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There is no race. There is no gender. There is no age. There are no infirmities.
There are only minds. Utopia? No, Internet.
—"Anthem," television commercial for MCI
The television commercial "Anthem" claims that on the Internet, there are
no infirmities, no gender, no age, that there are only minds. This pure,
democratic, cerebral form of communication is touted as a Utopia, a pure
no-place where human interaction can occur, as the voice-over says, "uninfluenced
by the rest of it." Yet can the "rest of it" be written out as easily as
the word race is crossed out on the chalkboard by the hand of an Indian girl
in this commercial?
It is "the rest of it," the specter of racial and ethnic difference and its
visual and textual representation in print and television advertisements that
appeared in 1997 by Compaq, IBM, and Origin, that I will address in this
chapter. The ads I will discuss all sell networking and communications technologies
that depict racial difference, the "rest of it," as a visual marker. The
spectacles of race in these advertising images are designed to stabilize contemporary
anxieties that networking technology and access to cyberspace
15
16 "Where Do You Want to Go Today?"
may break down ethnic and racial differences. These advertisements, which
promote the glories of cyberspace, cast the viewer in the position of the
tourist, and sketch out a future in which difference is either elided or put in
its proper place.
The ironies in "Anthem" exist on several levels. For one, the advertisement
positions MCFs commodity —"the largest Internet network in the world"—
as a solution to social problems. The advertisement claims to produce a radical
form of democracy that refers to and extends an "American" model of
social equality and equal access. This patriotic anthem, however, is a paradoxical
one: the visual images of diversity (old, young, black, white, deaf, etc.) are
displayed and celebrated as spectacles of difference that the narrative simultaneously
attempts to erase by claiming that MCFs product will reduce the different
bodies that we see to "just minds."
The ad gestures towards a democracy founded upon disembodiment and
uncontaminated by physical difference, but it must also showcase a dizzying
parade of difference in order to make its point. Diversity is displayed as the
sign of what the product will eradicate. Its erasure and elision can only be
understood in terms of its presence; like the word "race" on the chalkboard, it
can only be crossed out if it is written or displayed. This ad writes race and
poses it as both a beautiful spectacle and a vexing question. Its narrative
describes a "postethnic America," to use David Hollinger's phrase, where these
categories will be made not to count. The supposedly liberal and progressive
tone of the ad camouflages its depiction of race as something to be eliminated,
or made "not to count" through technology. If computers and networks can
help us to communicate without "the rest of it," that residue of difference with
its power to disturb, disrupt, and challenge, then we can all exist in a world
"without boundaries."
Another television commercial, this one by AT&T, that aired during the
1996 Olympics asks the viewer to "imagine a world without limits—AT&T
believes communication can make it happen." Like "Anthem," this narrative
posits a connection between networking and a democratic ethos in which differences
will be elided. In addition, it resorts to a similar visual strategy—it
depicts a black man in track shorts leaping over the Grand Canyon.
Like many of the ads by high tech and communications companies that
aired during the Olympics, this one has an "international" or multicultural flavor
that seems to celebrate national and ethnic identities. This world without
limits is represented by vivid and often sublime images of displayed ethnic and
racial difference in order to bracket them off as exotic and irremediably other.
Lisa iakamura 17
Images of this other as primitive, anachronistic, and picturesque decorate the
landscape of these ads.
Microsoft's recent television and print media campaign markets access to
personal computing and Internet connectivity by describing these activities as
a form of travel. Travel and tourism, like networking technology, are commodities
that define the privileged, industrialized first-world subject, and they
situate him in the position of the one who looks, the one who has access, the
one who communicates. Microsoft's omnipresent slogan "Where do you want
to go today?" rhetorically places this consumer in the position of the user with
unlimited choice; access to Microsoft's technology and networks promises the
consumer a "world without limits" where he can possess an idealized mobility.
Microsoft's promise to transport the user to new (cyber)spaces where desire
can be fulfilled is enticing in its very vagueness, offering a seemingly openended
invitation for travel and new experiences. A sort of technologically
enabled transnationality is evoked here, but one that directly addresses the
first-world user, whose position on the network will allow him to metaphorically
go wherever he likes.
This dream or fantasy of ideal travel common to networking advertisements
constructs a destination that can look like an African safari, a trip to the
Amazonian rain forest, or a camel caravan in the Egyptian desert. The iconography
of the travelogue or tourist attraction in these ads places the viewer in
the position of the tourist who, in Dean MacCannelTs words, "simply collects
experiences of difference (different people, different places)" and "emerges as
a miniature clone of the old Western philosophical subject, thinking itself unified,
central, in control, etc., mastering Otherness and profiting from it" (xv).
Networking ads that promise the viewer control and mastery over technology
and communications discursively and visually link this power to a vision of
the other which, in contrast to the mobile and networked tourist/user, isn't
going anywhere. The continued presence of stable signifiers of otherness in
telecommunications advertising guarantees the Western subject that his position,
wherever he may choose to go today, remains privileged.
An ad from Compaq (see fig. 1) that appeared in the Chronicle ofHigher
Education reads "Introducing a world where the words 'you can't get there
from here' are never heard." It depicts a "sandstone mesa" with the inset image
of a monitor from which two schoolchildren gaze curiously at the sight. The
ad is selling "Compaq networked multimedia. With it, the classroom is no
longer a destination, it's a starting point." Like the Microsoft and AT&T slogans,
it links networks with privileged forms of travel, and reinforces the
Figure 1 • Grand Canyon—Compaq
Figure 2 • Rain forest—Compaq
Lisa Nakamura 19
metaphor by visually depicting sights that viewers associate with tourism. The
networked classroom is envisioned as a glass window from which networked
users can consume the sights of travel as if they were tourists.
Another ad from the Compaq series (fig. 2) shows the same children admiring
the networked rain forest from their places inside the networked classroom,
signified by the frame of the monitor. The tiny box on the upper-right-hand side
of the image evokes the distinctive menu bar of a Windows product, and frames
the whole ad for its viewer as a window onto an "other" world.
The sublime beauty of the mesa and the lush pastoral images of the rain
forest are nostalgically quoted here in order to assuage an anxiety about the
environmental effects of cybertechnology. In a world where sandstone mesas
and rain forests are becoming increasingly rare, partly as a result of industrialization,
these ads position networking as a benign, "green" type of product
that will preserve the beauty of nature, at least as an image on the screen. As
John Macgregor Wise puts it, this is part of the modernist discourse that envisioned
electricity as "transcendent, pure and clean," unlike mechanical technology
The same structures of metaphor that allow this ad to dub the experience
of using networked communications "travel" also enables it to equate an
image^'of a rain forest in Nature (with a capital N). The enraptured American
schoolchildren, with their backpacks and French braids, are framed as usertravelers.
With the assistance of Compaq, they have found their way to a world
that seems to be without limits, one in which the images of nature are as good
as or better than reality
The virtually real rain forest and mesa participate in a postcyberspace
paradox of representation—the locution "virtual reality" suggests that the line
or "limit" between the authentic sight/site and its simulation has become
blurred. This discourse has become familiar, and was anticipated by Jean
Baudrillard pre-Internet. Familiar as it is, the Internet and its representations
in media such as advertising have refigured the discourse in different contours.
The ads that I discuss attempt to stabilize the slippery relationship between the
virtual and the real by insisting upon the monolithic visual differences
between first- and third-world landscapes and people.
This virtual field trip frames Nature as a tourist sight and figures Compaq
as the educational tour guide. In this post-Internet culture of simulation in
which we live, it is increasingly necessary for stable, iconic images of Nature
and the Other to be evoked in the world of technology advertising. These
images guarantee and gesture toward the unthreatened and unproblematic
existence of a destination for travel, a place whose beauty and exoticism will
"Where Do You WanttoGo Today?"
somehow remain intact and attractive. If technology will indeed make everyone,
everything, and every place the same, as "Anthem" claims in its ambivalent
way, then where is there left to go? What is there left to see? What is the
use of being asked where you want to go today if every place is just like here?
Difference, in the form of exotic places or exotic people, must be demonstrated
iconographically in order to shore up the Western user's identity as
himself
This idyllic image of an Arab on his camel, with the pyramids picturesquely
squatting in the background, belongs in a coffee-table book (see fig. 3). The
timeless quality of this image of an exotic other untouched by modernity is disrupted
by the cartoon dialogue text, which reads "What do you say we head back
and download the results of the equestrian finals?" This dissonant use of contemporary
vernacular American techoslang is supposed to be read comically;
the man is meant to look unlike anyone who would speak these words.
The gap between the exotic Otherness of the image and the familiarity of
its American rhetoric can be read as more than an attempt at humor, however.
IBM, whose slogan "solution for a small planet" is contained in an icon button
in the lower left hand side of the image, is literally putting these incongruous
words into the Other's mouth, thus demonstrating the hegemonic power of its
"high speed information network" to make the planet smaller by causing everyFigure
3 • Arab and camel (IBM)
Lisa Nakamura
one to speak the same language—computer-speak. His position as the exotic
Other must be emphasized and foregrounded in order for this strategy to work,
for the image's appeal rests upon its evocation of the exotic. The rider's classical
antique "look and feel" atop his Old Testament camel guarantee that his
access to a high speed network will not rob us, the tourist/viewer, of the spectacle
of his difference. In the phantasmatic world of Internet advertising, he can
download all the results he likes, so long as his visual appeal to us, the viewer,
reassures us that we are still in the position of the tourist, the Western subject,
whose privilege it is to enjoy him in all his anachronistic glory.
These ads claim a world without boundaries for us, their consumers and
target audience, and by so doing they show us exactly where and what these
boundaries really are. These boundaries are ethnic and racial ones. Rather
than being effaced, these dividing lines are evoked over and over again. In
addition, the ads sanitize and idealize their depictions of the Other and
Otherness by deleting all references that might threaten their status as timeless
icons. In the camel image, the sky is an untroubled blue, the pyramids have
fresh, clean, sharp outlines, and there are no signs whatsoever of pollution,
roadkill, litter, or fighter jets.
Including these "real life" images in the advertisement would disrupt the
picture it presents us of an Other whose "unspoiled" qualities are so highly valued
by tourists. Indeed, as Trinh Minh-Ha notes, even very sophisticated
tourists are quick to reject experiences that challenge their received notions of
authentic Otherness. Trinh writes, "the Third World representative the modern
sophisticated public ideally seeks is the unspoiled African, Asian, or Native
American, who remains more preoccupied with his/her image as the real
native—the truly different—than with the issues of hegemony, feminism, and
social change" (88). Great pains are taken in this ad to make the camel rider
appear real, truly different from us, and "authentic" in order to build an idealized
Other whose unspoiled nature shores up the tourist's sense that he is
indeed seeing the "real" thing. In the post-Internet world of simulation, "real"
things are fixed and preserved in images such as these in order to anchor the
Western viewing subject's sense of himself as a privileged and mobile viewer.
Since the conflicts in Mogadishu, Sarajevo, and Zaire (Images of which are
found elsewhere in the magazines from which these ads came), ethnic difference
in the world of Internet advertising is visually "cleansed" of its divisive, problematic,
tragic connotations. The ads function as corrective texts for readers deluged
with images of racial conflicts and bloodshed both at home and abroad. These
advertisements put the world right; their claims for better living (and better
22 "Where Do You Want to Go Today?"
boundaries) through technology are graphically acted out in idealized images of
Others who miraculously speak like "us" but still look like "them."
The Indian man (pictured in an IBM print advertisment that appeared in
Smithsonian, January 1996) whose iconic Indian elephant gazes sidelong at the
viewer as he affectionately curls his trunk around his owner's neck, has much in
common with his Egyptian counterpart in the previous ad. (The ad's text tells us
that his name is Sikander, making him somewhat less generic than his counterpart,
but not much. Where is the last name?) The thematics of this series produced
for IBM plays upon the depiction of ethnic, racial, and linguistic differences,
usually all at the same time, in order to highlight the hegemonic power of
IBM's technology. IBM's television ads (there were several produced and aired in
this same series in 1997) were memorable because they were all subtitled
vignettes of Italian nuns, Japanese surgeons, and Norwegian skiers engaged in
their quaint and distinctively ethnic pursuits, but united in their use of IBM networking
machines. The sounds of foreign languages being spoken in television
ads had their own ability to shock and attract attention, all to the same end—the
one word that was spoken in English, albeit heavily accented English, was "IBM."
Thus, the transnational language, the one designed to end all barriers
between speakers, the speech that everyone can pronounce and that cannot be
translated or incorporated into another tongue, turns out not to be Esperanto
but rather IBM-speak, the language of American corporate technology. The
foreignness of the Other is exploited here to remind the viewer—who may fear
that IBM-speak will make the world smaller In undesirable ways (for example,
that they might compete for our jobs, move into our neighborhoods, go to our
schools)—that the Other is still picturesque. This classically Orientalized
Other, such as the camel rider and Sikander, is marked as sufficiently different
from us, the projected viewers, in order to encourage us to retain our positions
as privileged tourists and users.
Sikander's cartoon-bubble, emblazoned across his face and his elephant's,
asks, "How come I keep trashing my hardware every 9 months?!" This question
can be read as a rhetorical example of what postcolonial theorist and novelist
Salman Rushdie has termed "globalizing Coca-Colonization." Again, the language
of technology, with its hacker-dude vernacular, is figured here as the
transnational tongue, miraculously emerging from every mouth. Possible fears
that the exoticism and heterogeneity of the Other will be siphoned off or eradicated
by his use of homogeneous technospeak are eased by the visual impact of
the elephant, whose trunk frames Sikander's face. Elephants, rain forests, and
unspoiled mesas are all endangered markers of cultural difference that represent
Lisa Nakamura
specific stereotyped ways of being Other to Western eyes. If we did not know
that Sikander was a "real" Indian (as opposed to Indian-American, IndianCanadian,
or Indo-Anglian) the presence of his elephant, as well as the text's reference
to "Nirvana," proves to us, through the power of familiar images, that he
is. We are meant to assume that even after Sikander's hardware problems are
solved by IBM's "consultants who consider where you are as well are where
you're headed" he will still look as picturesque, as "Indian" as he did pre-IBM.
Two other ads, part of the same series produced by IBM, feature more
ambiguously ethnic figures. The first one of these depicts a Latina girl who is
asking her teacher, Mrs. Alvarez, how to telnet to a remote server. She wears a
straw hat, which makes reference to the Southwest. Though she is only eight
or ten years old, her speech has already acquired the distinctive sounds of technospeak—for
example, she uses "telnet" as a verb. The man in the second
advertisement, an antique-looking fellow with old fashioned glasses, a dark
tunic, dark skin, and an untidy beard proclaims that "you're hosed when a
virus sneaks into your hard drive." He, too, speaks the transnational vernacular—the
diction of Wayne and Garth from Wayne's World has sneaked into his
hard drive like a rhetorical virus. These images, like the preceding ones, enact
a sort of cultural ventriloquism that demonstrates the hegemonic power of
American technospeak. The identifiably ethnic faces, with their distinctive
props and costumes, that utter these words, however, attest to the importance
of Otherness as a marker of a difference that the ads strive to preserve.
This Origin ad appeared in Wired magazine, which, like Time, Smithsonian,
the New Yorker, and The Chronicle of Higher Education directs its advertising
toward upper-middle-class, mainly white readers (seefig.4). In addition, Wired
is read mainly by men, it has an unabashedly libertarian bias, and its stance
toward technology is generally Utopian. Unlike the other ads, this one directly
and overtly poses ethnicity and cultural difference as part of a political and commercial
dilemma that Origin networks can solve. The text reads, in part,
[W]e believe that wiring machines is the job, but connecting people the
art. Which means besides skills you also need wisdom and understanding.
An understanding of how people think and communicate. And the
wisdom to respect the knowledge and cultures of others. Because only
then can you create systems and standards they can work with. And
common goals which all involved are willing to achieve.
The image of an African boy, surrounded by his tribe, seemingly performing a
Star Trek Vulcan mind meld with a red-haired and extremely pale boy, cen-
24 "Where Do You Want to Go TodayT
Figure 4 a
Black boy and white boy: Origin
trally situates the white child, whose arm is visible in an unbroken line, as the
figure who is supposedly as willing to learn as he is to teach.
However, the text implies that the purpose of the white boy's encounter
with an African boy and his tribe is for him to learn just enough about them
to create the "systems and standards that THEY can work with." The producer
of marketable knowledge, the setter of networking and software-language
standards, is still defined here as the Western subject. This image,
which could have come out of National Geographic any time in the last hundred
years, participates in the familiar iconography of colonialism and its
contemporary cousin, tourism. And in keeping with this association, it
depicts the African as unspoiled and authentic. Its appeal to travel across
national and geographical borders as a means of understanding the Other,
"the art of connecting people," is defined as a commodity which this ad and
others produced by networking companies sell along with their fiber optics
and consulting services.
The notion of the computer-enabled "global village" envisioned by
Marshall McLuhan also participates in this rhetoric that links exotic travel and
tourism with technology. The Origin image comments on the nature of the
global village by making it quite clear to the viewer that despite technology's
claims to radically and instantly level cultural and racial differences (or in a
more extreme statement, such as that made by "Anthem," to literally cross
Lisa Nakamura
them out) there will always be villages full of "real" Africans, looking just as
they always have.
It is part of the business of advertising to depict Utopias: ideal depictions
of being that correctively reenvision the world and prescribe a solution to its
ills in the form of a commodity of some sort. And like tourist pamphlets, they
often propose that their products will produce, in Dean MacCannelPs phrase,
a "utopia of difference," such as has been pictured in many Benetton and CocaCola
advertising campaigns.
Coca-Cola's slogan from the seventies and eighties, "I'd like to teach the
world to sing," both predates and prefigures these ads by IBM, Compaq,
Origin, and MCI. The Coca-Cola ads picture black, white, young, old, and so
on holding hands and forming a veritable Rainbow Coalition of human diversity.
These singers are united by their shared song and, most important, their
consumption of bottles of Coke. The viewer, meant to infer that the beverage
was the direct cause of these diverse Coke drinkers overcoming their ethnic
and racial differences, was given the same message then that many Internetrelated
advertisements give us today. The message is that cybertechnology, like
Coke, will magically strip users down to "just minds," all singing the same corporate
anthem.
And what of the "rest of It," the raced and ethnic body that cyberspace's
"Anthem" claims to leave behind? It seems that the fantasy terrain of advertising
is loath to leave out this marked body because it represents the exotic
Other which both attracts us with its beauty and picturesqueness and reassures
us of our own identities asa
not Other." The "rest of it" is visually quoted
in these images and then pointedly marginalized and established as Other. The
iconography of these advertising Images demonstrates that the corporate
image factory needs images of the Other in order to depict its product: a technological
Utopia of difference. It is not, however, a Utopia for the Other or one
that includes it in any meaningful or progressive way. Rather, it proposes an
ideal world of virtual social and cultural reality based on specific methods of
"Othering," a project that I would term "the globalizing Coca-Colonization of
cyberspace and the media complex within which it is embedded."
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the members of the Sonoma State University Faculty
Writing Group: Kathy Charmaz, Richard Senghas, Dorothy Freidel, Elaine
McHugh, and Virginia Lea for their encouragement and suggestions for revi-
26 "Where Do You Want to Go Today?"
sion. I would also like to thank my research assistant and independent study
advisee at Sonoma State, Dean Klotz, for his assistance with permissions,
research, and all things cyber. And a very special thanks to Amelie Hastie and
Martin Burns, who continue to provide support and advice during all stages
of my work on this topic,
References
Hollinger, David. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
McCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books,
1989.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions ofMan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.
Rushdie, Salman. "Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene For You!" New Yorker, 23 and 30 June
1997,50-61.
Trinh Minh-ha. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press, 1989.
Wise, John Macgregor. "The Virtual Community: Politics and Affect in Cyberspace." Paper delivered
at the American Studies Association Conference, Washington D.C., 1997.