iMomus Wired column, May 22nd 2007
May. 23rd, 2007 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThis is utterly bizarre. I usually submit my Wired column the Wednesday before the Tuesday it runs. I did the same last week, sending it to Leander Kahney (my Wired editor) and the general Wired stories email address. I then got a prompt from culture editor Laura Moorhead on Friday asking where the column was, and sent it again to her. None of these mails, apparently, got through -- I've just received a mail from Leander asking again for the column, and again I've sent it three different ways -- POP mail, webmail, and via my girlfriend's Japanese account.
Since I'm now paranoid that email isn't working for me, or that Wired's spam filters are eating all mails from me, I'm taking the unprecedented step of posting the column here, just to make absolutely sure it gets through.
iMomus Column
Wired News
May 22nd 2007
In Apple's epic soap, "dual core values" clash
There are two kinds of people in the world -- those who say there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't. The former do well in advertising.
Apple's long-running and highly successful Get A Mac ads (currently playing somewhere near this column -- PC may well be bumping his forehead against the masthead as I speak) are a beautiful example. They don't just pit Macs against PCs -- they blow it up into an epic conflict between rival ways of being. It's a huge exaggeration of tiny differences, of course. But as rhetoric, it seems to work well; the past year has seen Apple's market share growing faster than any other U.S. computer maker's.
What interests me about the campaign (directed by Phil Morrison at TBWA) is how it resuscitates, re-instates and cleverly manipulates an ancient enmity most see as having died a death back in the 1980s: the gulf between the hip and the square.
"Against a minimalist all-white background," explains Wikipedia, spelling it out for any visiting Martian who hasn't seen the ads, "a man dressed in casual clothes introduces himself as a Macintosh running Mac OS X... while a man in a more formal suit and tie combination introduces himself as a non-Macintosh personal computer running Microsoft Windows. The two then act out a brief vignette in which the capabilities and attributes of 'Mac' and 'PC' are compared, with PC -- characterized as a formal, stuffy person overly concerned with work -- often being frustrated by the more laid-back Mac's superior abilities. Some more recent ads have shifted focus away from comparing features of the computer systems to a more general comparison."
Advertising -- which can never sell us orange juice without selling us happiness too -- has an inherent tendency to hook small scenarios to huge themes, but when it's promoting a tool as powerful as a computer (we organize our lives with these things), microscopic differences quickly become clashing archetypes. As they've developed, the Get a Mac ads have focused on big questions: Who am I? What's my style, my orientation to life? How do I organize my time, my work? What are my core values?
As the episodes of this operatic soap have unfolded, actors Justin Long (the Steve Jobs-like Mac character) and John Hodgman (a plumper, funnier Bill Gates) have come to embody rival views of American life (the weak British and Japanese versions carry nothing like the same cultural clout). Dual core values, if you like.
Take the recent Flashback episode. Mac and PC are kids. Mac wants to show PC some of his paintings. "I have a better idea," retorts the precocious puritan. "How about I calculate how much time you just wasted?" Back to the present, and PC is still performing the same anal cost-benefit analysis.
PC -- as archetypal a bean-counting WASP puritan as ever stepped off the Mayflower -- has a very particular relationship with time. At the dismal party celebrating the release of Vista, for instance, he tries to make space in his diary for another celebration five years hence -- but remembers he has a strategy session that day. His colleague, only marginally less joyless, has an all-day meeting.
We don't have to have read Max Weber's seminal book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to recognize a bad case of "worldly asceticism" here. PC, his life overrun by the gray corporate mindset, has over-rationalized every aspect of his existence, disenchanting and instrumentalizing the world in the process. He's the opposite of a hippy. He's not switched on, and probably not getting laid. He's Dylan's Mr Jones.
Bill Gates -- the brunt of this joke -- was not amused by the implications. "Does honesty matter in these things," he asked peevishly, "or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? I don't think the over 90 percent... who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are."
The PC character does emerge as unlucky -- if not a klutz -- in the ads. One moment he's bandaged in a wheelchair (someone tripped over his power cord), the next he's on a hospital trolley, sick with cryptic error message "WMP dot DLL", or massively bloated with trial software "that doesn't do very much unless you buy the whole thing".
Mac, meanwhile, stays relaxed, informal and slightly bland -- a coffeehouse beatnik dressed by Gap; the conformist-cool straight man to PC's comedy square.
The distinction is distinctly retro. The hip / square thing could take us back to Norman Mailer's provocative 1957 essay The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. Or it could take us even further back. Mailer traces the origins of the hipster stereotype to Mezz Mezzrow, a Jewish American who declared himself a "voluntary negro" in the 1920s; a man who rejected the "antiquated nervous circuits" of convention and tried "to create a new nervous system for himself". Following Mezzrow, the beats of the 40s and 50s would use jazz, Zen, drugs, travel and transgression to channel what Mailer controversially called "the source of Hip -- the Negro".
So, wait, the Mac character is in some stereotypical, essentialist way black? Well, maybe. But you didn't hear it from Apple, who take care to place African-Americans neutrally through their Get a Mac ads (bit parts amongst the PCs mostly). A couple of amateur YouTube video tributes to the campaign are less politically correct. In one we find a black MacBook boasting about his bigger hard drive, in another the PC character is a prim-but-prurient secretary who wants to find out whether it's true what they say about Macs. Black Macs.
By the late 60s the hip / square binary had lost its racial dimension, becoming safe and familiar enough to play out on the Ed Sullivan Show in the form of a Jim Henson sketch in which switched-on hipster Kermit the Frog tries to educate a square on how to do "visual thinking". Kermit stops short, thankfully, of telling us that the jazzy squiggles he paints across the screen come shrink-wrapped with iLife, but we're well on the way.
In the 1980s the whole swinger / straight binary swings into reverse. Huey Lewis and the News tell us it's hip to be square, while David Byrne writes a song describing a Mr Jones who's no longer the unfunky fellow of the Dylan song. No doubt sporting a mullet, this Mr Jones is busy partying in his hotel room with "salesmen, conventioneers, rock stars with tambourines". I guess those epic oppositions dissolve in alcohol. Under the operating system, we're all pretty much the same.
Someone should probably tell Apple that the "white negro" and the "wizard with numbers who dresses like a gentleman" are sepia bromides. But why ruin such a successful -- and funny -- ad campaign?
Since I'm now paranoid that email isn't working for me, or that Wired's spam filters are eating all mails from me, I'm taking the unprecedented step of posting the column here, just to make absolutely sure it gets through.
iMomus Column
Wired News
May 22nd 2007
In Apple's epic soap, "dual core values" clash
There are two kinds of people in the world -- those who say there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't. The former do well in advertising.
Apple's long-running and highly successful Get A Mac ads (currently playing somewhere near this column -- PC may well be bumping his forehead against the masthead as I speak) are a beautiful example. They don't just pit Macs against PCs -- they blow it up into an epic conflict between rival ways of being. It's a huge exaggeration of tiny differences, of course. But as rhetoric, it seems to work well; the past year has seen Apple's market share growing faster than any other U.S. computer maker's.
What interests me about the campaign (directed by Phil Morrison at TBWA) is how it resuscitates, re-instates and cleverly manipulates an ancient enmity most see as having died a death back in the 1980s: the gulf between the hip and the square.
"Against a minimalist all-white background," explains Wikipedia, spelling it out for any visiting Martian who hasn't seen the ads, "a man dressed in casual clothes introduces himself as a Macintosh running Mac OS X... while a man in a more formal suit and tie combination introduces himself as a non-Macintosh personal computer running Microsoft Windows. The two then act out a brief vignette in which the capabilities and attributes of 'Mac' and 'PC' are compared, with PC -- characterized as a formal, stuffy person overly concerned with work -- often being frustrated by the more laid-back Mac's superior abilities. Some more recent ads have shifted focus away from comparing features of the computer systems to a more general comparison."
Advertising -- which can never sell us orange juice without selling us happiness too -- has an inherent tendency to hook small scenarios to huge themes, but when it's promoting a tool as powerful as a computer (we organize our lives with these things), microscopic differences quickly become clashing archetypes. As they've developed, the Get a Mac ads have focused on big questions: Who am I? What's my style, my orientation to life? How do I organize my time, my work? What are my core values?
As the episodes of this operatic soap have unfolded, actors Justin Long (the Steve Jobs-like Mac character) and John Hodgman (a plumper, funnier Bill Gates) have come to embody rival views of American life (the weak British and Japanese versions carry nothing like the same cultural clout). Dual core values, if you like.
Take the recent Flashback episode. Mac and PC are kids. Mac wants to show PC some of his paintings. "I have a better idea," retorts the precocious puritan. "How about I calculate how much time you just wasted?" Back to the present, and PC is still performing the same anal cost-benefit analysis.
PC -- as archetypal a bean-counting WASP puritan as ever stepped off the Mayflower -- has a very particular relationship with time. At the dismal party celebrating the release of Vista, for instance, he tries to make space in his diary for another celebration five years hence -- but remembers he has a strategy session that day. His colleague, only marginally less joyless, has an all-day meeting.
We don't have to have read Max Weber's seminal book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to recognize a bad case of "worldly asceticism" here. PC, his life overrun by the gray corporate mindset, has over-rationalized every aspect of his existence, disenchanting and instrumentalizing the world in the process. He's the opposite of a hippy. He's not switched on, and probably not getting laid. He's Dylan's Mr Jones.
Bill Gates -- the brunt of this joke -- was not amused by the implications. "Does honesty matter in these things," he asked peevishly, "or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? I don't think the over 90 percent... who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are."
The PC character does emerge as unlucky -- if not a klutz -- in the ads. One moment he's bandaged in a wheelchair (someone tripped over his power cord), the next he's on a hospital trolley, sick with cryptic error message "WMP dot DLL", or massively bloated with trial software "that doesn't do very much unless you buy the whole thing".
Mac, meanwhile, stays relaxed, informal and slightly bland -- a coffeehouse beatnik dressed by Gap; the conformist-cool straight man to PC's comedy square.
The distinction is distinctly retro. The hip / square thing could take us back to Norman Mailer's provocative 1957 essay The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. Or it could take us even further back. Mailer traces the origins of the hipster stereotype to Mezz Mezzrow, a Jewish American who declared himself a "voluntary negro" in the 1920s; a man who rejected the "antiquated nervous circuits" of convention and tried "to create a new nervous system for himself". Following Mezzrow, the beats of the 40s and 50s would use jazz, Zen, drugs, travel and transgression to channel what Mailer controversially called "the source of Hip -- the Negro".
So, wait, the Mac character is in some stereotypical, essentialist way black? Well, maybe. But you didn't hear it from Apple, who take care to place African-Americans neutrally through their Get a Mac ads (bit parts amongst the PCs mostly). A couple of amateur YouTube video tributes to the campaign are less politically correct. In one we find a black MacBook boasting about his bigger hard drive, in another the PC character is a prim-but-prurient secretary who wants to find out whether it's true what they say about Macs. Black Macs.
By the late 60s the hip / square binary had lost its racial dimension, becoming safe and familiar enough to play out on the Ed Sullivan Show in the form of a Jim Henson sketch in which switched-on hipster Kermit the Frog tries to educate a square on how to do "visual thinking". Kermit stops short, thankfully, of telling us that the jazzy squiggles he paints across the screen come shrink-wrapped with iLife, but we're well on the way.
In the 1980s the whole swinger / straight binary swings into reverse. Huey Lewis and the News tell us it's hip to be square, while David Byrne writes a song describing a Mr Jones who's no longer the unfunky fellow of the Dylan song. No doubt sporting a mullet, this Mr Jones is busy partying in his hotel room with "salesmen, conventioneers, rock stars with tambourines". I guess those epic oppositions dissolve in alcohol. Under the operating system, we're all pretty much the same.
Someone should probably tell Apple that the "white negro" and the "wizard with numbers who dresses like a gentleman" are sepia bromides. But why ruin such a successful -- and funny -- ad campaign?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Is it just me...
Date: 2007-05-22 05:48 am (UTC)Or maybe it is backfiring against Apple. I've been a long time Apple admirer, and was looking to get a new Macbook Pro, but decided to get a Sony Vaio recently instead because I hated the Mac adverts _that much_. Also because the Vaio had a much better video card and I couldn't run the software I needed on a Mac even under Bootcamp.
And I'm probably the reasonably "arty stereotype" guy. Maybe all the new people getting into Macs are the "dull, PC-like people" who want to consider themselves arty. I get that feeling talking to people.
Re: Is it just me...
Date: 2007-05-22 07:10 am (UTC)But deliberately buying a product because you don't like the adverts of the competition is just bollocks, isn't it.
Re: Is it just me...
Date: 2007-05-22 07:24 am (UTC)But I probably will be going away from Apple products in the future, when there are equal or better alternatives. The advert doesn't help. Steve Jobs and the cult of Mac is something I can't stand.
Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From:Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-05-22 08:16 am (UTC) - ExpandRe: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From:Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-05-22 08:58 am (UTC) - ExpandRe: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From:Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From:Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-05-22 09:54 am (UTC) - ExpandRe: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From:Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From:Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-05-22 10:12 am (UTC) - ExpandRe: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From:Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From:Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From:Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From:Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From:Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From:Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
From:Re: Is it just Mac...
Date: 2007-05-22 08:34 am (UTC)Re: Is it just me...
Date: 2007-05-22 09:10 am (UTC)Also, the Mac ads are a plain lie, my friend's Mac cable broke because it was flimsy and had a useless rubber seal, hardly the beautifully designed magnetic doodad they specifically advertise.
Re: Is it just me...
From:Re: Is it just me...
From:Re: Is it just me...
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-05-22 10:56 am (UTC) - ExpandRe: Is it just me...
From:Re: Is it just me...
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-05-22 12:14 pm (UTC) - ExpandRe: Is it just me...
From:Re: Is it just me...
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-05-23 08:12 am (UTC) - ExpandIt Browns, Seasons, and Thickens In One, apparently.
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-05-22 12:51 pm (UTC) - ExpandRe: It Browns, Seasons, and Thickens In One, apparently.
From:Re: Is it just me...
Date: 2007-05-22 08:39 am (UTC)Definitely. People seem to think that writing a letter or surfing the net on a Mac, rather than a PC, automatically makes them some kind of boho beatnik creative type. People who buy Macs do so because they want to buy into the 'lifestyle'. People who buy PCs do so because they want a computer, and don't really give a toss if it 'says something' about their personality.
Re: Is it just me...
Date: 2007-05-22 10:10 am (UTC)I was about to lay into this comment and accuse the poster of it of being a total cock, and then I realised that it was you,
I'm sure some people who buy Macs do so because they want to buy into the lifestyle, the moronic twunts. Owning a G4 Powerbook, sadly, doesn't prevent you from treading in dogshit or being sacked for incompetence.
Re: Is it just me...
From:Re: Is it just me...
From:Re: Is it just me...
From:Re: Is it just me...
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-05-22 08:01 pm (UTC) - ExpandRe: Is it just me...
Date: 2007-05-22 10:06 am (UTC)Re: Is it just me...
Date: 2007-05-23 01:28 am (UTC)They still tend to be underpowered.
I'm a holdout for quad systems that save me time!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-22 06:21 am (UTC)http://community.livejournal.com/mac_hearts_pc/35684.html
http://community.livejournal.com/mac_hearts_pc/38949.html
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-22 09:31 am (UTC)I still love my iBook, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-22 10:15 am (UTC)i wonder if it's got to do with you posting from japan, no it seems you sent it before going there.
// i have a logistically similar, if somewhat reversed, scenario to the accidental result of this where i'm asked to show in a gallery stuff i've been posting on my blog and i'm feeling a bit uneasy about it//
wish you lots of good flow .
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-22 11:01 am (UTC)"The (UK Mac) ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign - the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show - probably the best sitcom of the past five years - in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers." In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign."
"Ultimately the campaign's biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow "define themselves" with the technology they choose. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality."
Guardian
Date: 2007-05-23 01:54 am (UTC)What ever makes you happy has got to be good. I think it works for aggressives and perverts alike. Eh!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-22 12:24 pm (UTC)Goodness gracious Momus, who would have thought you and Macca had so much in common!
We all know that people are the same where ever we go
There is good and bad in everyone,
We learn to live, we learn to give
Each other what we need to survive together alive.
Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony
Side by side on my piano keyboard, oh lord why dont we?
Ebony, ivory living in perfect harmony... (repeat and fade
Religions ?
Date: 2007-05-22 12:41 pm (UTC)"We don't have to have read Max Weber's seminal book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to recognize a bad case of "worldly asceticism" here. PC, his life overrun by the gray corporate mindset, has over-rationalized every aspect of his existence, disenchanting and instrumentalizing the world in the process. He's the opposite of a hippy. He's not switched on, and probably not getting laid. He's Dylan's Mr Jones."
As a matter of fact, Umberto Eco wrote in the 90's a little piece about the opposition of Mac and PC as a religious matter. I'm sure you are aware of it, but lets repost the best translation available on the internet :
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_mac_vs_pc.html
Re: Religions ?
Date: 2007-05-22 01:17 pm (UTC)Marketing lies
Date: 2007-05-22 12:54 pm (UTC)In the Vista advert, PC talks about all the problems he's having with Vista. How he's had to replace hardware, and none of his new software works... What an amazingly hypocritical lie!
Many Mac users have to replace their entire systems with an OS upgrade. Masses of software became unusably from OS9 to OSX, and then again from OSX PowerPC to OSX Intel. Windows on the other hand is the most compatible operating system on the market, and there's software that works across Windows 98, 2000, XP and Vista.
Maybe Apple should try not lying.
And Justin Long must be the whitest man on Earth.
Re: Marketing lies
Date: 2007-05-22 03:40 pm (UTC)Re: Marketing lies
Date: 2007-05-22 04:15 pm (UTC)Re: Marketing lies
From:Re: Marketing lies
From:Re: Marketing lies
From:Mitchell & Webb roles
Date: 2007-05-22 06:40 pm (UTC)It's lucky that David Mitchell is positioned as the hapless PC-lover, given that in
a recently-broadcast archival work (_unthinkable solutions_, on BBC7), his vile
techspert/disser character "Owen" called Macs "big fat sweating lubies"
He was rude about a lot of other tech as well (including Psions, which are no longer
made, though their software coding lingers in e.g. Symbian phones), but that short
emailable mp2 clip might have put off Steve Jobbies, despite the cooler Webb being
the Mac user.
On Thursday, r4, _That Mitchell & Webb Sound_ returns, & my SD card will be ready.
Terrific
Date: 2007-05-22 09:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-23 03:26 am (UTC)PC is downright charming for sure, but Mac is way more fuckable. "I'm sorry PC... It's just, well, I love you like a brother."
Thanks for the link to the British version. I'm in the middle of watching Peep Show now and really enjoying it. It's like Curb Your Enthusiasm, only I want to die less often when watching it.
Bad casting for PC
Date: 2007-05-23 04:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 06:08 pm (UTC)-M. Nestor