There are many academic methods and disciplinary approaches to examine historical precedents in order to try and understand the present. Perhaps even to help us to pre-empt future challenges. In a recent article, I attempted to engage in a cross-disciplinary conversation between design and media and communications disciplines, by reflecting on a 1980s television advertisement. By using the advert as a creative device (Shklovsky, 1917, Berlina, 2015) with which to draw on a historical past, I aimed to inform engagement with and reflection on current and future challenges to the design and communications industry from the digital revolution.
The article focusses on a mid-1980s television advertisement for the Yellow Pages (1985). Originating at the same time as the height of the desktop publishing revolution, the advert illuminates a transitional period in the evolution of digital technology, marked by changing user practices and experiences. The narrative of the advert follows a young man’s quest to convert an old cine film (of his father) to videotape for his mother’s birthday, in the process showcasing the impending shift from analogue to digital technologies and encapsulating the multifaceted implications and transitional challenges of the period.
The protagonist’s journey takes him to physical shops, engaging in face-to-face human interactions, highlighting the imminency and anxieties of digital disruption. As his journey progresses, each encounter underscores the obsolescence of the cine film format, alongside evaluations of emerging technologies. The reactions to the protagonist’s questions, ranging from the bemusement of a Generation Xer to the nostalgic lamentation of an antique shop owner, emphasise the evolution of technological fluency and familiarity among different stakeholders.
The advert punctuates the uneasy familiarity (or otherwise) of users with emergent technologies. The protagonist’s mother’s ambivalent response upon receiving the converted videotape reflects the growing penetration of VCRs into households, but also suggests a reluctance to fully embrace the technology. This bridges to a critical analysis of transitional technologies — analogue, digital, and (crucially) hybrid — that shaped (and continues to impact) the path of the digital revolution. Even the advert’s setting brims with technological artefacts indicative of the period. The presence of a CRT television, ring binders, and an early Apple Macintosh computer are suggestive of the transitory yet ongoing integration of digital technologies – a hybrid state, nevertheless prefiguring the future digital immersion of contemporary times.
The hybrid setting of technologies, alongside the tensions, confusion and ambiguities of different stakeholders metaphorically symbolises, and can be contrasted alongside, the challenges impacting the design industry of the period and can inform reflection on contemporary challenges. For example, desktop publishing (DTP) allowed designers to encroach into areas that pre-press workers had traditionally worked in – WYSIWYG technologies in the early days of the web enabled designers to enter the world of interactivity that had previously been the domain of software developers, and now automation and AI (alongside challenges of democratisation of design in general) are counter-challenging designers’ traditional roles and practices.
While a commercial artefact, the Yellow Pages advert functions as a cultural, historical, narrative lens with which to contrast alongside contemporary transitional challenges within the digital revolution from issues including the democratisation of design, in-house design, automation and, of course, artificial intelligence.
Reflecting on the narratives that it, and similar cultural artefacts, portray can potentially enable us to contextually understand and prepare for forthcoming challenges from the digital revolution in ways over and above simply their technological impact.
Berlina, A. 2015, Art as Device, Poetics Today, 36.
Meron, Y. (2024). ‘What a funny looking video’: Using allegorical representations of technological change to reflect on future digital communication and design challenges. Media, Culture & Society, 0(0). doi: 10.1177/01634437241231875
Shklovsky, V. 1917. Art as Technique. In: Rivkin, J. & Ryan, M. (eds.) Literary Theory: An Anthology. 3 ed. West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell.
Yellow Pages (1985). Unknown [Online]. https://youtu.be/v3GRi5_juz0 : [Accessed 27/4/2023 2023].
Communication & Graphic Design Research 