We have compiled a collection of nearly 500 television ads covering a period from 1995 to the present so that we might investigate how advertising articulates (gives cultural voice to) "worldviews" of global and high-tech capital. We intend to focus on the kinds of narratives North American corporate sponsors choose to tell about their relationship with a still emerging global economy and civil society.

Many of the ads we've collected could be classified as corporate ads. Though all ads are intended to sell something, a lot of corporate ads aim more at identifying the company and what it stands for than offering a particular commodity. Or as they say in the biz, these ads aim at "branding" the company. In our rubric, this "branding" process aims at establishing or reinforcing a corporate sign value. Then mix in a little public relations talk to give it a positive spin. This type of advertising differs from the far-more-common varieties of commercials that aim at building and sustaining commodity signs for parity consumer goods. A pivotal difference between these corporate ads and commodity ads lies in the tone of address they employ. While today's consumer-goods advertising often assumes a winking manner about the nature of the advertising project itself, corporate ads of the sort we are looking at here are far less likely to address viewers in a self-conscious tone. They are more serious, somber, concerned and purposive in tone.

Landscapes

As students of advertising, we have examined American advertising culture in terms of the economy of sign values that circulate and flow through the commercial media. In this project, we are asking how corporate ads represent globalization, how they represent the intrusion of e-commerce into people's lives, how they represent technology itself? And though these ads are busy representing global landscapes, they do so for the benefit of primarily American audiences.

Corporate capital was transforming itself at a furious pace in the 1990s, sometimes through merger and acquisition, sometimes by virtue of new technologies, always by expansion. Our study examines the kinds of public self-representations that corporate entities offer as they transform themselves and the societies in which they exist. The transformations are of several orders -- one is toward globalization; one is toward the new economy of high tech firms; one is toward the widespread populist incorporation of the middle classes into retail investing; one is toward the Internet and the wireless telecommunications to come. The transformations left out of their accounts will prove no less significant -- e.g., the steadily widening gap between rich and poor and the weird place that puts the middle classes; the disappearance of a regulatory state; the absence of panoptic authority and power.

Reading these ads as symbolic accounts of the transformations taking place, we want to focus on the landscapes and narratives set forth in these ads.

ZEN SCAPES, FIBEROPTIC SCAPES

Why did we initiate this page by joining two such radically disparate images from television commercials? And what do they have to do with advertising landscapes? The first scene resembling a tranquil bridge scene -- patterned perhaps after a venerable Japanese print -- has been lifted from a montage arranged to testify to Merrill-Lynch's global financial reach. The photographic imagery of orange-robed Buddhist monks became a late 1990s favorite amongst corporate advertisers, who perhaps saw the orange-robed monk as a signifier of diversity's inclusion in the "new world order." Or perhaps they include such imagery to connote Eastern wisdom, or to convey a sense of balance between tradition (unchanging) and energetic modern Capital (Merrill-Lynch). What can decontextualized images of orange-robed monks be made to tell us about capitalist cultures circa the millennium?

We ripped the second image from an MCI WorldCom advertisement where it was meant to signify the speed of data transfer over the Internet. Whereas the first landscape scene speaks to continuity amidst the forces of globalization that are penetrating and transforming Asia, the second landscape speaks not to place but to space, an abstraction that more and more seems to lie at the core of the capitalist world-system. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to interpret this radically decontextualized image as the inside of a fiberoptic cable. Here is the cyber-scape of the moment, not simply a symbol of a future that is upon us, but a functional conduit, the veins of a network that like a river flows through us, connecting us.

In thinking about images such as these we have returned to the traditional of studying "landscapes." The device of "landscapes" has a long-standing place in Western culture's representations of social and cultural geography. Cultural analysts and art critics have long used the strategy of reading landscapes for clues into the social and cultural makeup of a time and place.

How then might we begin to conceive of the era we are calling hypermodernity? Or, phrased differently, what can be said about how capital conceptualizes those spaces in its advertising? We see in these ads Landscapes of Space and Speed. Landscapes of Globalization. Landscapes of Capital, Technology and Individualism.

We'll begin then by trying to disentangle the interwoven mappings of space, time, capital and globalization in corporate television ads by turning to a 1998 MCI WorldCom campaign which likened the next stage of the telephonically integrated high-speed internet to the completion of the transcontinental railroad over 150 years ago. The MCI WorldCom advertisement self-consciously addresses this comparison in world historical terms. What can be gained from analyzing scenes from these ads as landscapes in the context of critical theoretical musings? How does a capitalist culture represent the "new global economy"? How does it represent the role of the digital communications and the Internet as the pivot for this stage of global economic integration? And what impact do these representations have on the wider Cultural formations?