Winding down the Semester, We're Halfway There! ^__^

 

A small compilation of the ads I deconstructed :)

Yay! Finals are finally over! :) eh...now the anxiety to see my final grades are kicking in....This semester just flew by! Ah, I feel like we just started sophomore year, but we're done with half of it already! I used to think critical thinking was just a class where you think critically early in the morning, when your brain was still half asleep, but that wasn't the case. I learned all sorts of things from the habits of a critical thinker to the different types of fallacies to the needs and techniques within ads. Towards the end of this course, I enjoyed the media analysis. Maybe it's because media is everywhere around me and it affects the lives of everyone in this "digital nation" (haha remember that?) 

To be honest, I didn't know the Media Blog assignment was over last week. I actually planned out ads and commercials that I wanted to analyze in the future. I might just continue this blog whenever I have time, it's fun seeing the different needs and techniques used to sell a product.

I consume media everyday, every hour, EVERY MINUTE. Well, maybe not every minute, but fairly often. I have a bad habit of having the TV on while doing homework because I just don't like working in silence. Once in awhile when I start paying attention to what's on, I come across a variety of commercials. Funny ones, depressing ones, scary ones, you name it. 

Media has impacted pretty much everyone's life. (unless you live under a rock, haha just kidding) All the documentaries that were shown in Critical Thinking, showed the "behind-the-scenes" of media. In the most recent film, Miss Representation, I came to realize all the truths of women in media. Most women in media are critiqued about their appearance. Like the "Who Wore it Better?" kind of news. I remember in that documentary, the statistic where Nancy Pelosi served in the House of Representatives a certain number of times and some other male representative was in the House of Rep. less than she, but he had like 5 magazine covers.Another thing I found super interesting was the fact that the clothing in Disney movies are just as bad as R-rated movies, but because they're targeted to younger children, everything just seems to be an innocent fairy tale.

In Merchants of Cool, it was scary to see how companies learn the latest trends. Narrow-casting was just fascinatingly creepy to learn. A few days later, I observed the ads that were in the margins of websites I visited and wow they were on products that I was looking at over the weekend! Same thing happened to my mom. I had to borrow her computer and she was on Amazon.com looking for a charger for her phone. I closed the page and when I went to look something up on Youtube, the exact same ad for the charger my mom was looking for popped up! I was like “OMG, that’s narrow-casting!!!”. 

After all these posts about media and the techniques/needs that are used, I learned that the most popular needs was the need for affiliation and the need for attention. This especially appeals to women because they stereotypically are really conscious of their appearance. As for techniques, the most common ones were either wit and humor or possible gestalt. (Some of the commercials I’ve watched have nothing to do with the product that’s being sold…) 

It's been a fun semester and thank you for teaching us about media, Mr. Starace! I feel like this will be the funnest class I'll ever have this year. Hopefully, I can continue deconstructing media in my free time. I will forever remember your comment, from the beginning of this assignment, about the awkward combo of Gmail and Blogspot. LOL that was hilarious! I shall always remember the different components of media and I feel more cautious about products I buy now.

Oh and I found the website for cat bounce! Haha, I'll never forget that either :P Need to release some stress, by seeing cats bouncing around on a screen? Go here!---->http://cat-bounce.com/