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"I think we're still on that topic, still trying to figure out what computers are, how they change us, why we use them."
- Neal Stephenson
 |
| Master Ventriloquism Corporation (MV) | ||
| A central source of product advertising, commercials sent out to every product. |
Most products sold in America had product advertisements issuing directly from the package!
| Fascinating, those huge batteries of machines pouring out their messages to the American people. It seemed to him almost miraculous, the way the commercials were broadcast into thin air and picked up by the tiny discs embedded in the bottle or can or box or whatever wrapping contained the product, but he knew it involved some sort of electronic process that he couldn’t understand. Such an incredibly complex process, yet unfailingly accurate! He had never heard of the machines making a mistake; never, for instance, had they thrown a shoe polish commercial so that it came out of a hair tonic bottle. |
| Technovelgy from Captive Audience,
by Anne Warren Griffith. Published by Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1953 Additional resources -
|
This brief excerpt describes the life of a typical consumer in her home:
While washing the dishes. Mavis was deciding what dessert to prepare. She’d bought several new ones the day before, and now they all sounded so good she couldn’t make up her mind which to use first. The commercial for the canned apple pie ingredients was a little playlet, about a husband coming home at the end of a long hard day, smelling the apple pie, rushing out to the kitchen, sweeping his wife off her feet, kissing her and saying, “That’s my girl!” It sounded promising to Mavis, especially when the announcer said any housewife who got to work right this minute and pre- pared that apple pie could be almost certain of getting that reaction from her husband.
Then there was a cute jingle from the devil’s-food cake mix, sung by a trio of girls’ voices with a good swing band in the background. If she’d made the mistake of buying only one box, it said, she ought to go out and buy another before she started baking because one of these luscious devil’s-food cakes would not be enough for her hungry family. It was peppy and made Mavis feel better. She checked her shelves and, finding she had only one box, jotted it down on her shopping list.
On this hopeful note her thinking ended, for the soap powder box cried out, “Good morning. Mother! What say we go after those breakfast dishes and give our hands a beauty treatment at the same time.'’ You know. Mother, no other soap gives you a beauty treatment while you wash your dishes. Only So-Glow, So-Glow, right here on your shelf, waiting to help So let’s begin, shall we?”
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