I think that first and foremost the best thing that I learned all semester in this course is that media is all around us in many different forms. I never realized just how big of a role media plays in everyone’s lives and now I can appreciate it a lot more than I used to. I am a Communications minor and I’ve taken courses in Communications before, but none of them made me appreciate all the different types of media as this course has. From the movies that I watch to the radio I listen to on the way to work during the summer, media encompasses my life and everything that I do.
Another concept that I really enjoyed learning about this semester has been the way that media effects our emotions. This relates to the material we learned about Sigmund Freud and how different types of media manipulate your emotions in order to make us act in different ways. I’ve gone over this topic before (being an advertising minor) but I never realized that even governments try to use this type of concept every now and then such as the Nazi Party in their use of propoganda. I think the most important thing that I learned from this part of the course is to not get so absorbed by what I’m seeing all the time and to think about what the message is trying to do to make me act in a certain way. Even though I might end up having a career in this very same field, I have to be aware of these types of maniuplative forces for myself, because after all I will be a consumer as well. This kind of reminds me of the movie that we watched in class called “How to Get Ahead in Advertising,” which I also enjoyed very much.
Finally, I think my favorite part about this course was the different applications that I learned to use ranging from Illustrator to Flash. These are programs that are used everyday across many media and are also very useful tools to know how to use for many different reasons. I now know how many animations are created whereas before I always wondered how they were made. I also now can appreciate the differences between programs such as Illustrator and Photoshop because of the different things that each has to offer. Before this course I would have always used Photoshop if I hadn’t known that Illustrator is a much better option when it comes to creating the copy of a project. I create advertisements for my job during the summer so I can now expand on the different applications that I use. I enjoyed all of the different projects that we did throughout the course of the semester and each of them taught me something else about things that occur everyday in our lives. Thanks for everything you taught us and have a great summer!
After seeing the first half of the film today and reading about glamour in the text, I noticed that the idea of glamour played a big role in this movie. The main character was an advertiser and eventually broke down after he realized how he was manipulating the minds of millions of people by creating the “glamour” advertisements that he had been creating his whole career. Even if he didn’t believe that the product worked, he would create these ads that made people feel dissatisfied with their lifestyles/appearances/relationships etc. in order to sell more of the products that he was advertising. This is essentially what glamour is defined as in the text. A specific example is when he was thinking of ideas for an advertisement for the pimple cream that he had to create and he was speaking out loud to himself. One of the ideas that he had was getting someone famous to say that the cream is the best cream out there and he didn’t even know it was called when he was enacting the vision that he had out loud. The reason why this works is because the celebrity that he would get to stand behind this product was there just for the glamour aspect of the advertisement even though they most likely didn’t even know what the product was. He would have used a celebrity to represent the product just to build brand equity and make other “normal” people want to use it to be more like the celebrity.
The uses for a brick (aside from building a wall):
- Weapon
- Weight (to hold something down)
- Can be used to stop a wheel from rolling
- A symbol of strength
- Something to carve/write something on
