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Max Headroom and New Coke
Max Headroom debuted in 1985. The television show was canceled in 1987. The premise of the show is that a news anchor was hurt badly, so to preserve his identity they uploaded his mind into a computer. A three-dimensional simulation is created of this person who then goes on to have his own show where he talks about things of his choosing and interviews people, similar to Oprah.
Max Headroom, of course, was merely an actor who's image was computerized into a simulation of that actor.
Despite the early fascination with the show and the idea of Max, the phenomenon died out quickly. This was due to many factors, including - media oversaturation, the use of Max in some of the largest advertising campaigns ever (for a product that people didn't like), and a general disdain for the character's quirks and the "creepiness" of the show.
In a strange way, Max Headroom illuminated something very real about our society in a dystopian lens: the simulation of Max, and the simulacra of ideas used to make him highlighted very clearly how unreal our society had become. Is there anything so meaningless and disconnected from reality than a computer-generated image of someone speaking out of a strangely generated neon box world? The disembodied image of Max, himself oversaturated with his nearly omnipresent awareness of culture, forces us (at minimum) on a subconscious level to question the virtuality of our existence.
It is no wonder, then, that Max became an advertising phenomenon. Allying himself with New Coke, ironically, could not have been a more perfect union of death. At the time, Max was everywhere in the media. He was at the height of his popularity, and his put this personality capital on the line for New Coke in an advertisement campaign.
New Coke was doomed before it was ever released. The cultural significance of the original Coca-Cola formula was beyond what anyone could have imagined. When it was announced that Coke was changing its recipe, Coca-Cola Co. received over 400,000 angry calls and letters. Many of these people felt betrayed and a psychologist hired by Coke to talk to angry callers said that it sounded as though they were talking about a "dead family member."
A product, mass-produced for drinking, so important to people's lives that they would feel this loss on the same level of losing a family member? Indeed, Coke had tapped into one of the fundamental problems of the media culture we live in - value and meaning have been co-opted by brands that feed us what they want us to have. The backlash against Coke stemmed from people feeling the loss of value in the symbol of their product. This is backed up by the statistics which show that most people didn't care too much about the difference in taste between Coca-Cola Classic and New Coke. People were upset because the meaning of the product was lost, not because of any tangible differences the utility and pleasure of the product itself.
Max Headroom and New Coke are relics of the past now, which at the time were meant to project us into a new and exciting future. A virtual human? A scientifically improved Coke flavor? Strangely, this futuristic reach has now left these two cultural products in the dust.
Both Max and New Coke demonstrate currently relevant ideas about simulation and simulacra --
1) The more transparent the generation of meaning is with the intent to manipulate people, the more likely they are to resist.
2) Despite the willingness to resist manipulation, advertising has become one of the most successful technologies ever created to accompany the inventions of television and the internet. The reason for this is that there is a void of meaning in our world, and advertising helps to fill that void by pointing us toward products filled with cultural meaning. This is important because the meaning of the product and the product's usefulness need have absolutely no correlation for this to be true.
3) The discomfort of Max's virtuality lead to his death, because people could never quite take him seriously due to his strange hiccups in speech and plastic facial features. The current trend toward using computerization to create a "real" that is more real than real emerges from an understanding that subtle manipulation is much easier than drawing on a conscious suspension of disbelief, rather than the subconscious alteration of pre-existing schema. Humans, at this period of time, are quite ready and willing to be manipulated for the sake of meaning construction, even if the meanings are based on simulacra - a sort of house of cards with no foundation in reality or anything other than a fabricated meaning that came before.
I remember watching Max Headroom as a kid. My mom hated it, it made her uncomfortable. Looking back now, I realize that I liked Max because he challenged me to think about the world I was growing up in. The first time I began to question what being a human actually meant started from thinking about the simulated half-existence of Max.
So how different are we really from Max?
Max Headroom, of course, was merely an actor who's image was computerized into a simulation of that actor.
Despite the early fascination with the show and the idea of Max, the phenomenon died out quickly. This was due to many factors, including - media oversaturation, the use of Max in some of the largest advertising campaigns ever (for a product that people didn't like), and a general disdain for the character's quirks and the "creepiness" of the show.
In a strange way, Max Headroom illuminated something very real about our society in a dystopian lens: the simulation of Max, and the simulacra of ideas used to make him highlighted very clearly how unreal our society had become. Is there anything so meaningless and disconnected from reality than a computer-generated image of someone speaking out of a strangely generated neon box world? The disembodied image of Max, himself oversaturated with his nearly omnipresent awareness of culture, forces us (at minimum) on a subconscious level to question the virtuality of our existence.
It is no wonder, then, that Max became an advertising phenomenon. Allying himself with New Coke, ironically, could not have been a more perfect union of death. At the time, Max was everywhere in the media. He was at the height of his popularity, and his put this personality capital on the line for New Coke in an advertisement campaign.
New Coke was doomed before it was ever released. The cultural significance of the original Coca-Cola formula was beyond what anyone could have imagined. When it was announced that Coke was changing its recipe, Coca-Cola Co. received over 400,000 angry calls and letters. Many of these people felt betrayed and a psychologist hired by Coke to talk to angry callers said that it sounded as though they were talking about a "dead family member."
A product, mass-produced for drinking, so important to people's lives that they would feel this loss on the same level of losing a family member? Indeed, Coke had tapped into one of the fundamental problems of the media culture we live in - value and meaning have been co-opted by brands that feed us what they want us to have. The backlash against Coke stemmed from people feeling the loss of value in the symbol of their product. This is backed up by the statistics which show that most people didn't care too much about the difference in taste between Coca-Cola Classic and New Coke. People were upset because the meaning of the product was lost, not because of any tangible differences the utility and pleasure of the product itself.
Max Headroom and New Coke are relics of the past now, which at the time were meant to project us into a new and exciting future. A virtual human? A scientifically improved Coke flavor? Strangely, this futuristic reach has now left these two cultural products in the dust.
Both Max and New Coke demonstrate currently relevant ideas about simulation and simulacra --
1) The more transparent the generation of meaning is with the intent to manipulate people, the more likely they are to resist.
2) Despite the willingness to resist manipulation, advertising has become one of the most successful technologies ever created to accompany the inventions of television and the internet. The reason for this is that there is a void of meaning in our world, and advertising helps to fill that void by pointing us toward products filled with cultural meaning. This is important because the meaning of the product and the product's usefulness need have absolutely no correlation for this to be true.
3) The discomfort of Max's virtuality lead to his death, because people could never quite take him seriously due to his strange hiccups in speech and plastic facial features. The current trend toward using computerization to create a "real" that is more real than real emerges from an understanding that subtle manipulation is much easier than drawing on a conscious suspension of disbelief, rather than the subconscious alteration of pre-existing schema. Humans, at this period of time, are quite ready and willing to be manipulated for the sake of meaning construction, even if the meanings are based on simulacra - a sort of house of cards with no foundation in reality or anything other than a fabricated meaning that came before.
I remember watching Max Headroom as a kid. My mom hated it, it made her uncomfortable. Looking back now, I realize that I liked Max because he challenged me to think about the world I was growing up in. The first time I began to question what being a human actually meant started from thinking about the simulated half-existence of Max.
So how different are we really from Max?
posted by Will at 10:56 AM
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