Chapter Seven: Where Have All the Words Gone?
Would you like to conduct an interesting experiment? Go to a used bookstore, and get your hands on an old magazine, something pre-1950s, if you can. Then take a quick look at some of the ads. You will not have to peruse them, because that one glance will alert you to a very obvious characteristic. You might find a small illustration of a pleasant black-and-white photograph, but for the most part these ads are dense with text. The page is filled with words. It would take you five or ten minutes to read the entire ad.
Now pick up a contemporary magazine and find and ad, any ad. You will notice the difference immediately. Gone are all words. Gone! They have vanished, it seems, replaced by images.
Let’s compare them more closely.
The older one happens to be an automobile ad. Its ten paragraphs provide in great detail the reasons you should buy the car. You will learn how the car accelerates and how well it maneuvers in traffic. You will learn how its stability contributes to smooth turning. You will read about the manufacturer’s promise: you’ll never feel a drop of remorse for deciding to own this car.
The modern ad is also black-and-white (although most are color), but that is where the similarity ends. The name of the car company appears at the top right corner of the page. At the adjacent corner is a single paragraph. It is hard to call it a paragraph, though, because paragraphs consist of sentences, yet this paragraph comprises only pieces of sentences. It advertises a handful of features (for example, a navigation system) that had not been invented when the earlier ad appeared. There is not an abundance of information. In fact, if you want more, there is a dot.com address you can investigate on your own. That’s it for the text.
The image does the rest of the talking: a black vehicle on a black background. Its chrome and glass are perfectly lighted to create a sense of power and mystery. Its manufacturer obviously believes that power and mystery are more important than information.
Think for a second about that first ad. If you came across that ad today, would you take the time to read it? Would you find ten minutes in your busy day; a day filled with school and friends and home work and chores and e-mail—to acquire all that information about the car? Probably not. But when that ad first appeared, the magazine’s readers surely found the time to read it. Can you imagine a world paced so leisurely that readers would donate valuable time to an advertisement? It is indeed hard to imagine.
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