英语专业毕业论文样例.doc

英语专业毕业论文样例
Preparing for the Information Age—An Analysis of AT&T Advertising
In the last hundred years, technology has pushed us through two eras (agricultural and industrial) and propelled us into a third ( the information) age with such dazzling speed that we often find it difficult to explain what has happened to us.1 We see the advance of this technology as a mixed blessing—as a cold, impersonal force that has taken control of our lives and as an exciting, liberating creation that has expanded and enriched our lives. Perhaps the most effective way to explain our ambivalent attitudes toward technological progress is to study the way one corporation, American Telephone and Telegraph, has used advertising to create and exploit our need for a personal relationship with an impersonal system.
On March 10, 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell first transmitted the human voice over a couple of wires, he faced the same problem that every inventor faces—how to sell his product to the public. His first task was to demonstrate that his invention really worked, and he could find no better place to display his product than the large “sales conference” that was held in Philadelphia the same year, the Centennial Exhibition.2 Bell published his first ad for the telephone the following year, encouraging people to come to Old St. John’s Church in New York to examine the “speaking and singing telephone.”3 These early exhibitions seemed to carry two messages: you can see a new invention work and you can use it for your own pleasure—to hear the voice of someone you recognize at the other end of the line.
Once people realized that Bell’s telephone worked, they had to be convinced that it could become a dependable product, superior to its new competitors and to other forms of communication. In these early days the challenge was to develop a reliable telephone network for an essentially rural population that had learned to trust the letters delivered by personable mail carriers. From the perspective of the isolated and self-reliant family farm, advertisements for technological inventions such as the telephone were identified with life in the city. But as technological advances and organizational developments allowed Bell’s invention to evolve into the Ball system and eventually into the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, the corporation’s advertisements soon were able to proclaim that telephone service was available to everyone. An 1890s ad assures potential consumers that “the mail is quick, the telegraph is quicker, but tong distance telephone is instantaneous. You don’t have to wait for an answer.”4
By the turn of the century, more and more wires were strung across rows of crops and down dirt roads connecting country to city. In fact, “the increase in the number of rural phones between 1902 and 1907 was truly phenomenal—from 260,000 to 1,465,000 or 49 percent.”5 This high demand suggested that farmers did not perceive telephones as the intrusion of an impersonal technology into their homes, but as the extension of their personal relationships into a new community, because most rural phones created a new network of friends and a new form of entertainment.
Another factor that helped personalize this new technology was the operator. Since most rural customers made their calls through a switch board, they soon transformed the central operator into a community heroine.6
By the 1920s the phone had become a commonplace in most American homes. The advertisements created by Bell’s ad agency (N. W. Ayer) for magazines such as Colliers described the good intentions and social benefits of the telephone in “friendly-folksy, all-is-well themes.”7 The industrial revolution, which had begun in the late nineteenth century, had reached its first boom period, luring more and more apple-cheeked youngsters to the thriving factories in the city. The 1920s census confirmed the effect of this social change: for the first time in the nation’s history more Americans lived in urban areas than in rural areas.8
In a sense, telephone advertising not only accelerated this change by encouraging communication between country and city, but also created the psychological attitudes that helped shape industrial America. In his comprehensive study, Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks points out that the telephone (and certainly the advertising that lauded its innovations) created “a new habit of mind—a habit of tenseness and alertness, of demanding and expecting immediate results.”9
This tension between the personal society established by a familiar technology and the impersonal world created by a new technology is certainly apparent in AT&T’s attempt to convert party lines to private lines and the central switch board to the direct dial system.
An advertisement from the early 1930s, “the Dial Telephone...how it works”, symbolizes AT&T’s desire to prepare its anxious customers for one of these technological innovations.10
AT&T was forced into a period of rapid change during the forties. Not surprisingly much of its technological energy went into the war effort. In the 1942 Annual Report, Chairman of the Board Walter Clifford, Jr. stressed a theme that was to highlight much of AT&T's advertising during this period: “The science underlying electrical communication is at the heart of modern war.”11 Not only did the telephone prove crucial to planning military campaigns abroad, but it also proved essential to the nation’s civil defense. Patriotic ads assured Americans that AT&T was developing a highly advanced communications technology to preserve their personal freedom and livelihood.
When the war ended, AT&T, like most American corporations, turned its mobilized industrial power on the newly affluent American consumer. After years of scrimping and sacrificing, Americans were ready to invest their resources in a new generation of gadgets, from air conditioners to television sets. The telephone, which during the war had provided an emergency connection for many families, was at the top of the shopping list. In 1953, AT&T reported that it had installed over 19 million phones since the war and was currently trying to fill a million requests for private lines.12
In this new age of affluence, AT&T decided to change the thrust of its advertising from explaining the benefits of one telephone to extolling the value of extension telephones. The basic telephone, now considered a domestic necessity, could be multiplied throughout the household, fulfilling each family member’s need for personal access to communications technology. In a 1960s ad, AT&T suggests that extension telephones make it possible for homes to be “custom planned (by you) for comfortable living.”13 The copy reminds readers that the telephone dominates their lives—helping them plan social engagement, shop for goods and services, keep in touch with family and friends. The argument seems unassailable: “Because the telephone is so useful to everyone, extension phones should be handy throughout your home, in locations to fit your family needs.”
The more AT&T created and exploited consumer desire for status, the more it had to personalize its technology to satisfy individual tastes. As Alvin Toffler points out,

The mass market has split into ever-multiplying, ever-changing sets of mini markets that demand a continually expanding range of options, models, types, sizes, colors, and customizations. Bell telephone, which had once hoped to put the same black telephone in every American home—and very nearly succeeded—now manufactures some one thousand combinations or permutations of telephone equipment from pink, green, or white phones to phones for the blind, phones for people who have lost the use of their larynx, and explosive proof phones for construction sites.14

Although this catalogue suggests that AT&T was preoccupied with selling hardware, the corporation was actually moving toward Toffler’s prediction that “once a techno-society reaches a certain stage of industrial development, it begins to shift energies into the production of services, as distinct from goods.”15 During the early seventies, inventions such as the micro-chip, computer switching systems, and orbiting satellites finally became part of the total AT&T system, making it possible for customers to make inexpensive direct dial long distance calls within the United States and to other countries throughout the world.16 This global service prompted AT&T to launch a vigorous advertising campaign (especially on television) encouraging its customers to use this new technology.
The “Reach Out and Touch” advertising campaign epitomizes AT&T’s effort to create and exploit its customers’ need for a personal relationship with an impersonal system. Post-war Americans were not only affluent, they were mobile, moving their households every five years.17 As members of the family scattered across the country, they needed some method to maintain personal contact with one another. But long distance calling had always been reserved for special occasions. The cost accountants at the corporation referred to it as a “discretionary purchase.”18 No customer has to make a long distance call. To encourage such calling on a regular basis, AT&T had to convince people that they were purchasing a service that would enrich their lives.
The real motive for the campaign was more likely AT&T’s recognition of a new technological era—an era in which services rather than products were going to have to carry “more and more of the revenue burden in the system.”19
In 1982, AT&T announced that it had reached a “turning point” in its history.20 On the one side, the corporation faced increasing competition “in markets that in the past were, for all practical purposes, virtually ours alone.”21 On the other side, it was faced with a court order to divest itself of its local companies and form a new AT&T. For the first time, the corporation had to create a new personality to manage the technology it had created.
As it assessed the situation, AT&T realized that the information age had come of age:
Today, about half the workers in the United States are engaged in generating, gathering or otherwise handling information. And they are doing it with increasingly modern technology—from hand-held or desk-top computers to advanced information systems that not only process business data but actually control business processes.22
AT&T felt confident that it could be a leader in this new era because it had created most of the technology that had brought it into being.23 But as this complex of new systems began to bombard and penetrate the personal lives of every American, it evoked the traditional ambivalence about technology: were we eager citizens of the information age or anxious victims of information overload?
In 1983, AT&T tried to answer this question by announcing its newly fashioned corporate identity while at the same time reaffirming its old fashioned relationship with its customers. A typical ad suggests that the telephone is about to become “your gateway to tomorrow.”24 The art work conveys all the mystery and excitement of a new age. The cradle of a touch-tone phone (presented in the image of a Star Wars launching platform) sits at the bottom of the page while a vast horizon stretches to the top of the page. The relative proportions of the two images suggest that the telephone (barely recognizable as a phone) will become less important than the incredible array of new services it will provide.
The copy in the ad continues to emphasize the “dramatic and exciting changes” that are about to take place but it follows the theme of earlier AT&T advertising by reassuring its readers that these changes will be both practical and manageable. Every activity—managing your household, arranging your entertainment, operating your business, escaping emergencies—can be controlled by your familiar telephone
The copy concludes by acknowledging that to bring about these changes, the telephone company will have to change. As Sonny Kleinfield, author of The Biggest Company on Earth, predicted in 1981, “it is probable in the long run—that the telephone will no longer be called the telephone. And so the name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company will become a misnomer (the telegraph portion is already a misnomer) and it, too, will undoubtedly be changed in time to something like the American communications company.”25
Although the exact character of the information age may still be as vague as the horizon beyond the phone cradle, AT&T wants to assure its customers that this new technology will liberate rather than overwhelm them. At the conclusion of the ad, AT&T invites customers to call a toll-free number to “talk about what’s happening today to make a new tomorrow”. The “Let’s Talk” number does not connect callers with an impersonal recorded message, but a personable operator reminiscent of that heroic operator from rural folklore. Perhaps there is no better way to prepare for the information age than to talk about this ominous blessing with an intelligent and vigilant operator who can help “you understand what’s going on. What it all means to you.”

Notes

1. Alvin Toffler. The Third Wave. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1980. p. 26.
2. Daniel Boorstin. The Americans: The Democratic Experience. New York: Random House, 1973. pp. 390-91.
3. John Brooks. Telephone: The First Hundred Years. New York: Harper and Row, 1976, plate 16.
4. Brooks. plate 30.
5. Brooks. p. 116.
6. Brooks. p. 117.
7. Sonny Kleinfield. The Biggest Company on Earth: A Profile of AT&T. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981. pp. 149-50.
8. Roderick Nash. The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917-1930. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1970. p. 78.
9. Brooks, pp. 117-18.
10. American Telephone and Telegraph Company. “Dial Telephone...How It Works”. American Boy, December 1931.
11. American Telephone and Telegraph Company. 1942 Annual Report. New York: American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1953. p. 6.
12. American Telephone and Telegraph Company. 1953 Annual Report. New York: American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1953. p. 6.
13. American Telephone and Telegraph Company. “Home-side Telephone Convenience”. The New Yorker, 26 March 1960.
14. Toffler. p. 243.
15. Alvin Toffler. Future Shock. Random House, 1970. p. 221.
16. Kleinfield. p. 301.
17. Toffler. Future Shock. p. 78.
18. Michael J. Aden. “Onward and Upward with the Arts: Thirty Seconds”. The New Yorker, 15 October,1979. p. 99.
19. Aden. p. 100.
20. American Telephone and Telegraph Company. 1982 Annual Report. New York: American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1982. p. 3.
21. 1982 Annual Report. p. 1.
22. 1982 Annual Report. p. 6.
23. 1982 Annual Report. p. 6.
24. American Telephone and Telegraph Company. “Your Gateway to Tomorrow”. Money, March 1983.
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