Firstly, I like being able to put names to concepts. Before becoming ‘media literate’ I was only able to look at images and advertisements and get certain feelings towards them. Like, “this image makes me feel this way etc. But after this course I can look at all different types of media and understand why they are illiciting such responses from me. Is it propaganda? A postmodern image? Does it take away my agency? Will it influence my commodity self? I feel that having a mastery of the vocabulary greatly increases my understanding and personal filtering of media imagry.
This course has also forced me to think towards the future. By achieving an understanding of media principles and theory’s in the present age, it becomes easier to apply them to a future prediction. How will we advertise 20 years from now? 50 years from now? 100 years from now? Will images still define our lifestyles? Will they still maintain their status as the unnatainable?
Apart from the theory aspect of Media Literacy, I am pleased to have acquired a very basic understanding of digitial media applications. I enjoy having the skills to edit photo’s in photoshop, or to get creative in illustrator and even create and post animations for the web on Flash (after much frustration and headaches of course). No matter what field of work I ultimately end up in, having these general skills can only benefit me in a workplace that is naturally increasing it’s demands for media literate employees.
Glamour, according to Practices of Looking, is a desired state of perfection. Glamour has a powerful presence in images and advertisements because it exemplifies the ideal. It plays on the consumer’s innate desire to acquire a sense of beauty, perfection and more abstractly, happiness. Images of glamour in our society portray beautiful people with beautiful possessions doing beautiful acts in beautiful settings. It is, in reality, an unattainable state however one’s inability to achieve a level of glamour does not seem to hinder him from still striving (through the act of buying the products advertised, etc.).
In the movie, How To Get Ahead in Advertising, the protagonist is a successful advertising executive. He does not see people as individuals, he views them as demographics; as predictable statistics and potential minds ripe for his manipulation. He embodies both sides to glamour throughout the course of the movie. At the beginning, he exemplifies glamour from the media standpoint. We see him living a glamorous lifestyle and we see his attempts at creating a false sense of glamour to sell to the public. However, he soon falls pray to the very principle he uses on a daily basis-he becomes obsessed with achieving a glamorous state for his campaign to sell boil cream. No idea is good enough, no idea is perfect enough, no idea is glamorous enough for him to deem ready to go to market.
I’m not sure if this is ‘too philosophical’ but when I think about the collective desires of our society, I think about our shared concept of ‘wants’. The media would like us to believe that the hero that will save us is our own tendency to acquire more. The characters in television programs we love are wearing clothes we should buy, eating food we should eat and living in houses we should live in. Even when the primary mission is not to sell (like in entertainment programs) there is almost always a secondary level that is playing on our desire to want. How can an individual in a tremulous world find happiness? By buying the biggest television, newest video game system or the fastest car. I don’t mean this to come off as overly cynical but I truly do believe that for better or worse, a universal hero does not exist. Because of this, we are all forced, be it consciously or subconsciously, to buy our way to happiness and a supposed feeling of comfort. Our collective desire to continuously want is part of a vicious self sustaining cycle. We believe that everyone else around us is constantly competing for the greatest collection of material goods, in order to not fall behind we too adopt that collective mindset, unknowingly allowing the cycle to perpetuate. So what will save us from our modern fears? I cannot pretend to have that answer, but what I can pretend to know is that at least superficially, our desire to want can distract us for the time being.
Learning about the person Edward Bernays was a very interesting process for me. I didn’t know whether to praise the man for being a genius or condemn him for penetrating and exploiting the psyche of the American consuming public. Nevertheless, all the information presented in this documentary was completely new to me. I never understood the importance that Freud’s psychoanalytic theories had on the formation of the consumerist society we all know and love. I think it’s impossible not to see Bernays tactics or Freud’s theories in today’s media. Now, more than ever, advertisers are aiming to exploit our implicit desires as human beings. From the car commercial, where a company’s vehicle is being driven against the backdrop of an expansive mountain vista to a clothing company’s add in which their clothes aren’t being modeled to make way for exposing skin, Bernays tactic of selling the meaning beyond the images is in full force amongst today’s society.
