On Reading A Video Text Summary

Media is everywhere, it became a part of our life. We are exposed to thousands of ad messages every day and it's hard to imagine how it would feel to live without them constantly surrounding us. Today we see ads in print publications, TV commercials, emails, on different products, massively scattered in sport venues, and it’s even spreading into public spaces. In his documentary, Morgan Spurlock delivered a fascinating satire of the process of placing products into movies and tried to delve into the nature of advertising in our society.

What does an ad say about a society? When viewing a product advertisement, many people never stop to think why the ad and product appeals to them. However, when a more critical look is taken, it’s easy to see precisely how ads are carefully tailored to appeal to trending values of a targeted demographic, and how that makes it easy to examine the society of those whom the ad is targeted at. In the analytic writing Advertisements R Us, Melissa Rubin provides an excellent example of this, as she crafts a logical and clear analysis of a 1950’s Coca-Cola magazine ad which thoroughly explains how advertisements can reveal quite a great deal about the society in which they were created.

Furthermore, the author dwells into mediated popular culture which pertains specifically to movies, TV, songs, and advertisements along with the way they communicate

Often times, we rely on the world to we live in to shape us. From mass media, to magazines to commercials, we always find ourselves seeking the next best thing instead of what we already have. The way society shapes us develops each and every one of us because we are persuaded by such advertisements. Robert Scholes of “On Reading A Video Text”, and Shirley Jackson of “The Lottery”, show appropriate examples of the world we live in today. Robert Scholes proves how distorted and misconceiving people construe the world through the “Lottery”, proving his idea of cultural reinforcement.

Through visual anthropology, images, ads, and cartoons are constantly changing individual’s views and the world in which they live in. Images are not merely pictures to state the obvious, they are pictures that have a deeper meaning. Whether the meaning is shown or not shown, they convey representation of something more meaningful in the end. Stuart Hall

In today’s mass media, it is quiet common for advertisers to assimilate class into their commercials. These advertisements portray a certain level of elegance because of the sophisticated choice to use classical background music and thick European accents. On the contrary, other advertisers take the common-folk approach by structure these commercials around the western concept. Both of these advertising tactics supports an American paradox. As argued in Jack Solomon’s “Master of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising”, the contradiction lies in the desire to strive above the crowd and the quest for social equality.

Media and technology give people access to various cultures at an efficient and accelerated rate; thus making media an easy tool for making cultural connections. In the article “What’s Black, Then White, and Said All Over?”, Leslie Savan explores how the media and technology is used to spread black culture and how people use this culture in their daily lives. “Whaazzzaahhh?! Was just what the nation apparently needed on the eve of a new millennium. The sound instantly became an NBA refrain, a greeting on radio sports shows, the theme of an SNL skit...(Savan 450)” This Budweiser commercial is a perfect example of how technology and media can take a “black word” and put it into mainstream media. The commercial was centered around a group of African American friends all on the phone having a conversation with each other and drinking a Budweiser. Till this very day, Whaazzzaahhh is used and identified with black culture. Another great example of how culture can be spread through media comes from the article “Visible Man: Ethics in a World without Secrets”. In

Media plays a huge part in the lives of individuals in their regular activities in the society. Surely, it has impacted on how we see the world and ourselves. Numerous different sorts of media including television shows, radio, movies, advertisements, and daily papers are put on the web and random places. This paper investigates how the role of representation in media is important.

The role of blinding commercialism in people's lives is to provide comfort in its repetitiveness and thoughtlessness. Commercialism does not encourage deep thought by any means, it prays on the quick impulses of the human mind. Murray points this out when talking to Jack about his students and their dislike of television, “‘Look at the wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras.’”(51). Murray’s studying the television shows just how much can be learned about humankind from it. Through the use of a simile,

According to Robert Scholes, author of On Reading a Video Text, commercials aired on television hold a dynamic power over human beings on a subconscious level. He believes that through the use of specific tools, commercials can hold the minds of an audience captive, and can control their abilities to think rationally. Visual fascination, one of the tools Scholes believes captures the minds of viewers, can take a simple video, and through the use of editing and special effects, turn it into a powerful scene which one simply cannot take his or her eyes from. Narrativity is yet another way Scholes feels commercials can take control of the thoughts of a person sitting in front of the television. Through the use of specific words, sounds,

Today’s quick-moving world of technology has media texts such as advertisements to make sure that people understand with just a glance. Having adverts on magazines, social media and billboards allow them to use tools such as semiology, genre and narrative because it makes their messages clear instantly. These signs allow us to carry meaning through advertisements, connotations and the signification process. These tools let brands, mainly celebrities, and the option to produce and create a myth of the product such as “Be daring. Be an inspiration” to sell it to the world. We are in a time where advertisers use ‘simplicity’ in their adverts; there are no more paragraphs. It is mainly down to the person and the few words shown in that advert.

Mass media plays a great part in our lives. Television, newspapers, magazines surround us everywhere every day of our lives. All of them are stuck with different kinds of ads. But how often do we pay attention to the real sense of those ads and the ways the advertisers try to sell various products to us? We see dissoluteness and challenging behavior every day in life and we got so used to it in, at first sight, such small pieces of film, and apparently of our day routine, as advertisement, that we hardly notice the big picture. For over twenty years, Jean Kilbourne has been writing, lecturing, and making films about how advertising affects women and girls. In her essay, "‘The Two Ways a Woman Can Get Hurt':

This theme of consumerism is one of the strongest driving forces in the novel, which explains why the role of the television is so important. “TV’s commercial emergence coincides with the ‘golden age’ of Fordism.” (McCarthy 2) The television thrives merely on the ratings that bring about an enlarged group of commercial viewers, and the more viewers, the more money is brought in through commercials and advertising. Although many people believe that they themselves are not influenced by advertising, no one can escape the brief moments of mind-numbing product awareness being drilled into their heads.

This paper will discuss one of the "iphone 4 Face Time" commercial advertisements (HYPERLINK "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yatSAEqNL7k"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yatSAEqNL7k) that I like most due to its ability to create emotional feelings inside me. "Iphone 4" is another appealing product of Apple, launched in 2010 along with several ads on television, newspapers and internet. Apple has a very old history of producing creative and subliminal ads that touch the heart of the consumers, as discussed in the psychoanalytic approach of Sigmund Freud (O'Shanghnessy and O'Shaughnessy 166).

Media influence is the force by which ideas are injected into people’s lives shaping the very culture of society. This influence is masqueraded through hidden media message, resulting in a change in its audience which can be positive or negative, abrupt or gradual, short term or long term. Although mass media’s influential effect can reach a wide ranged audience as an agent of socialization the responsibility to contain what it releases has not been of importance. “The media’s socially significant obligations are formally ignored.” (A.S. Zapesotskii, 2011, p 9). Media messages can be exerted through many different outlets such as TV shows, music, movies, commercials, news, magazines, games which are all gravitated to entertain audiences ultimately offering personal gratification that can sometimes blur the lines between reality and