Posted at Jun 20/2005 10:19PM:
David Platt: Added link to
Summaries.
Summaries: Social Anxieties re: technology and cars
- Technology is solving the wrong problems
- Useless technology
- Covenience not always so convienent
- Interests and needs change with lifestyle, but nostalgia/lust for certain cars remain
- People are getting too absorbed in technology
- when they are advertising cars here, they are either presenting new technology almost apart from cars, or on cars concentrating on safety.
Posted at Jun 15/2005 01:40PM:
Rolf Steier: The trend that stands out to me is the notion that much of technology is ridiculous and unnecessary - that technology is modernizing things that don't need to be updated. We see a remote controlled book shelf, someone reading a book on the computer while the book itself sits on the table next to him. There is also the palm pilot-controlled plane, and the hybrid car-toaster. Obviously these are humorous in intent, but I think that they potentially reflect a feeling that technology is not solving the right problems.
Not a lot in here for car ads, but what there was, was interesting. There was a concentration on efficiency/recycling, with ads for a hybrid and for Exxon’s new refining process that captures emissions. The other ads sort of generically appealed to luxury, but only one appeared to be aimed specifically at this magazine.
- lexus hybrid (no name given), tagline ‘welcome to the luxury hybrid’. There wasn’t even a car name on this ad, implying both that the vehicle may not actually even be in the showrooms yet, and that they are introducing more than just a new model, but a new idea for the brand: ‘not just the debut of a new car, but of a new category’. It mentions the ‘remarkable fuel economy and low emissions that only hybrid technology can provide’, ‘without asking you to sacrifice anything’.
- ExxonMobile tagline ‘we’re all for reducing emissions’. They’re clearly worried about what’s going to happen with raising gas prices and increasing concern for the environment, so they’re working the recycling angle. They claim that their new refining process, taking by-product steam and using it is ‘the equivalent of taking well over a million cars off the road, every year’.
- volkswagon jetta, tagline ‘on the road of life there are passengers and there are drivers’ they played with the tagline in print though, all the words but ‘passengers’ and ‘drivers’ are jumbled togethere as though they had come to a sudden stop. The text touts the ‘best side-impact crash-performance score given to a car in its class’. Aimed at the safety conscious, so perhaps families or adventurous singles.
- Toyota solara, tagline ‘your stock just went up and split’ this ad went in a lot of magazines, and is clearly not aimed at any one group. It’s supposed to imply an increase in value on purchase price, and mentions the JBL audio system.
- Ford :the only ad aimed specifically at the new Yorker is meant to look like on of the new Yorker cartoons: it’s a family putting things in their sedan (more things than one would think fit) and telling their neighbor ‘we realize we can never go back to a regular sedan’. It wasn’t until I noticed that ‘advertisement’ was written across the top that I realized it was actually an ad, and there is a clear ford logo on the front of the car (although the model I can’t determine- it is probably meant to be the five hundred, which is the full-page ad on the facing page).
- ford five hundred, tagline: ‘a raised cabin. So you no longer feel vertically challenged in traffic’. Appealing to those who have been used to driving a SUV or a minivan but no longer need to, so perhaps the recently retired, or empty nesters. same as in Elle.
The iPod made the cover of The New Yorker last month. I thought that was significant, and I browsed cartoonbank.com, the magazine’s database of covers and cartoons, for car and technology subject matter. I found hundreds of results, and I have posted some of them below. Given the magazine’s knack for tapping into prevalent social anxieties and also the magazine’s power to influence its readers (an admittedly limited segment of the population, but the magazine reaches quite a number of Americans who are willing to spend money on technology and cars), I think analysis of these images might be useful. I will spend the next few days working on a more formal analysis of these images, but in the meantime, please feel free to add your own comments. -- Meg
Posted at Jun 12/2005 04:23PM:
David Platt: I was thinking about putting the New Yorker cover from May 30th online -- you beat me to it. :)
What strikes me about several of the images is the suggestion that many of the technologies featured are replacing something that we're supposed to value but don't -- the threat of books on tape rather the intimacy of reading to your child, listening to a Walkman in the park instead of noticing the bird song -- or the fetishization of the car. (I have a guilty confession here : I myself have two CDs of ambient noise for when I'm writing -- one of which is rain in a rainforest with bird song.)
Secondly, there are the cartoons which represent some of the supposedly more absurd aspects of the technology and ways in which people use them: the infamous "I'm on the train/ bus" conversations. Of course, we smile at many of these, but I wonder if this is entirely fair -- uses that appear silly might actually be rather helpful. Despite having sworn that I'd never be one of those people, now that I have a mobile 'phone, I regularly make 'phone calls to my Significant Other telling her what street the MUNI has reached so that she knows when she can expect me home.
I may be revealing too much about myself, here.
The New Yorker Imagery
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