Media Blog

https://youtu.be/lpdMEt1YxI4 The Frontline film "Persuaders" highlights the behind-the-scenes operations that go into making successful advertising. It discusses how brands develop their advertisements based on what they think we want and how politicians do the same thing. Using psychographics, a special way of categorizing people based their habits and desires, brands are able to effectively cater to to a certain group of individuals. For example, I recently came across a Prada advertisement on YouTube. I am not entirely clear on what it is trying to say, which is probably its exact intent. The advertisement centers around two fashionably dressed people, one man and one woman. They take turn saying very vague words such as, "bathe, stroll, black coat, suitcase" and other words in Italian as they go about their day in what one can assume is an Italian city or town. They each carry different Prada bags throughout the video. The video is obviously meant to appeal t...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/world/asia/moab-mother-of-all-bombs-afghanistan.html http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/04/13/pentagon-us-dropped-largest-non-nuclear-bomb-in-afghanistan.html Oftentimes, the way that we perceive current events in the world is affected by what sources we choose to read. Though different sources claim to have objective coverage, they often use wording or specific examples that imply one opinion or another. For example, I read two different articles about the "Mother of all  Bombs" dropped by the United States on ISIS' caves in Afghanistan on April 13. One of the articles I chose was from Fox News while the other was from the New York Times. The Fox News article was extremely brief. It mentioned that MOAB was the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal and that it was dropped on ISIS caves in Afghanistan. It gave a quote from Adam Stump, a Pentagon spokesman, saying that the bomb was 11 tons and that this was the first time it ha...

I have a complicated relationship with media. On one hand, I try limit my media consumption throughout my everyday life. But at the same time, I realize that my efforts are largely futile due to the way that media can creep into every aspect of our lives today. I use my phone many times during the day. I use it to connect with my friends mainly through Instagram and Snapchat. Even though my main purpose in using these apps is to communicate with friends, I am inevitably bombarded with advertisements. In the back of my mind, I know that ads on social media are carefully constructed to look candid so that we will be more likely to believe them. I know that despite their vibrant colors and pearly white smiles, these posts are not real. Despite what I know to be true, advertisements on social media still have a way of getting into my head. I guess that the aesthetic of certain advertisements appeals to my sense of perfectionism with their pristine and over edited photos. What makes it wor...