Shorthand Seeing

- The Triumph of Recognition over Cognition

I picked up a case of Coke for Thanksgiving at my local Costco. At least, I told my husband to do so because it was too heavy for me to lift. I left him and went to get some sparkling apple cider.Back at the homestead, packing away the groceries, I spotted a case of the completely wrong Coke on the kitchen floor. I laid into my husband, accusing him of passive-agressive warfare, blindness, carelessness or some combination of these. He shot me a dirty look, and accused me of illiteracy.

It turns out The Coca Cola Company had seen fit to change the packaging of Classic Coke from red to white for the holiday season. The problem is - the white can with silver polar bears is dizzyingly similar to the usual silver and white packaging for Diet Coke.

Thus, I, a college educated and somewhat intelligent person came to realize I had joined the ranks of uneducatable consumers: a super-conditioned pack of Pavlovian dogs. We weren't reading, we were relying on color and the recognition of a familiar graphic pattern that only happens to sell... er, spell something. Yes, color and pattern had trumped reading and my husband was right - I might as well have been illiterate.

My husband was not fooled, neither was my son, but neither is as avid a Coke drinker as I am. (Yes, I have imbibed after abstaining for a while.) It's no suprise that the more familiar we are with something, the less attention we pay to it. For the things we use the most, the places we visit the most, the people we see the most - we are (for the most part) only marginally present, only marginally attentive. We are everywhere else it seems - our attention pixelated and scattered; or perhaps we are nowhere at all.

For regular Coke consumers, uneasiness and outright suspicion have reigned since the release of Christmas Coke. The 'White Coke' didn't taste right, people were distressed and disoriented, having flashbacks to the time Coke changed its formula to achieve a taste more like Pepsi. After a great hue and cry, The Coca Cola Company announced plans to retract its painfully short holiday campaign and will roll out Classic Coke in proper red cans sometime soon.

Going the wacky way of previous commercial blunders, the 'White Coke' can seems set to become a collector's item. I will surely keep one as a reminder to collect myself and truly look.