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 From Now On
The Educational Technology Journal
 Vol 10|No 8|May|2001

Please feel free to e-mail this article to a friend, a principal,
a parent, a colleague, a teacher librarian, a college
professor, a poet, a magician, a vendor, an artist, a juggler, a
student, a news reporter or anyone you think might enjoy it.

I am my office?
I am everywhere?

by Jamie McKenzie
About the Author

This article is based on a speech presented at ASTE (Alaska Society for Technology in Education) in April of 2001. It is an interactive article combining a photo essay with discussion questions for the reader to ponder.

The article explores the potential impact upon young people of various "digital" ad campaigns that started to appear on TV, in magazines, along the hallways of airports, in the hallways of schools and on the screens of school computers.

Lifestyle marketing carries strong messages. See for yourself by analyzing the messages that might be expressed by the following slides, all of which were fabricated by the author to simulate a series of ads he found along the corridors of SEATAC Airport.

One series of hallway ads showed very cool Dot Com types under the slogan, "I am my office." The other series showed a very similar group in many different settings under the slogan, "I am every where."

Column A
Column B
Column C
Activity One

Open the slides in Column A and consider the message. What is this company selling? What values are implicit? How do these slides make you feel?
Activity Two

Open the slides in Column B and consider the message. How do these slides make you feel? Did the substitution of children for adults change your response? How?
Activity Three

Open slide 19 and discuss whether or not schools need to be careful about wolves in sheepskin.
Activity Four

Open the other slides in Column C and consider the messages implicit in such a campaign. How do you feel about these messages?
Activity Five

Media literacy engages students in learning how to see through the subliminal messages and distortions of advertisers and marketing folks along with propagandists and pundits. How could you use these images with students to launch a lesson on media literacy? How could you create your own lesson from an ad series? How could you ask students to make their own slide show exploring these issues?

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Credits: The photographs of people using phones in airports were shot by Jamie McKenzie. Pictures of international young people are from Art Explosion 40,000 by Nova Development Corp. Other images are from CD-ROM collections by Photodisc and PhotoSphere.
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