(2 Par. RE: ATT) Globalization & the Age of Information Technology (FINAL)

The commercial this post refers to can be found here.

In this ATT commercial, two children (presumably Hansel & Gretel) are portrayed walking down the street of an imaginary city created by ATT. Both children are young and their clothing style seems to be rather out of place in a city such as the one cast by ATT. They are alone, and appear to get lost. The city is portrayed to be more dangerous after they get lost, with a shot of the high rise buildings looming over the children, and a man closing down a shop with bars across the front. A few things should be noted here; (1) these children are quite obviously out of place, most likely from another country; (2) the [foreign] city they are travelling through is portrayed as dangerous, until they look at the GPS on their cell phone (implying that ATT saves the day).

This commercial implies that it is the technology, provided by ATT, that saves these children from ending up horribly lost. There are a couple of different ways this commercial fulfills its aim, namely to sell the idea of ATT to consumers. The first, and most obvious, is the play upon a mother’s fear of losing her child. This ensures that a mother will at least think twice before not buying her younger children cell phones. The second is through the representation of the children as the “loss of innocence” to technology. As more and more technology is reaching younger and younger audiences, one must question how it affects children such as the ones in the commercial. The younger children are when introduced to technology, the more dependent upon it they become. They don’t know another way of living, which is represented in the initial dropping of the bread crumbs to find their way back home. This “other” way of living is quickly dispelled, however, in the consumption of the bread crumbs. Although new technology such as this fuels the increasing globalization of people, less and less people actually know where they are without this technology. This increasing dependency upon technology ensures the continuation of companies such as ATT.