What We Market

It's too bad we had to get out of class right at the end of Connelly-Anne's presentation because I think a lot was said that could have taken up a whole other class period. Though the correlation of the presentations wasn't planned, they did end up strenthening each other. CA focused on the advertising we read, while Dana examined the advertising we see on television; interestingly, both forms of media use the same principles: appeal to the deepest inborn urges within a human being and the product will sell.

CA and Dana did a good job of showing how much we've been desensitized, more than anything - having advertisement after advertisement saying the same thing (but with a different product) demonstrated how much we see and don't realize. Personally, I don't notice the problem as much because I don't ever watch tv, and since I'm broke and have no reason to, I don't subscribe to magazines. I eat rice and beans until I graduate - seriously. But the truth is that, even though I'm not exposed to that form of media, I still see it on billboards, on internet pop-ups. I agree, it's a terrible problem.

But what do we do about it? It really is a serious problem - and though the media is not directly responsible for the rapes, murders and alcoholism running rampant (and it really is, compared with other developed countries) here, it does feed it. Where do we say that an advertiser doesn't have the right to show certain images or to use certain words? Where does freedom of speech end and human decency step in?

As I said earlier, I spent a semester in Italy last spring - but before that, my parents lived there for two years and just returned this summer. My dad told me that he'd grown so used to the Italian way of doing news that he was shocked to return home and see shootings on the news every night. Many news shows in Italy are nothing more than a guy on camera, reading out loud. My dad wasn't prepared to face the violence he'd unknowningly been numb to before. In America world news is covered - but our news stations talk mostly about random acts of human rights violations and, if we're honest about it, they do it because we watch it and we're entertained. There are blitz-news segments that share in 90 seconds what happened that day - in all the world. And then the rest of the time is spent staring into our own bellybuttons.

And there I've gone ranting. But here's what I'm implying by all of that. In America we are far removed from the conflicts of other nations, geographically. We're powerful, and the world knows that. And we know that. Our media can afford to focus on what it does, because really a lot can happen in the world and we'll not be affected that much, or at all. In European countries, if there's a problem in Romania, you can bet every surrounding country will know about it because they'll have to deal with the issue of refugees. What is so dangerous about the media is that it alarms us about the wrong things (that our neighbors will shoot us) and disalarms us about what we should be concerned with (like how we behave in international circles - and how we treat countries that will one day be more powerful than we are). What to do about it? First, stop watching it...or reading it. Second, write to news companies, and get lots of other people to write. Third, become a newscaster or advertiser yourself and work from the inside out.