You know I love me some retrofuturist technology – we’ve talked about it before. That’s why I loved stumbling on these commercials and videos I’m presenting for Sci-Friday – they’re a 90s-era look at what we thought the Internet and technology were going to be. It’s charming to see how hopeful and excited people were, building onramps for the Information Superhighway:
In the 90s, IBM was going all-in on an operating system to compete with Mac and Windows. It spent millions on ads all over TV trying to create market saturation – you can watch those commercials on Youtube today. Technology advertisements like these have long capitalized on visualizing a slightly futuristic world, enabled by the tech they’re trying to sell you. It’s cute in its own way, but becomes a parody of itself if it fails to launch (see also the AOL ‘Jetsons’ commercial and MSN TV)
Another example of common advertising strategy is to use an actor from a scifi TV show as your spokesperson. One example is above with Leonard Nimoy introducing the Magnavox LaserDisc video system. Below, Wil Wheaton tells us about the magical world of home video editing:
The point of all these videos is that we had a hopeful view of the future thirty years ago. I’m trying to do the same thing again with Mesh, introducing a hopeful scifi future for kids to explore. In a greedy, cynical and violent world, hope, optimism, and resilience are powerful weapons.
