Literacy as Design

Even after a century and a half of saturation with mass-market image technologies, the heritage of alphabetic literacy from the Enlightenment still dominates within the academy and in literacy instruction in general. The totemization of alphabetic literacy and the denial of the materiality of literacy have had the attendant effect of treating images as trivial, transitory, and manipulative. Visual thinking remains excluded from the mainstream literacy curriculum in the schools, and it is taught only in specialized courses in college in disciplines such as architecture and art history. When in the early 1960s one of the first designers of three-dimensional computer graphics, Lawrence G. Roberts, looked for scholarship on perspectival imaging, he found a dearth of work in the twentieth century and instead had to refer to German geometry textbooks from the early nineteenth century to find a mathematics of perspective.

Perhaps because images are so ubiquitous, we in the academy have paid so little attention to how they work. But an even stronger reason may be that images have been so thoroughly appropriated by advertising. No aspect of our culture is more thoroughly despised from the viewpoint of the academic humanities than advertising. Advertising is the discursive anti-Christ, doing everything that the tradition of academic literacy detests. It persuades with images; it acts on the emotions; it bends and stretches language; it employs humor and parody; it can't always be explained; it is anonymous. To parade out the usual statistics about how we see over three thousand ads a day and how today's teenagers will like spend a decade of their lives watching ads is only stating the obvious (Twitchell 2). It is difficult to find any public space free of advertising or listen to or watch any public medium, including the public channels, without encountering ads. The state of Iowa even sells advertising in its income tax booklet. Universities have cashed in by selling sponsorship of sports teams to shoe manufacturers, signing exclusive deals with soft drink companies, and by selling rights to their own images. The Penn State football jerseys that used to be distinctive for their lack of adornment now display the Nike logo.



Advertising is a 158 billion dollar business in the United States and has grown to around 200 billion dollars in the rest of the world, with Western-style advertising quickly rising in emerging markets like China and Vietnam. Nonetheless, the academic response to advertising continues to ignore it, to accuse it of deception, and to dismiss it as trash. The basic criticisms of advertising remain the same. Advertising causes people to purchase goods that they have no wish to purchase either by outright deception or more insidiously by creating wants and desires that otherwise would not exist. Herbert Marcuse is representative in arguing that advertising creates false needs, which perpetuate misery and injustice: "Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume to accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs" (5). Certainly there is a long list of products consumed today for which markets barely existed before advertising: cosmetics, deodorants, soft drinks, credit cards, household cleaning products, cigarettes, bottled water, insurance, state lotteries, mouthwash, and most over-the-counter medicines.



The usual analysis of advertising is that it depends on an irrational connection between the product and an object of desire. Throughout most of this century, print ads and later broadcast ads depended on a narrative of the object of desire being attained through purchase of the product. Most often the promise was one of sexual success, either in attracting a partner or in keeping one. The right choice of chewing gum or mouthwash got the partner; the right choice of coffee kept him interested.

Mass media ads of today,however, depend far less on narrative coherence for their appeal. By the late 1980s advertisers realized that the old tactics would not work for an audience over-saturated with advertising and overly cynical. Thus the emphasis in advertising for a number of products shifted from story to style as advertisers became increasingly self referential, recirculating images drawn from the cultural landscape and most often from media representations. This mode of advertising through lifting images and meanings from one context and placing them in another resists the simple analysis of attaching a product to an object of desire.

Instead, advertisers engage in a conversation of images with their audiences. They are both manipulator and manipulated because they must interject their product into an ongoing system of signs. Their effect depends not so much on "hailing" in the Althuserian sense of extending an invitation to occupy a subjectivity as in adding a way of seeing and thus extending a set of cultural associations. For this reason a conventional analysis based on the distinction of signifier and signified following from Saussure is wholly inadequate for dealing with contemporary advertising.

An alternative approach comes from the Canadian media activist organization,The Media Foundation, that challenges advertising it sees as harmful by subverting it. The Media Foundation publishes an ad-free magazine, Adbusters, and it supports the Adbusters Web site, both of which take on specific advertising campaigns with clever spoofs. The group's president and former ad man, Kalle Lasn, explains Adbusters' mission: "I don't have any problem with advertising. I love advertising. We are into selling ideas, not products. We're social marketers, not product marketers. To me, that is a whole different kettle of fish" (Lewis).

At the top of the Adbusters' sabotage list have been alcohol and cigarette ads. Because ads are in the public domain, their copyright status is questionable, and Adbusters has pushed that line. One target has been Absolut vodka. "Absolut Impotence," shows an empty, shriveling bottle with a caption quoting Shakespeare: "Drink provokes the desire but takes away the performance."



Another ad, "Absolute End," (the "e" is added to Absolut for copyright reasons) shows a bottle-shaped chalk line around a blood smear surrounded by police and photographers with the small print caption: "Nearly 50% of automobile fatalities are linked to alcohol. Ten percent of North Americans are alcoholics. A teenager sees 100,000 alcohol ads before reaching the legal drinking age." In February 1992 Absolut threatened to sue Adbusters, but Absolut quickly backed down when they recognized that the suit would lead to a public debate about protecting advertisers who sell dangerous products.



A more difficult challenge for Adbusters are ads which fetishize glamour. They have launched a spoof campaign against one of the most exploitative marketers, Calvin Klein, using the grey-scale tones Calvin Klein is famous for.



Adbusters produced a 30-second spot that pointed to the connection of fashion and eating disorders. The commercial begins with a soft-focus image of a naked woman accompanied by a voice-over saying, "Obsession, fascination, fetish." The writhing woman appears to be in slow-motion ecstasy before we realized that she is vomiting into a toilet bowl. The voice says: "Why do nine out of 10 women feel dissatisfied with some aspect of their bodies? The beauty industry is the beast."



Several women's groups joined Adbusters in purchasing four spots on the CBC show, Fashion File, and they attempted to buy airspace on CNN's Style with Elsa Klensch. Both networks refused to run the Adbuster's uncommercial. Adbusters also attempted to buy time on ABC, NBC, and CBS for a spot declaring the day after Thanksgiving, "Buy Nothing Day." None of the major networks would run the ad. Richard Gitter, NBC's vice president of advertising standards and program compliance, says that NBC doesn't air controversial ads. Gitter continued with more candor, "this action was taken in self-interest. It was a spot telling people, in effect, to ignore our advertisers" (Oldenburg).

Even though the Adbusters' uncommercial was censored by the networks, it and other uncommercials have been viewed by many people via the Web. The Adbusters' URL is frequently mentioned in lists of favorite Web sites in newspapers and on individuals' home pages. The Adbusters' Web site offers a critique of the visual icongraphy of the perfect body and the "Just Do It" rhetoric of personal empowerment embedded that iconography. Adbusters seeks to redefine agency by "trickle-up" activism. The "Culture Jammers Toolbox" section of the site gives production advice on how to introduce noise into focus groups, compose alternative print ads, make television spots, buy television time, and subvert billboards with spray-painted modifications.

The "Culture Jammers Toolbox" says nothing about making Web sites, but the Web has become the primary medium for grass roots media activism. Among the tens of thousands of the Web sites of individuals are many pages devoted to media criticism and parodies of advertising. This activism has come at a time when the Internet has become the battleground for the deregulated corporate giants, where control of the coaxial cable and fiber-optic conduits represent only a small part of the potential fortunes to be made from an array of services carried through the pipe: advertising, credit cards, banking, entertainment, news, and sales of other products. Given the corporate vision of the Internet as the ultimate Home Shopping Network, is there reason to expect anything other than a more acelerated, more international, and much more profitiable global consumer culture?