On the representations side of things, we've also seen a rising tide of commercials that address the subject of globalization. In the early to mid-1990s, notable efforts in this direction included Merrill-Lynch's corporate campaign built around its Asian empire theme; AT&T's global-"China" campaign; and IBM's multi-culture, but one-world "language" ads.

Our initial draft for this section carried the thick title, "The Cartography of Ads: Time, Space and the Collapse of History, Geography, Sociability & Narrative." Here, we began to sketch out an argument that went something like this: 1990s corporate advertising for products ranging from Reebok shoes to AT&T phone services to Merrill-Lynch investments all offered a curious endorsement of both postmodernism and what we refer to as "hypermodernism" -- modernism on steroids and amphetamines. Ad campaign after ad campaign from the early 1990s depicted a 'new global order' whose vaguely utopian aura rested on the structural absence of community, society, and state -- indeed social relations were representationally narrowed down in these depictions to relationships between isolated individuals and the panoramic presence of the Corporation. While stressing a glorious new age of multicultural diversity, these representations banished production relations, and indeed, turned all geographic places into abstracted signifiers. Orange-robed monks and green-eyed tree frogs had become the preferred signifiers in a heavily abstracted advertising geography of global capitalism. In advertising, signifiers of cultural geography are key to identifying geo-location.

Why do advertisers often resort to the distortion of the fisheye lens in order to represent the internal landscape of capitalist work spaces? How does such distortion accurately represent the phenomenology of daily life in a hypermarket society?

Where do landscapes fit in when we begin talking about an era labelled as either hypermodern and postmodern? Do television ads really constitute a place (or a space?) where we might find contemporary landscapes? We contend that television advertising is continuously engaged in the construction and reconstruction of landscapes. These landscapes offer concentrated glimpses of what have come to be known as cultural geographies - snapshots of how we might conceptualize the arrangement of our world.

In order to address these these questions, we begin by examining the 1998 MCI WorldCom campaign which likened the next stage of the telephonically integrated high-speed internet to the completion of the transcontinental railroad over 150 years ago. The MCI WorldCom ad self-consciously presented the a rendering of the contrasting landscapes of two successive stages of western capitalism.