Chapter 11: Advertising
I enjoyed reading this chapter a lot because I am an Advertising major and I learned a lot more about advertising after reading this. However, I still have a love/hate relationship with Advertising. I wanted to pursue art direction as a career because I think it's exciting to make creative and clever advertisements to inform people and sell products, but advertising is such a powerful and scary form of medium that I'm hesitant to be part of this business. It is also appalling to learn about the amount of money that is put into advertising. However, without advertising, businesses wouldn't do so well and more importantly, our culture would not have been a consumer culture.
Chapter 12: Public Relations
This chapter provided me with a more negative view towards PR, especially after reading about Edward Bernays and Lucky Strikes, how he was able to deceive the public mind, women especially, that smoking is alright; while hypocritically, forbade his own wife to smoke. Sure, public relations has helped businesses and inform the public on various issues through tactics like public service announcements. Although I understand that it is important to give businesses and organizations a positive image to gain public support, I feel that it is immoral to try to cover up an organization or company's wrongdoing or distort it in some way in order to keep a positive image.
Chapter 13: Media Economics
The section on Disney being a media conglomerate is certainly mind-blowing, especially when it's not even the #1 media conglomerate. I also enjoyed reading the section about hegemony and "common sense". It just goes to show how the American culture is only run by a few giant media corporations, and furthermore, the American media is doing very well in cultural imperialism. As the chapters go on, I begin to learn that we as citizens really have not much of a choice or power but to live by what these media markets offer us. Lastly, I'd like to end this paragraph with a quote that I thought was quite funny to be found in this chapter.
"It's a small world, after all." - Theme Song, Disney Theme Parks
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