Criticisms of Media February 27, 2008

One of the criticisms Berger talks about in Chapter 5 is how in today’s media, such as reality television, reality is misrepresented. For example, take The Real World. This is not really representative of the actual real world. The program is completely staged; take a bunch of young adults and liquor them up and claim that that’s the “real world?” Also I agree with how violence in the media today effects the consciousness of the audience. Because it is so prevalent, people are becoming more and more desensitized to violence, using it as an answer for problems and having no remorse about it because hey, that’s how everyone solves their problems, it’s shown all over television. Berger also tells how women are degraded through media. This is seen especially through music videos where women are seen as inferior to men, and if you listen to some of the lyrics, they are pretty degrading towards women. Defenders of the media claim that there is no concrete proof for these criticisms, but I believe we have a lot of evidence to back up these criticisms. For example, there have been studies done to show that young children exposed to media containing violence such as video games or action movies grow up using violence as an answer to their problems.

Audiences February 20, 2008

In class we talked about specialized audiences and how it is important in media. What I got out of it was that this concept is very important in marketing products because advertisers need to analyze programs to understand what type of people are more likely to view them in order to target their ads to potential or current users of their product. Using Barbie Doll as an example, advertisers are not going to broadcast their ad on channels like CNN or ESPN. They would advertise it during shows like Lizzie McGuire or during a channel that young girls would be more likely to watch. We talked about how advertisers have a problem advertising their product during commercial since things like TiVo and downloading programs online are becoming increasingly popular. When we were talking about that, it reminded me of the movie, The Truman Show with Jim Carrey. The movie is about a show where the main character, Truman, is unknowingly being taped and broadcasted 24/7 for a TV audience. Because the television show records and broadcasts his life nonstop, with no commercials, it makes money through product placement. In order to market their products, the advertisers would have the characters in the program drinking Folgers coffee for instance and describing the wonders of it through the script. Similarly, in order to solve the TiVo problem, advertisers use product placement as a way of marketing their products.

Orwell Rolls in his Grave…con’t February 11, 2008

After watching the rest of the film, I would first like to say that I find it completely appalling the way the voting incident between Gore and Bush REALLY was. It is ridiculous that one out of eight ballots were voided in the black community and only one out of every two hundred were void in the white community and the way the machines were even set differently. And after the whole incident, nothing was reported through the media, like we were all just supposed to not acknowledge or just forget it even happened. Has the media now just become some sort of brainwashing mechanism in order for the government to gain more power? Since when was it okay that the government and media intertwined? Doesn’t that completely defeat the purpose of a democracy and peoples’ freedom of speech- saying things the way they want them to be said instead of being required to censor the news and manipulate it in a way that appeals to the government?

Orwell rolls in his Grave February 8, 2008

The film we watched in class basically pointed out that now that the media is in the hands of bigger and bigger corporations, the important stories are no longer covered. Comparing Orwell’s 1984 and today’s political power, it’s a little frightening to see a resemblance. It is scary to see how much of the media’s distortions can make over half the population believe something incredibly false…why DID 51% of the nation believe that the one that should be held personally responsible for the attacks on 9/11 was Saddam Hussein? I remember someone in the film saying something along the lines of how this isn’t a democracy anymore but sketches of fascism, and the film makes a shockingly good argument in showing this and brings up interesting but legitimate questions. Why can no one answer the question of why the allegations against Governor Jeb Bush were dropped by CBS after he, himself denied that they were true??? This film kind of makes me think that as the news falls into fewer hands, we are getting more and more detached from reality because of all the media being manipulated and the important stories that are just not even being broad casted. No wonder there is a growing number of unemployed journalists; Now that the government decides what gets broadcasted, what doesn’t get broadcasted, HOW it gets broadcasted, etc, journalists pretty much only have two choices of either pleasing the chamber of commerce through manipulation and censorship or just keeping their mouths shut.

Super Bowl Ads February 6, 2008

Advertisers paid on average about $2.6 million for a 30-second Super Bowl ad this year.   True,  Super Bowl ads are the most entertaining ads of the year; many people only watch the Super Bowl FOR the ads. However, I question how effective they are in really selling their product. Advertisers spend forever coming up with witty ads to gain a spot, and although they make for some great entertainment, sometimes I don’t even remember what the brand was. Some viewers may not even make a connection between the commercial and the product that is being advertised. For example, it would not be very beneficial to FedEx if people were to mistake their commercial for UPS. Even though that commercial was creative and original and was pretty amusing, I don’t think people would remember who was advertising. Even with beer companies, I can’t tell the difference of brands in the commercials except for Budweiser. I think that Budweiser ads do a good job in isolating their brand in their commercials and make it easy to recall as theirs. In some of these other commercials, the brand was merely mentioned, like an afterthought, causing the recollection of the brand to suffer. So I just wonder if advertisers are really getting their money’s worth, paying millions of dollars, but not really getting the full worth of what they thought they paid for.

Semiotic Systems and Human Behavior February 4, 2008

Do semiotic systems have any effect on human behavior? And if we were exposed to different signs, would our lives be different? I definitely think that signs have a huge effect on human behavior. Signs basically make up society and people perceive them in a way which has an effect on how they behave. For example, in today’s American society, skinny models paint the covers of magazines, symbolizing sex appeal and beauty. This in turn affects people’s behavior in wanting to diet, even going to extremities in order to look like these models to gain what is being symbolized. I believe that my life would be absolutely unlike it is now if the signs I were exposed to were different. Signs are different around the world, and dependent on where they live and their culture, people are exposed to diverse signs, leading completely different lives. Even as society evolves through time, signs change, and people live differently. For instance, not as many people smoke as they did back in the days. Before research proved that smoking causes cancer, cigarette companies symbolized their cigarettes the way the Marlboro ad did, such as “manhood,” but as soon as the connection between cancer and cigarettes occurred, the signs changed, and peoples’ general behavior also changed. That being said, if our signs were, for instance, to change from symbolizing a trait that is socially acceptable, to a trait which is socially unacceptable, our behaviors would definitely be greatly affected. So yes, I think that since it is in human nature that people tend to want to possess traits that are socially desirable, it would be inevitable that our lives would change if we were to be exposed to different signs.

Semiotics February 1, 2008

The media in today’s society is extremely beneficial in that it provides us with so much important information in so many different mediums, and it does so quickly. The video we watched in class, however, gave one of many examples of how media can be deceiving. I was a little lost with the concept of how a cow wasn’t a cow and how it pertained to anything, but I finally understand why it is important to understand semiotics in order to filter out the unimportant and even conniving aspects of the media. It’s true, a cow you see online isn’t really a cow, it’s a digital picture of a photograph of a cow. In the same sense, when advertisers use signs to symbolize womanhood or patriotism or something along the lines of that, the product is not actual “womanhood” or actual “patriotism”. However, it is advertised that way so that consumers buy the product to achieve what is signified. But by portraying this kind of symbol, it doesn’t tell the consumer the quality of the product, and they buy into it because of the kind of tricks advertisers use with the use of signs and symbols. In order to not be tricked into buying something or even believing something false, it is important to understand the ways in which the media works and what tricks are used so that you don’t fall victim to it.