"Nostalgia is constructed and experienced as a covering aura defined as standing for a time when the world moved slowly enough to be understandable and anxiety-free. The actual spatial-temporal location of the 'past' is undefined. The past is represented in the present, or rather, the present is represented as the past." (Goldman 1996:110).
This AT&T advertisement employs an interesting twist of memory techniques, harkening back to an eerily current 1940's America (1950's? there's no way to be certain) in order to bolster their value by attaching notions of technological prowess and instant convenience. The photograph provides a generic historical image of a confrontation between the worker and the boss; it communicates history through the black-and-white realism, dated fashions (pinstripe suits, slicked back hair, round spectacles) and outmoded technologies (old rotary phone, slide rule). This working relationship is certainly an alienated one: the employee stands before his superior, sheepishly with hand in hand, being admonished for a job poorly sone. His reply is clearly antagonistic: he obviously does not feel any meaningful personal bond to the workplace (i.e., "your crummy inventory department").
This ad speaks to our alienated worklife in the present, but the use of memory softens the blow. Our alienation is offered up gently, from a distance in this quaint moment from "history." In the cartoon-like captions, the worker is addressed as "you." In the product frame, the viewer is also named as "you." We stand in for the employee, who is empowered with the ability to one-up the boss with witticisms, yet subordinated nonetheless. A crucial difference that we are to understand is that we have the PocketNet technology in this day and age: by choosing this commodity, we are (superficially) emancipated from our life of conscripted labor--for it lets us "check inventory levels. And access all you other network levels. Instantly." So, while we can identify with the employee's disdain for enslavement to a Capitalist system, we--in the present--can somehow be exonerated by taking part in that same system. We are offered only a capitulation to consumption, coyly disguised as liberation.
"Qualities of permanence, tradition, and interdependence are translated into meanings of authenticity and honesty. Though these connotations come from our past, ads mundanely construct a spatial nostalgia for a noncommodified and nonurban world, rather than a temporally precommodified world" (Goldman 1996:117).
In this Dexter ad, memory is triggered through photographic and lingual codes. The appeal to historicity comes first in the appellation, which evokes the notions of "tradition" and "grandfather." Here too, in this ad, a black-and-white picture is used to denote a time and feeling from our collective past: it shows an elderly gentlemen instructing a young turk (his grandson?) in the finer points of shoemaking; the brown tint is the same as that of faded photos from the early years of pictures. The text at left begins with the lines: "Most grandpas give you an ice cream or a shiny, new quarter. Here, they give you a time-honored lesson in leather stitching." This image implies a time when children still had close, bonding relationships with the elders in their extended families, and a quarter would actually mean something to them. It also desperately seeks to locate this genuine feeling in the present--the tense and words used state that the traditional aura is in the now.
"Gemeinschaft locales are intended to offer the appearance of down-home country places as the background for portraits of relations among simple, honest people" (Goldman 1996:117).
Dexter is trying to capitalize on the idea that in a fast-paced world of mass-produced commodities and anonymity, they still adhere to production in the time-honored, old fashioned way. The photo depicts a close interaction between the caring, smiling men--it speaks to the pre-industrial days when a skilled craftsman would pass on his specialized wisdom of producing quality goods to an eager apprentice who would one day take his place. These are romantic appeals to the "way things used to be"; Dexter carefully extracts the ideal to enhance its own status. Notions of time are utterly confused, for the scene in the photograph is supposed to be a current one, yet it is cloaked in signifiers of memory. By bringing the past into the present, Dexter attaches desired values of tradition, craftsmanship, and stability to its brand name.