Assignment 1

I believe that there are some types of media that provide more confusion rather than literacy. Professor Lackaff mentioned to keep in mind that that sometimes the media succeeds best if the consumer remains illiterate and I feel that this is true.

Last semester I took principles of persuasion and throughout the semester I learned how the media takes advantage of our ignorance and uses that to their advantage. There are several techniques that are used by the media to persuade us to buy into a product. If our society was more media literate then we would recognize these attempts and companies sales would decrease.

One thing that really stuck with me after the class was that the media’s key audience is children. Children are unable to recognize the advertiser’s attempts of persuasion, so they have no defenses against it. A great example of this is during Christmas time when toy companies advertise several toy commercials each day attempting to get the attention of young children. Every year they are successful without fail because they are attracting an audience that wants what every other child has. If they see that another child there age is playing with a certain toy, they too want to have the same toy the child has in the commercial. Most children will do what their peers are doing around them. In the principle of persuasions class, there was one example that proved this to be true. The book explained an example of how a boy was deathly afraid of dogs. He would avoid dogs at all cost. One day to help with his fears, the boy was shown a tape of children petting dogs. After watching the tape a few times the boy’s fear began to diminish. The boy began to feel comfortable with dogs because he recognized that they did not share the fear that he had.

I believe that we should all be educated about the media. Because the truth is that the types of techniques that are used by the media are used by people in our everyday lives. For example, car salesmen, retail employees, etc. And although I still believe that the media will succeed in the long run, as least we will know the defenses that we can use if we choose to use them

As described in class today the media is what keeps our society a mainstream culture, but it is ok to go outside that culture and practice other beliefs of your own.