Dentyne’s new advertising campaign

If you’ve ridden the redline on the MBTA in the past month, you’ll have seen Dentyne’s new advertising campaign. The new campaign,  with the slogan “make face time” is splattered in every frame of advertising space. Look eye level at all and you’ll see picture after picture of happy couples(possibly aryan), friends(multiracial friends!), “making face time”.

It’s the scariest thing I’ve seen all year.

All the ads focus use the rhetoric of technology to describe age old social interactions. Super-imposed on a picture of two couples is the phrase “The first instant message”. Above two interracial friends hugging, is the familiar facebook message — “Friend Request Accepted”. The idea, as Dentyne states above two kissing lovers(heterosexual) is to reconnect with the world: “power down. log off. unplug. have mercy on your thumbs. browse the world wide something else. send some not so instant messages. undo. hit cancel. be together. make face time”

The campaign imagines a culture, and presumes a society, where people are permanently networked to mediums destructive of meaningful social interactions (hugs, kisses, love). The campaign proposes as a solution, to suddenly “unplug” and buy lots of gum. Instead of alienation via substitutive human interactions(such as ims, voicemails), Dentyne proposes commodity fetishism. “Buy gum! For it will make you loved”

How can people be bamboozled by this shit?

(Dentyne tastes bad too!)

Math Notes

1027notes

From Math 122. I couldn’t read my hand writing, and I wanted to try to learn commutative diagrams. So I typed it up.

There’s not very much commutative diagrams.

Awesome things I found today:

The Burj Dubai tower, as of september 1st 2008, is the tallest structure in the world. The only Kablaam I didn’t hate: Prometheus and Bob.

I wrote this for the Harvard Crimson

On Tuesday Nights, those damn Problem Set Nights
Meghan T. Purdy in Lowell, Megan T. Purdy within my sights
And Lo! My melancholy world is brighter
Meghan T. Purdy, you are like a fire fighter
Too bad you weren’t there by ABP
That fire would’ve whimpered to see –
You in your glorious attire
Ready to conquer any fire (or photograph)
With one hand you curve color balance right
A green face, a blurry leg, things that might give small children fright
With the other you stand tall
Overcoming natural disaster with nary any effort at all
Meghan T. Purdy: ubermensch
Megan T. Purdy: photo bench

Forgive me!

Barthe – Death of the Author

“Having buried the Author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as according to the pathetic view of his predecessors, that this hand is too slow for his thought or passion and that consequently, making a law of necessity, he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely ‘polish’ his form. For him, on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin — or which, at least, has no hter origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins”( Barthe, 146) Image, Music, Text. “The Death of the Author”

After the death of the author, what is the author to do? After man has dissevered reading from reading the author, how does the author express himself?

“the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred”

Is this writing for the aesthetics of writing?