Throughout our semester, we have discussed repeatedly that modern technology and the “spaces” resulting from it–the Cloud, the feed, the stream–are poor substitutes for these things in our non-online world and experience, that it in fact is insulting to those things and their place in our lives for us to consider their digital substitutes “real.” As technology becomes increasingly interactive, it is considered to be a perversion of the real interaction between humans and things, humans and other humans, etc. As a burgeoning digital rhetoric scholar, my immediate instinct is to feel defensive when faced with these ideas, and I spent a lot of this semester figuring out how to accept them and integrate them into my own scholarship.
Where I find my scholarship and myself is wondering about the personhood of those who I do only know through the online, and the personhood potential in the online itself. If our technology and those that legitimately inhabit it, were able to speak back to us–what would it say?
When reading James R. Brown’s “Composition in the Dromosphere,” I think I found part of my answer in his analysis of Greg Gilis i.e. Girl Talk. In mentioning Gillis’ participation in an advertisement campaign for Microsoft, he quotes Gilis’ “I’m a PC, and I make people sweat” (80). I was particularly fascinated by this quote and what it says about Gillis’ work as well as what technology can be in our lives. The “I’m a ___” phrase is used more to align a certain group with the larger community or with each other in a way that suggests unity or common interest. Our cultural experience with this phrase can be seen in “I’m an alcoholic” in AA meetings or “I’m a Mormon” in the multi-year campaign funded by the LDS church to reject stereotypes and concepts about the religion. This phrase, despite being a short and simple statement, is non-confrontational. The rest of the statement is, inherently, “I am ___, and I’m just like you.”
This statement, however, provides this phrase in a different context. Not only is what is being stated different from the usual usage of “I’m a ____” to state a human identity, but it is one that is actively inhuman. A PC cannot introduce itself to us in the way that we assume “introduction” works, and it certainly could not in 2008 when the “I’m a PC” campaign began. The introduction continues to alienate us and our understanding of this with the statement finishing with “…I make people sweat,” as technology is supposed to remove both the literal and metaphorical “sweat” from our lives, becoming increasingly small and light, able to disappear when we need it to. (If you’ve ever attempted to physically pick up a typewriter, you know what I’m talking about). In contrast, this statement allows the technology to assert itself as an inconvenient, even unpleasant presence. It is going to physically make people sweat through its hefty weight and metaphorically do so through the information it is providing, possibly through Gillis’ identity as a performer that wants to push boundaries.
The “pushing boundaries” that Gilis is known for is also present in the ad the quote is taken from, the Microsoft “I’m a PC” campaign. This campaign, which was created alongside and in opposition to the “Buy a Mac” campaign, was intended to portray PC users as “normal people.” Mac’s campaign, intended to present themselves as the better alternative, created a version of PC and of Mac as people. According to Charles Forceville in his chapter “The Strategic Use of the Visual Mode in Advertising Metaphors,” PC was presented as “Caucasian, with a conventional pair of glasses and haircut, and he is slightly overweight” and Mac as “lithe and athletic, handsome, with a more Latineate appearance, and he looks younger than PC” (Forceville, 65). Microsoft’s response to this through the “I’m a PC” ads was to cast an actual Microsoft employee alongside numerous famous people and dress him like the “PC” character in the original Mac ads. These ads were intended to put a literal human face to a piece of technology, and one that was seen as particularly soulless in comparison to Mac.
What is striking watching these ads and reading Forceville’s analysis of them is the focus on the “personas” that Apple and Microsoft created both in tandem and in competition with each other, ultimately creating a character for each of their primary products at the time that became bigger than the products itself in some ways– Microsoft has made multiple throwbacks to these ads using the same employee. At the end of the day, what is difficult to remember, and what I think technology might actually say to us, is that neither one of these people actually exist. Brand identity is not an “I’m a ____” at all because there is no solitary “I,” it is created by teams of people whose names we will never know. The alienation that comes from the “I’m a PC, and I make people sweat” is therefore more aligned with what technology does, it feels uncomfortable because it is not the “I’m a ___” phrase that helps us understand each other and relate to each other. It is, perhaps unintentionally, a recognition of the PC as a foreign and unwanted presence in our homes, in our lives.
Works Cited
Brown, James J. “Composition in the Dromosphere.” Computers and Composition, vol. 29, no. 1, 2012, pp. 79-91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2012.01.004.
Forceville, Charles. “The strategic use of the visual mode in advertising metaphors.” Critical multimodal studies of popular culture (2013): 55-70.
“I’m a PC.” Wikipedia, Nov 17 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_a_PC Wikimedia Foundation.
MacTechHowTo. “All ‘I’m a PC’ Ads Part 1.” Youtube, Oct 26 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfv6Ah_MVJU