July 16, 2005
Getting By In Class...with HP Pavillion Notebooks
A professor drones about chemical compounds in front of a lecture auditorium brimming with students. The kids dutifuly take notes. The hip ones have laptops -- HP Pavillion notebooks. The camera takes turns closing in on different students in the room, dodging the teacher's attention to press a button on their keyboards. Each produces a fantasy that materializes in the room, intercut by shots of the boring lecture: a metal band leaps out on to the desks and surrounds a girl, performing a show for her; elsewhere a boy clicks his mouse a motorcycle bursts into the back door, pops a wheelie, and rides down the stairs; ninjas fight on the lecture room floor. "Everything is Possible" the ad campaign promises.
As you can imagine, as a teacher, I was immediately insulted by this television advertisement. I've seen plenty of commercials that mock the lecture theater, but this one went way over the top in its celebration of the irresponsible student. I couldn't believe what I was seeing on the screen: a commercial advocating that students buy a computer so they can tune out the teacher and play games, play music, and watch DVDs. Sure, some students "drift off" into fantasy all the time, and many do use their computers cell phones and pdas for escapism during class. And sometimes the circumstances of a large lecture hall make it all but impossible for a teacher to prevent it. But what troubled me most, I think, was the complete anti-intellectualism of the ad -- and the assumption that computers in the classroom are good only for taking notes at best (and avoiding learning altogether at worst).
Doesn't HP market to educational institutions? Don't they sell at a discount to college labs and in college bookstores? Don't they target the very same profs they're insulting with this ad? Only in the amoral universe of corporate advertising culture can such contradictory messaging make sense.
Ironically, this spot aired while I was watching A&E channel's Investigative Report (inspired by Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Nickle and Dimed), called "Wage Slaves: Not Getting By in America Today". One minute, I'm watching families talk about how they don't know how to buy school clothes for their kids on their minimum wage salaries; the next, I'm watching spoiled 18 year olds watching martial arts films on their $1000 toys, under the pretense of taking notes in a classroom. And I wondered, with just the slightest sense of poetic justice: Are these not the wage slaves of the future?
Just did a google search. Good to see that even parents, like Bob Bly, are also outraged by this ad.
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Let me be even more explicit. (I've been downloading parts of this ad for several days in hopes I can put together a compilation tape with the fighting frogmen, the punk-metal band, and the cyclists cum dumb ass students sans the explicit HP ad stuff.) I'm going to intercut this with stuff from the Mr. Hand - Mr. Spicoli scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Show it in some of my classes.
You see, we have this little problem at most teaching campuses. It's where the IT folks (who have generally gotten too big for their britches-- and tend to be overly arrogant in their dealings with faculty) sell....the Next Big Thing. Mandatory laptops with a laptops in the classroom concept.
For some reason parents and students cream their jeans at this (and stupid MEANINGLESS things like "most wired" ratings), even though it means that they'll have to shell out a grand or more for a laptop if they don't already have one that's up to specs. This is the fetishism of IT-junk. Gone too far on most campuses already.
WAKEUP. The wi-fi system usually reeks and can hardly support in class stuff-- and the ad shows exactly what'll happen with ubiquitous laptops-- it's bad enough already with cells and text messaging.
Besides, I can't think of a way that this REALLY supports meaningful pedagogy. Let's slow em down and teach em to read, write, and sum.
Go figure...