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					The Professor
			3.21.05
		RadioShack Hates Your Family I don’t have children (yet), so I can’t claim an abundance of authority on the subject of family vacations. I do, however, enjoy musing on the role of technology in today’s world, and that’s why I was struck by a recent commercial by RadioShack. The ad opens with a shot of a family in a minivan, apparently on their way to their vacation destination in Somewhere, America. Decked out in an ensemble of pseudo-Swiss design, mom, dad, and the kids in back are entertaining themselves with a good round of call-back yodeling and folk-singing. They seem to be enjoying themselves. Next shot: an average family (identified in the voiceover as emblematic of “the rest of us”), slouched quietly in their minivan, each staring in different directions while dad bears down on the road to Vacation, USA. They are clearly not in a vacationing mood. The problem is that they’re bored. Apparently, they are bereft of anything to talk about, or at least they aren’t interested in sharing their thoughts with their minivan-mates. By the looks on their faces, one might even assume that they are not thinking of anything. One might be forgiven for wondering whether they’re capable of thought at all. For the cognitively comatose, however, there is a solution: buying electronics from Radio Shack. iPods, DVD players, GameBoys, among others. In the next scene, we bear witness to family #2 on in the throes of its spending spree for everything-you-need-for-your-next-road-trip, followed immediately by a scene transformed from a lonely (though not alone) trip down the highway into a veritable destination itself. It’s the only way to travel, unless of course “you’re into yodeling”, a reference to the Family Schweiz from car number one. Well, what if I’m into yodeling? From the back of the room, I can hear someone shouting “then stay out of RadioShack!” I will, but then that’s clearly not the effect the company is trying to have on my consumer habits. It wants me in the store, buying all of the technological necessities that it presents me in its commercial. And in order to convince me that I should be buying into its message (and buying its goods along the way), it simultaneously has to persuade me that I shouldn’t be into yodeling. And that’s just bullshit. Let me be clear: Singing folk-tunes is certainly an odd pastime, especially when you’re cruising Route 54 dressed like Clan Ricola. But it’s really just an exaggeration of a lot of activities that families engage in all of the time: joking, arguing, or conversing. Of all the things that keep families knit tightly together, interaction is perhaps the most effective and consequential over time. It distinguishes families from groups of strangers. But to get you to buy $1,000 in electronic goodies, RadioShack wants you to think that all of that’s just silly. Watch a video. Listen to music. Heck, with a laptop you could even work on the taxes. It’s practically an invitation to social isolation. And, before you dismiss this as an overstatement of the case, be sure to watch the ad first: Once equipped, the members of family #2 might be enjoying themselves, but they’re enjoying themselves by themselves. RadioShack gets the role of technology in advancing the human condition exactly wrong. Unfortunately, their confusion leads them to disparage about the only people in the world that we hope will stay right.
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