October Blog Post

            The concept I have chosen for this month is related to chapter 11, Mediated Culture(s). I wanted to focus more specifically on advertisements and the messages they contain. The reason I chose this is because of the vast number of ads that every person in our culture is inundated with daily. Advertisements are everywhere and we are so used to seeing them everywhere we look that we sometimes don’t consider the social context behind the product. People unconsciously absorb ads and they in turn have an influence on our worldly perspective. They impact what we consider societal norms, they help shape our ideas about gender roles, body image, they often reinforce stereotypes and inadvertently promote things like sexual violence. Often ads are run that just shouldn’t be and while this issue is starting to gain more attention than it has had in the past, it still widely goes unnoticed. 

            I had a professor at a community college years ago who had us do an exercise where she brought hundreds of magazines to class. The magazines were all diverse in type from fashion, to outdoors, to gardening and homecare. She told us to pick 10 out and cut out any articles that we think may have a social message that goes deeper than the product the company was selling. This exercise stuck with me because we found all kinds of crazy ads, particularly in the fashion magazines that pretty clearly promoted things like sexual violence. There was a great example in a 2015 Bloomingdales Christmas ad, where there is a man creepily staring at a woman while she is looking in a different direction smiling and laughing with a caption between them that says, “SPIKE YOUR BESTFRIEND’S EGGNOG WHEN THEY’RE NOT LOOKING”. http://www.bandt.com.au/media/bloomingdales-christmas-ad-accused-of-promoting-date-rape . The ad was withdrawn and an apology statement was issued by the company for unintentionally promoting date rape. This is one of many examples that can be found, and unlike this one that was so obvious, many of these ads get overlooked.

            With ads being so prevalent an unavoidable in our society, it is important that we are aware of the impact they have and the messages they convey. With better understanding we can hold companies more accountable for the content they put out, and we can even use these ads as a learning tool of what not to do. I believe it is important to teach people about the impact media has on our culture because we live in a diverse culture and we should be putting out the right kind of messages to all.