Assignment 11

 

Assignment 11

Questions about Audience

What does the composer assume the audience knows or believes?

Stein assumes and expects us to know a little bit about a lot. She expects us to be familiar the founders of Apple, the Macintosh personal computer, Apple’s competition, George Orwell’s 1984 novel, an array of different movies, and a little about advertising.

“Titled ‘1984,’ the ad evokes the dystopic George Orwell novel of the same name, with its Big Brother figure ceaselly intoning the slogans of Newspeak.” (Stein 279)

This quote is proof that she expects us to be familiar with George Orwell’s novel, 1984. I know this because she never wrote about the book beforehand. She never wrote about Big Brother, or Winston, or Oceania, or anything. She just made a reference to it and expected us to know what she was pertaining to.

Questions about Purpose

Is the purpose clearly stated or easy to determine? If not, why might the composer have decided not to make the purpose obvious?

According to Stein, she wrote, “The, ‘1984’ Macintosh Ad: Cinematic Icons and Constitutive Rhetoric in the Launch of a New Machine,” to give her audience a better “understanding of the integral role ads play in contributing to and drawing on ideological and cultural discourse.” (Stein 280) She wants to examine how ads borrow from the underlying culture but also change that culture at the same time. That’s the most obvious purpose.

I think her purpose was unclear because she expects her audience to argue against her points and to maybe form new ideas. For all intents and purposes, this whole class revolves around interpreting text, and that’s why she wrote this article the way she did. She expects us to study and interpret her essay as we would any other critical examination academic essay.

Questions about Context

Is the composer respectful of the audience, treating them as intelligent, thoughtful people?

Stein is very respectful of us. She does treat us as intelligent and thoughtful people. If this wasn’t true, this essay would be easier to read. On that note, she wrote this essay, fully expecting us to read it thoroughly, to break it down into little pieces, and in the end, understand her resolve.  

Stein’s decisions to write to us specifically, to make her purpose unclear, and to treat us as thoughtful and intelligent individuals all affected my interpretation of the text. Put simply, all of these choices made reading her essay really difficult to read. And this goes back to the point I was trying to make before. She demands a lot out of us. She expects us to think critically about the subject, be thoughtful and to come to a deeper understanding of the role of advertisements play in today’s culture.