Keeping Up With Atari: Neoliberal Expectations in Early Electronics Advertising

Abstract

During the early 1980s, ad campaigns framed purchasing and using emerging consumer electronics as tools for accessing, what Lauren Berlant called, ‘the good life.’ Computers, video games, VCRs, and cassette players might help consumers cultivate a neoliberal, upwardly mobile, and implicitly white, lifestyle. This paper explores early personal computer and home console video game advertisements as a cultural discourse that framed emerging technology through normative gendered, raced, and classed everyday lifestyles in an American context. The central case study is the early 1980s televisual ad campaign for the Atari 2600 system, featuring the “Have You Played Atari Today?” jingle. The campaign was widely viewed and is representative of contemporaneous marketing approaches. The ad’s allusion to time management both reinforced broader neoliberal paradigms and enacted a gendered slippage between labour and leisure. This paper draws from feminist critical theory approaches and uses textual analysis to understand the ways that electronic advertisements appealed to late capitalist social attitudes.