Media and Advertisement

Hello, readers! My name is Chaidie, and you are reading the first post on my smashing new blog. Today, I am going to be looking at media and advertisement.

My own media consumption typically involves sources of educational enrichment, communication, current events, and entertainment. To give you a snapshot of what that looks like, this is what I found upon tracking my media usage last weekend: I spent (1) several hours reading history books,  (2) an hour listening to lectures on Ancient Greece, (3) about an hour total using text, email, and other forms of communication, (4) half an hour reading the news, and (5) a couple of hours reading enjoyable fiction (P. G. Wodehouse - would recommend). As you can see, I relied more heavily on printed works than on technology for my sources of entertainment and enrichment. While I was sick that weekend, I would typically also consume more school-related media (such as academic articles) on my computer. There was also a large chunk of my media use that involved communicating through my smartphone. One thing that struck me while introspecting on my own media use was that while responding to texts or Facebook messages is something that is expected or taken for granted in the modern age, one has to make an active choice to consume other forms of media. For instance, in order to read a book or a news article, I had to make the active choice to do something I didn't have to, just for the experience and benefits of doing so. This, I believe, is a dilemma that many technology users are faced with today.  

Equally interesting is the apparent lack of choice that we experience when faced with advertisements and commercials. It seems like more and more un-skippable or un-hidable ads are appearing on web pages, YouTube videos, and news sites. However, when I considered ads in my English last week, was able to look more deeply at their underlying structure. 

The first commercial, Dove's Beauty on Your Own Terms we looked at, and the one I found most interesting, was by Dove. The commericial showed several women in their workspaces, at first stating their insecurities and negative things people said about them. Then, the women reject these stereotypes, and say self-affirming things and accept and celebrate their identities. I thought that this was a really interesting commercial, and by watching it and discussing it in class I learned to look at it more critically. While I would originally have associated it with a very pathos-centric argument, considering it alongside my peers allowed me to engage with it in a bit more depth. For instance, it allowed me to analyze how Dove catered to their intended audience (the modern woman) by seeking to empower that audience. I also learned how to look at the more structural and stylistic elements of the ad, such as the set-up of the ad (in the Dove ad, for instance, the transition from negative to positive partway through) and camera angles and music. Something that surprised me was how synchronized the music was with the music in the Dove ad.