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Rummaging through the shelves of your local computer software source, flipping pages in your trade rag of choice, recurrent themes emerge. Put the POWER of cool new tool XBRAND 3.0 to work for you. TAKE CONTROL of your website / database / career, with built-in SUCCESS processing. Newer faster stronger easier than anything ever before. In the language of fetish and consumer idenfication, software promises purchasers such intangible treats as strength, success, leadership, confidence and control.
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The images employed to convey these qualities are considered visually synonymous -- the handshake, the steely square jaw, smug smiles, even the occassional bulging muscle. The caricatured knight on Norton's Disk Doctor claims you'll save the day, perhaps even that cute confused blonde receptionist-cum-princess with this special tool. Make your multimedia project a movie set and command the screen with the masculine authority of Director (at left). This ubiquitous suited white man-wonder is capable of extraordinary feats, as he shields computers from viruses with SAM, pulls paper from monitors with the aid of Adobe Acrobat, juggles multiple tasks as Web Arranger, triumphs over spreadsheets for Microsoft Works, scales the stairway to heaven into the 4th Dimension. Occassionally his alterego superhero storms on the scene, wielding the pen-as-sword for FreeHand (at left).
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Women surface only occasionally, stranded over in the scanning, monitor and image production corral, where their image is used to illustrate the artistic features of the product. In the lexicon of computing signifiers, women do not represent the computer users, but are rather relegated to the role of photographic model or the object of design. The filmic fragment of choice is the female eye, cropped within the control palette, as if to suggest that the accommodating image (dare I say subjectivity) of "woman" is infinitely tweakable ... and furthermore, through purchasing this product, you'll get to look at pix of hot chicks all day!
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The female eye featured in Photoshop's opening frame is embossed on film, establishing the (female) eye as belonging to the design element, rather than the designer. The painterly impression of the white woman introducing Adobe Illustrator (below) is clearly not the artist. Advertisements and interfaces for scanners present images of women as the benchmark of scanning quality -- like the naked kneeling woman in the Scantistic splash screen or the submerged swimmer, lips caught mid-pucker-kiss, selling the Polaroid SprintScan. And who could forget the topless brunette framed with Live Picture?
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The constant theme that distinguishes the anonymous computer user, independent of such variables as gender, illustration style and Photoshop filters, is faithful adherence to caucasian coloring. White hands of indiscriminate gender abound, pressing buttons, shaking other white hands, displaying client-server solutions, holding the shiny new tool, pointing towards the future, balancing the world on a fingertip. Even on my computer desktop, my libertarian, progressive Power Mac of the people, a small white hand is the icon of function, used to represent everything from QuarkXPress to Eudora to the Find function and sticky notes.
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