INTRODUCTION
For every Tivo or Direct TV that promises an escape from television advertising, an event like the Super Bowl proves publics will still elevate them to event-viewing. For every magazine trying to reduce its amount of print ads (usually in response to reader complaints), another successful magazine like Lucky is born, priding itself as an advertisement for the cultural act of consumption itself. For every internet ad zapped by pop-up blockers, two more seem to break on through (and sometimes we actually find ourselves clicking on them). Contradictions? Perhaps, but the media and our relationships with its offerings are full of such contradictions. Who hasn’t watched the most inane reality show ever and found themselves tuning in the next week? Who hasn’t balked at spoiled celebrities then enviously watched a program that showcases their “fabulous” lives? At first glance, media consumers have a no more complicated and contradictory relationship with ads than any other part of popular culture. After all, there is no part of popular culture that doesn’t periodically need to stand up to accusations of banality and shallowness.
However, within the ever expanding texts of mass production, ads do stand out as unique anomalies. Within the variety of popular culture texts, there is enough fragmentation and choice
that one can easily construct their own assortment of appreciations. The music buff need never cross the path of a comic book, and the television potato may never pick up a gossip magazine. The cable news watcher may never browse print newspapers, and the indie-scenester may never enter the symphony chamber. However, even if someone never turns on a TV and never flips a single page of a magazine; if someone exists without an internet connection; if they are the most passive couch potato or the most fervid writer of fan fiction; the mind boggles at the number of advertisements that would still cross their paths in an average day (supposing they haven’t taken to cave dwelling).
The overwhelming presence of advertisements makes them unique cultural artifacts that demand even more of our attention. The questions have always been: what shape should that attention take, and in what contexts should this attention be put to use? My interests lay in framing these questions in the context of composition classrooms, where advertisements represent one of the field’s longest standing alternatives to the use of literature or essays. First, I will offer past and current categories of approaches for using ads (both print and television) in composition classrooms. These categories aim to illustrate both broadness and historicity in an attempt to show how these questions have been previously addressed. I also believe these categories provide a useful heuristic for a larger goal.
After establishing history, I will illustrate how emerging theories of visual rhetoric may offer new ways to continue this old desire to utilize ads in the composition classroom. Within the last decade, increased public exposure to multimedia texts, along with ordinary people’s access to the tools needed to produce them, has led scholars in rhetoric and composition to explore our responsibilities for the inclusion of visual design principles in what we consider the teaching of writing. In his book, The Economics of Attention, Richard Lanham notes how “the great victory of the alphabet was to separate thought from image,” as he calls for methods “to bring the alphabetic world back into the behavior one” (85). Lanham’s “alphabet that thinks”calls for a more conscious oscillation between typographical and symbolic ways of seeing and understanding. Such an alphabet mixes image, text, and sound in dynamic ways that produce articulations intertextual in their complexity and non-linear in their interactivity. Production of such texts calls for increased awareness of rhetorical choices as composers struggle with how to produce meaning(s) in the complex arrangements and interplay of various elements (143).
Lanham and I agree that advertisements are one of the few widely-received and familiar texts that currently utilize this speaking alphabet. By shifting focus away from what advertisements persuade us to do, and towards how they utilize dynamic design to create hybrid meanings, instructors will discover a wealth of new assignment possibilities. These assignments may not look like the traditional essay, but they will offer composing skills that take advantage of an increasingly multimedia and visual sphere of communication.