Uncouth Reflections

Paleo Retiree writes:

At my previous place of blogging I often marveled at what I called “nonsense brackets” — the tendency many graphic designers have these days of inserting parenthesis marks or brackets into their work for no grammatical/linguistic reason. (See here and here for examples of my musings.) They do it instead for visual heightening and because, with its overtones of computer code, the move confers coolness on their work.

Fun, if in a dismaying way, to see the trend making its way further into the mainstream. The other day, for instance, I went out to pick up some food and found that Ralphs, a west coast grocery chain, has embraced the trend whole hog.

Hats off, I guess, to the people doing the graphics for Ralphs for succeeding in making what were once edgy tropes seem perky and inane. Such, come to think of it, were probably their marching orders. Middle America likes perky and inane, and if you want to sell to them …

I’ll call attention to four things in the collage above.

1. The nonsense brackets. Was I right or was I right in my hunch that we’d only be seeing more of the damn things?
2. The use of  the “@” sign. Hey, aren’t we up 2 date?
3. The use of highlighter yellow. More about highlighter yellow and its omnipresence in current popular culture in a future posting.
4. The grinning, eager-to-help, beta loser. (That’s not a real person at the store, by the way. It’s a guy in a poster. But the workers in the store really do wear that t-shirt.) Young men today, lost amidst their digital gadgets, eviscerated of their manliness yet apparently happy about their fate. And our popular culture celebrating this state of affairs. Sigh.

I don’t know what to make of this mess except to marvel at how common it’s become for computer-things to be foregrounded in commercial art, and at how for-granted we take this fact. You’ve probably noticed the number of TV ads that imitate/steal-from the iPad with its swipes and its pinching effects, for another example.

As far as I can tell, popular culture these days exists in order to exalt the digital gadgets with which popular culture is now created. Bizarre, and ‘way too self-reflexive and endlessly-recursive for my tastes. But I’m sure I’m missing many things here. What are your theories about what it all signifies?