Monday, March 9, 2009

1984- Conformity versus Independence



The Macintosh 128K was released on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command line interface. Macintosh was also the first lucrative personal computer to use images, rather than text, to communicate.

1984, the name of the commercial, used an unnamed heroine to represent the coming of the Macintosh (indicated by her white tank top with a picture of Apple’s Macintosh computer on it) as a means of saving humanity from "conformity." These images were an allusion to George Orwell's noted novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which described a dystopian future ruled by a televised "Big Brother."


What are your thoughts?
What is the symbolism in this contrast between black and white?

The location of the dystopian society is very bleak, dreary, and dark. But note that the heroine in the advertisement is wearing a white shirt and she has almost white hair...


more on white in the coming posts...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really liked that ad! I think the most interesting thing, is that it is timeless. I clicked on it kind of absent mindedly and didn't realize it was from 1984 until the end. I could have thought it was a modern ad.

I also liked how the woman was in orange. Her vivaciousness and brightness was a sharp contrast to the drones watching the screen. Very clever...

Susan Romano said...

I too found that this ad ages well! 1984 is timeless--so their only worry was making the woman timeless--perhaps she's a little aged in her attire. Color is definitely plotted as superhero bringing change, the antidote to grey-tone conformity. I thik it's grey rather than black and white--that creates the dullness associated also with lack of activity. Whereas the woman is moving athletically, the grey men sit with mouths agape receiving televised messages passively. This too was the era when "interactivity" became an active positive term.

Post a Comment