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.
(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
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
Date: 2007-05-22 07:48 am (UTC)Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
Date: 2007-05-22 08:16 am (UTC)Of course, what they mean is that they deal in music and telephones too. But we all know it's because Steve Jobs thinks he's the messiah.
Cult or not, there's certainly something about Apple and its fanbase, otherwise Momus wouldn't have wrote his article and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
Date: 2007-05-22 08:30 am (UTC)No, I know. Sorry to be a pedant, but you said "Mac".
Steve Jobs thinks he's the messiah.
No he doesn't, he thinks he's the CEO of Apple. He's right.
Re: Is it just Mac...
Date: 2007-05-22 08:34 am (UTC)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: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
Date: 2007-05-22 08:58 am (UTC)But then, a few years ago I was really all for Apple stuff. When Apple was more of the underdog, and their niche was the professional design field.
Now Apple have become a "lifestyle brand!". They're about music on your iPod, organising photos on your iMac, prodding the screen on your iPhone. Seems they've taken the iLife thing too literally, and the adverts reinforce that - both Justin Long and Robert Webb portray horribly smug, "hip", shallow people. Maybe that's enhanced by being an uncanny reflection of Webb's loathesome character in Peepshow, but then there's a similar (but less sinister) issue with Justin Long too, like it was intentional... it must be really, the characters bear a striking resemblance to Steve Jobs too.
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: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
Date: 2007-05-22 09:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-22 09:31 am (UTC)I still love my iBook, though.
Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
Date: 2007-05-22 09:54 am (UTC)Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
Date: 2007-05-22 10:02 am (UTC)What we have here is a failure to communicate. If the intonation had been there what i would've said would have read as "Oh fuck off with the notion that it isn't a cult, it most demonstrably is, you rotter."
Re: Is it just me...
Date: 2007-05-22 10:06 am (UTC)Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
Date: 2007-05-22 10:07 am (UTC)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: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
Date: 2007-05-22 10:12 am (UTC)(I too own a bunch of Apple stuff - two iPods and an old iBook. But I use a PC, primarily because it's essential for work - there's just no way to run the software I need on a Mac. I'm not against Apple products at all, I just hate their adverts, Steve Jobs, and the image Apple seem to be exhibiting.)
(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 .
Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
Date: 2007-05-22 10:17 am (UTC)Re: Is it just me...
Date: 2007-05-22 10:23 am (UTC)Your voice will, of course, be drowned out by all the people who have now started buying the thing in question because they find the adverts kooky, or whatever. You're not really sending a message to anyone. And Bisto might well make better gravy. It Browns, Seasons, and Thickens In One, apparently.
Ads rarely give any useful information, so it's up to us to ignore the messages, do the research and make informed decisions by ourselves. You can buy a product without buying into a lifestyle. You're an individual, aren't you?
Re: Company in "claiming its products better than others" shock
Date: 2007-05-22 10:27 am (UTC)Fairly normal, I'd say.
Re: Is it just me...
Date: 2007-05-22 10:41 am (UTC)Re: Is it just me...
Date: 2007-05-22 10:56 am (UTC)