Nineteen Eighty-Four and “1984”: Apple's Use of Dystopian Poetics in iCommodification (2012)
van den Berg, Thijs (Author)
Journal of Literature and Science
Volume: 5, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 98-124
Publication date: 2012
Language: English
On January 22, 1984, in the break of the third quarter of the NFL's seventeenth Super Bowl, Apple Computer Incorporated aired for the first time the now famous 1984 commercial for its new, Macintosh computer.1 Needing a commercial winner and increasingly feeling the pressure of IBM, Apple banked its future on the success of Macintosh and the commercial that introduced it to the public. This article argues that Apple's choice to refer to Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) in order to sell computers was informed by more than a lucky coincidence of dates. Rather, the 1984 commercial was to a large extent prompted by the poetics of dystopian discourse. By engaging with Orwell's classic fiction Apple's advertisement was able to activate paradigms of spatial coherency and subversion that are associated with utopian and dystopian constructions, and so effectively managed the commercial space into which Macintosh could emerge.
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