Not only did the Macintosh have a personality, established first from Scott's 1984 video and then from it's - his - ability to talk to the audience and tell jokes at the expense of mainframe computers, the Macintosh had one very other important thing: a father. By referring to Steve Jobs as a father figure, the Macintosh reclaimed its body. It moved away from the post-modern idea of a disembodied and hollow computer voice, and reestablished itself as something tangible, something solid, something with a history, and perhaps most importantly, a flesh-and-blood family.
In terms of marketing, this was genius. Playing first to an anti-establishment theme, Apple then turns around and invites anyone who identifies with such themes to join their family. In terms of cultural resonance, embodied computers, and matrixes, this was revolutionary. A speaking, joking computer is incorporated into the cultural context of the era and becomes performative and, one could argue using Katherine Hayles' terminology, embodied. (In How We Became Posthuman, Hayles defines embodiment as "contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment" (196).) While a joke will locate you in place, time and culture, a family - a genealogy - does so even more.
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