I find that watching TV commercials provides me with lots of profound material for an anthropological study of everyday, popular culture. Take for example this ad that's been running on TV lately:
As we studied in class, the medium is the message - in this ad, while the "mom" tries to recreate a family "nature could never" give her, she's using technology (Windows 7) to erase from her family's picture other pieces of technology: the cell phone, video game controller, etc. Thus, this ad could be seen to be giving us the message that technology is the cause of, and the solution to, life's problems (C.F. Homer Simpson saying the same thing about alcohol in an episode of The Simpsons).
Projecting a Zizekian analysis on this ad, it would seem that "The Cloud" is the realm of the Symbolic wherein the family's Real faces can be converted to ones that are more suitable for Symbolic reality - where the children are not off in their own world but sitting smiley-faced for the camera. However, this is done via photo manipulation as The Real keeps disrupting the idyllic family picture the mom wants to share with the world (via more technology) so that she won't be "ridiculed" in her social network... even though it can be easily presumed that just about everyone has been in such "ridicule worthy" photos. This ad (like so many others) plays on our need to constantly prop up our symbolic reality and hide, ignore or photoshop out all those objets petit a around us, and it seems to both feed on, and cultivate, the viewers' desire to suppress, deny or manage the chaos of the Real.
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