ABSTRACT
In late 2004, eBay launched a multimedia ad campaign titled “The Power of All of Us.” The campaign’s American TV component included four commercials. One, titled “Toy Boat,” opens with a boy playing with his toy boat at the beach. A textual overlay tells viewers the time is 1972, the place Cape Cod. As the scene dissolves, we see the tide take the toy far out to sea. It sinks to the bottom only to be retrieved decades later as part of the catch of an industrial fishing boat of unspecified Asian origin. A fisherman picks the toy boat from a net full of fish; the next scene shows the boy, now a thirty-something fellow, gazing with wonder at the image of the boat in an eBay listing on-screen. Viewers also see a framed painting of the boat on the wall behind the monitor. A voice-over asks the audience the following questions about memory, its maintenance, and its retrieval: “What if nothing was ever forgotten? What if nothing was ever lost?” Before eBay, all that remained of the boat was its framed representation on a wall. Now, however, via the magical power of eBay-the-virtual-archive, a treasured childhood object is returned to the competent neoliberal subject and, along with it, even more treasured memories and associations from his past. “Toy Boat” asks viewers to associate memory with objects and their retrieval, and to think about the past as essentially a material object that can be reappropriated into the present through the medium of eBay. Because eBay is about exchanging objects, the ad implies that memories not associated with fetishized objects are less valuable than those that are. Value is implicit here, both the psychic needs that the boat’s use value might help fulfill, and the boat’s exchange value within a capitalized flow of goods and memories.
