Media Consumption and Advertisement Reflection

How often do you use media in your everyday life? How is the media designed to influence us? Why is it important that we are aware of this? These were the questions that we asked ourselves as we received our media consumption charts. The charts, simple in structure, were a tool to help us keep track of how often we used different types of media over the course of a long weekend. Personally, I had predicted that my recorded media time would be large. In addition to being a high school student living in the Pacific Northwest, I am a theatre lover, runner, and book enthusiast. For better or for worse, media is a huge part of my everyday life. As a student, I often use online media sources for homework. I also am a movie lover, and music from the radio is a regular part of the soundtrack of my day. All of this does not even include the times throughout the day when I check up on social media or the news. This being said, it was no surprise when I began to rack up the hours on my media chart. The most surprising thing to me was the sheer amount of media that I could immerse myself in at once. I could be listening to music while reading a book and intermittently checking social media updates. I also was surprised by the different ways that my media time could add up. While I tended to read or watch movies for a longer period one or two times a day, I checked things like email or social media in many short bursts. In addition, I had the most hours of media usage under the music category, but instead, much of the music that I recorded was in the background, and I was not paying as much attention to it as I was with other forms of media. The ways that I obtained my media also differed vastly. While I used a phone, computer, or television to watch movies and check email and social media, I also read paper books and magazines and listened to the radio in the car. Although I interacted regularly with media, I had never really thought of all of the ways that it is designed to influence the consumer until the topic was brought up in a classroom discussion.

In class, we talked about how media messages are constructed, how they are representations of the world, how they have economic and political purposes, and how individuals create meanings out of the media that they consume. These four big media ideas guided us as we watched video advertisements for Dove, Greenpeace, and Rimmel. By watching these ads, I learned that every single aspect of how the advertisements are presented is important. Nothing is random or coincidental because the advertiser only has a short time to grab your attention, draw you in, and convince you to buy their product or support their message. For example, one of the Dove ads featured a soundtrack that resembled a beating heart, helping to support their message of a company with a strong sense of self-worth and humanity. While this may have subconsciously influenced me as I initially watched the video, it was not until we turned off the visuals and listened to the soundtrack that I was able to register this subtle detail.  Something that surprised me was that there was a noticeable cultural difference between the way that the American Dove and Greenpeace ads were presented and the British Rimmel ad. While the former companies focused on very serious topics such as the horrors of the beauty industry and environmental destruction, the latter ad was more focused on showing the viewer how much fun you could have while using their products. While I personally did not feel that one style of advertising had more of an impact on me than another, it was intriguing to think about how portrayals of products can be tailored to pique the interests and emotions of different audiences. In order to participate in the class discussion about these ads, it was important to think less about what the ad was trying to sell you and more about how they were trying to sell it to you. We realized that the way that the product was pitched was far more important than whether or not the product was actually worth buying. With this information, I hope that we are all able to become more responsible and critical consumers of advertisements and media and possess a greater understanding of how media influences the choices that we make.