...urban life organized around commodity relations and the television encourages the proliferation of socially disconnected and isolated individuals who have privatized lives. The acceleration of commodities, signs, and people through the circuits of production have contributed to a privatised world of expanding individual freedoms coupled with disorientation boredom, and insecurity." (Goldman: 115)

Younger generations of Americans have grown up fully immersed in the world of television and movies. This has inevitably influenced everything about who we are: our identities, our sense of history, our relations with others, etc. Conventional wisdom states that we are becoming an ever-more individuated society, facilitated to some degree by the presence of television in our lives, yet our response has been to celebrate and rally around the collective television memories of our youth.

We all probably have some recollection of a conversation with someone which turned to the topic of some childhood television show. You both remembered the episode- the moral lesson of the day on the Brady Bunch, or how Scoobie Doo saved the whole gang. These memories have become a large part of our collective conscience, as becomes clear when we see Rosie O'Donnell sing sitcom theme songs with her guests, and watch movies like Reality Bites which portray an image of young, media savvy "Gen Xers" finding common bonds through pop culture media referents.

Advertisers, in their constant search for some way to hail viewers long jaded to their techniques by a lifetime of television watching, have recognized this trend and have appropriated it by linking their products to the

images and theme songs from the shows we all grew up with. Ads like these Chevrolet pieces use the Flinstone and Beverly Hillbilly's families to aim straight towards our nostalgic hearts. That so many of us grew up

watching thse shows gives Chevrolet a huge audience who are drawn into by our own memories. In the same way, "I Dream of Genie" and Wimpy from "Popeye" can be used to sell hamburgers for Burger King. "Blaxploitation" genre movies like "Shaft," which still rerun on cable, are mined to sell Nike and Shaquille O'Niel and even Miller beer.

Proust describes how memory creates consciousness putting together a 'consistent self ' out of surrounding chaos, from the symbolic components of the past. Advertisements rely to a great extent on this property of memory; and since it is impossible for them to invoke the actual, individual past of each of their spectators- that past which goes back to personality- they invoke either an aura of the past, or a common undefined past. (Williamson: 158)

Since a good proportion of what we understand of history and culture has come from the electronic media, we have come to have a very non-linear view of both. History is cut into manageable, bites- sized pieces, and cultural moments are chopped into sound bites. This has given us a great amount of access to details of history which we may not have had otherwise. We are able to see actual footage of, say, Elvis' life, or watch Oliver Stone's interpretation of JFK's death. For the most part, though, these representations are given to us without a real sense of linear context (and, as media representations, these are also obviously widely open to biased interpretation) Advertisers take advantage of the fact that we have had access to history through the media by grabbing from a wide range of historical representations to hail those of us who remember the event, but may not have actually been around for it.

This ad by JCrew, for example, invites us to "capture the spirit" of John F. Kennedy, though it seems clearly directed towards a market not old enough to remember his life.

Because of the access we have had to history through the electronic media, we can now pick from the banks of memory- any time period, any place, any moment, and capture "the essence of it" in the creation of our own personal identities. The person who wears hippie-esque clothing is understood as having sensibilities similar to what we perceive to have been the sensibilities of the original hippies, whereas someone who wears a pink- striped polo shirt is seen as (well, possibly...) embodying "the assured, individual style, spirit of JFK."