英语专业毕业论文样例.docVIP

英语专业毕业论文样例 Preparing for the Information Age—An Analysis of ATT Advertising In the last hundred years, technology has pushed us through two eras (agricultural and industrial) and propelled us into a third ( the information) age with such dazzling speed that we often find it difficult to explain what has happened to us.1 We see the advance of this technology as a mixed blessing—as a cold, impersonal force that has taken control of our lives and as an exciting, liberating creation that has expanded and enriched our lives. Perhaps the most effective way to explain our ambivalent attitudes toward technological progress is to study the way one corporation, American Telephone and Telegraph, has used advertising to create and exploit our need for a personal relationship with an impersonal system. On March 10, 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell first transmitted the human voice over a couple of wires, he faced the same problem that every inventor faces—how to sell his product to the public. His first task was to demonstrate that his invention really worked, and he could find no better place to display his product than the large “sales conference” that was held in Philadelphia the same year, the Centennial Exhibition.2 Bell published his first ad for the telephone the following year, encouraging people to come to Old St. John’s Church in New York to examine the “speaking and singing telephone.”3 These early exhibitions seemed to carry two messages: you can see a new invention work and you can use it for your own pleasure—to hear the voice of someone you recognize at the other end of the line. Once people realized that Bell’s telephone worked, they had to be convinced that it could become a dependable product, superior to its new competitors and to other forms of communication. In these early days the challenge was to develop a reliable telephone network for an essentially rural population that had learned to trust the letters delivered by personable mail carriers. From the pe