this photo of an Amish girl and read some of the comments people left on Flickr about it:
"It's like stepping back in time!"
"I can imagine the youngsters get bored though"
"We passed one teen-aged girl who was out mowing the weeds next to the road with a manual rotary push mower. She was bare foot and didn't look like she was enjoying the labor"
"Straight from the 19th century!"
I then asked them to think about the values and beliefs that we hold about technology and its role in society, and how those values inform the ways in which evaluate a society as being 'advanced', 'modern' and 'progressive'. As we started talking about it, I came to think about the many ways in which we create difference.
We are trained to see technology as convenience, as progress and as advancement. We do not question why that is the case, why we see things in this light. It seems to hard to argue that a society that is not technology-prone will survive - but what are our Darwinist assumptions at work here? Why do we always start from the assumption that life is survival, struggle - is it something we observe in nature?
Or is it something that our Western worldview prompts us to observe? We tend to dismiss cultures centered on a harmonious communion with nature. In The Western culture, we see struggle, we strive to control nature. Conflict is central to our view of the world. But to what extent this is just a way of selecting our focus on the world?
Photo credits: Sleestak66
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