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F ³: The IKEA World Tour

 



The truth is: it tickled my brain. It’s visually creative, full of word play, and just a little bit…naughty. 

It’s an IKEA advert. It’s one minute and forty seconds long. You have time.


“Get Cheras to IKEA Cheras” IKEA Malaysia, 2016


This was the ‘gateway’ video, as it were, that prompted me to search YouTube for all the short IKEA videos I could find. Was I looking for more twerking? Not necessarily. Whimsy? Absolutely.

It turns out that I was in for a bigger adventure than I had anticipated. IKEA operates more than five hundred stores which are located in sixty countries and three territories.  A deep dive into their adverts took me around the world. Different races, ethnicities, cultural celebrations, housing options, climates, family structures. 

I went for the cute adverts. I was immersed in cultural diversity.

One of the the things that annoys me about YouTube is its mathematical commitment to keep offering me a narrow range of things that it thinks I want. No, let’s call that mathematical rigidity. I can go whole weeks without seeing any content that isn’t white, white, white. This is not because I want it that way. YouTube makes it extremely difficult to break that algorithm.

It is possible to make a concerted effort to change this. I have had limited success. As an example: I enjoy craft content. I decided to click only on craft videos by non-white creators to see what would happen. It took two days before YouTube started suggested similar content. And, as soon as I stopped clicking on that content as though it were my full-time job: it disappeared.

Back to IKEA. 

I’m not sure I can adequately express how refreshing it was to experience these little advertising mini-worlds that did not focus on white American culture. It reminded me of Thornton Wilder’s Julia Gibbs, who yearns to see the world beyond Grover’s Corners.

Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.

- - Our Town, Thornton Wilder 

And another thing. It doesn’t take long to notice something about the way that many people live throughout the world that differs greatly from what we are always being told is the ideal. It has to do with density. 

All over the world people are living in apartments. Not just young couples or lonely retirees. Entire families. Extended families. Over and over, IKEA ads show the perfectly normal lives of people doing all the familiar activities of daily life in cultures where density is the norm. Life is not necessarily perfect for them. The adverts show the challenges of small spaces and even depict the efforts necessary to get a large furniture delivery to a high floor in an apartment building. 

Yes, these are adverts and selling products is the goal. So I suspect they show us a world that is generally rosier than reality. But the truth is that density is not the work of the devil that American suburbanites keep railing that it is. 

And the world is, and I hesitate to put it this way, wildly diverse in a perfectly normal and often joyous way. Yet here we are in Howard County worrying about whether we ought to let our schools make space for “those other religious holidays..”

We are so deeply sheltered from reality. We don’t need to be. But we are surrounded by structures that exclude anything that looks different and then tell us that that is reality. All of this serves the goals of people who want us to be ignorant and to fear others.









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