Selfe's Essay Summery

Our group focused on the second narrative of Selfe’s Essay, “The Land of Equal Opportunity”, and “The Land of Difference”. To me, The Land of Equal Opportunity is, in a way, what people believe the internet should be, and The Land of Difference represents what the internet is. Selfe makes several claims in the second narrative, one that I thought highlighted all the rest was, “This landscape, Americans like to believe, is open to everybody-male and female, regardless of color, class, or connection. It is, in fact, at some level, a romantic re-creation of the American Story…” This quote makes a connection with Robert Scholes’s American myth, in fact I would be so bold to say that it is an extension or a facet of that idea. The American dream covers a wide set of ideals about what America is, and how life should be lived in America. The Internet seems to be a takeoff of the idea that America is also the Land of Opportunity, and that since America is associated with freedom, so is the internet. However, the sad reality is that neither America nor the internet could be considered the Land of Equal Opportunity.

After the introduction of the land of equal opportunity, the article begins to talk about American commercials, and how they focus on using those “American Myths” to sell their product, while they are actually saying very little in the process. The American Myth does most of the talking in that the reader or viewer is expected to have foreknowledge of our culture that has been dubbed our “cultural memory”, and can easily piece most American myths together. This is illustrated best by when Selfe claims “…cultural memory is a potent one for Americans, and these ads resonate with the values that we remember as characterizing that golden time”. This furthers that there is a traditional line of thinking in America that we call the American dream, and that that dream took place in the Golden time. The golden time, to me, represents not a specific time that we could put a date on, but a time from each of our pasts that we remember fondly, such as our childhood when nothing went wrong. During this time is when we learned of the American dream, and there were significantly less problems that we had to deal with, perhaps not because they weren’t there, but because we didn’t have to deal with them.