Print Media And The Rabbit Hole By Brad Zembics

In today’s society, no matter where you are, there is always a good chance that you have seen an advertisement. These little creatures are everywhere. You may see them when you are reading a magazine, watching TV, or surfing the internet. We have become so used to them. Advertisements are good at making us stop what we are doing and giving them our full attention. What is an advertisement? An advertisement is an announcement made to the public. In Jib Fowles’ article, “Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals,” he is informing us that companies are spending millions of dollars on advertisements to grab our attention in order to manipulate us into spending or thinking of spending our hard-earned money on their product. Even though a lot of people do not want to believe that a paper that is eight times eleven with an image and no more than five words is manipulative because we want to think that we are not that easy to trick. Nike created an advertisement for one of

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.

In our daily lives advertisement are seen all around is. We see them on billboards and on our phone. This is how must things get known to people .In M.T. Anderson’s young adult novel Feed, Anderson uses satire to criticize how things are advertised in order to warn readers about how advertising manipulates them into doing things.

In an age of rising consumerism, consumers are engulfed in their gullibility and fall into the scheme of false marketers. As a result, in the 1999 publication, The Onion, it issued a parody press release about the fictional “MagnaSoles” to show marketer ploys on consumer gullibility. To achieve this satire, the publication uses a satirical tone and criticizes the credibility of ads to reveal the fallacy and manipulative power of the industrial world.

The average United States Citizen views about 5000 advertisements a day (Johnson). Advertising is everywhere. Billboards on the way to work, ads on the internet, and paper products such as magazines or newspapers display a sale or a promotion of a good or service. Usually, the ad will give a brand or company name, and uses the product’s merits to draw the consumer closer. This has grown exponentially as advertisements in media in 1970 were estimated to be 500 a day, a ten percent increase in the last 48 years. (Johnson). This is due to the rise of technology, as the computer has become a household gadget within the new millenium. These advertisements are meant to give a synopsis of the product or service’s purpose, quality, and efficiency. If a consumer views 5000 advertisements in a single day and assuming the commercials do not repeat, 5000 goods or services are introduced. With more options to choose from in such little time, the consumer has a harder time differentiating the quality and perhaps necessity of the product. The marketers rely on the quick, impulsive decision making of consumers. With the misleading nature of many infomercials or radio broadcasts, the people of American society are bombarded with constant propaganda, thus making seemingly harmless promotions more potent to filling industries’ pockets and lessening the common population’s

Media impacts our lives everyday. The average 14-to-28 year-old will be exposed to about 3,000 ads every day. Ben Franklin once said that nothing is certain is this life except death and taxes. I believe it is now safe to assume we can add advertisements to that list now. We are literally bombarded with them. After seeing all the advertisements I am led to believe that they are the most carefully constructed of all human communication, being it the most expensive too. In 2004, according to www.answers.com, advertisement was in excess of $450 billion in the United States alone. It is not our fault though that these advertisements display messages that we cannot perceive. When we see an ad, our conscious mind will filter out the things it cannot deal with and make an acceptable idea or image that is made conscious. This is

Studies show that there the word gullible written on the ceiling above. In the article, The Onion, the writer talks about how people are gullible and fall for commercials. In the article the author used certain rhetoric devices that other commercials would use to make their product to seem legit. Barry, who wrote a mock press release that was published by The Onion claims that people who fall for ridicules commercials are fools by using ethos, imagery, and pathos.

The truth is that as consumers we are prone to being taken advantage of and more specifically, ripped off. How this occurs is quite simple. It is the technique of persuasion that forces people to do things, believe things and in this case purchase things that are not necessary. Tactics to persuade people can range from rhetoric devices to the structure of the message itself. Rhetoric devices, such as logos and pathos, and the structure of the message come together to ultimately persuade people to buy into things that they normally wouldn’t buy. Pathos appeals to emotion and logos describes the idea of logical reasoning. Then comes the structure of the message itself which enhances an idea to its full potential. The main purpose of these techniques in literature is to serve as writing strategies to convey an idea in words. Two examples of authors utilizing writing strategies to persuade readers that stores and advertisers manipulate shoppers take place in “The Science of Shopping” by Malcolm Gladwell and “Attention, Shoppers: Store Is Tracking Your Cell” by Clifford and Hardy. The author of “Attention Shoppers” uses the writing strategies of pathos, logos and the structure of the writing better than the author of “The Science of Shopping” to persuade readers that stores and advertisers are manipulating shoppers.

“There are over 250 billion advertisements released to the public every year with the average person seeing over 3000 ads every single day” (Kilbourne). This is an astronomical amount of information for anyone to process in a week let alone in one day. This is a prime example of Capitalism at it’s finest. Controlling the consumer in every aspect of their lives. Jean Kilbourne also talks about how “Only 8 percent of an advertisement is actually processed by the conscious mind, with the other 92 percent being soaked up by the subconscious” (Kilbourne). Thinking about those numbers really brings into perspective how much we are truly influenced by media

Though M.T. Anderson imagines a world even more immersed in consumerism than our current world, the amount of control ads have on our life isn’t far from what M.T. Anderson imagined in “The Feed”. The mood of the book, though it can be overdone at times, makes the book even

This newspaper ad has a lot of “Logos” or logic. The purpose the Anonymous Author is trying to get through the Audience is not achieved mainly because the newspaper Ad is missing a lot of Visuals like for example pictures of

“22 Tips to Gain Weight FAST!” “You’ll Never Look at Barbie Dolls the Same Way After You See THIS Picture!” “Insurance Companies HATE this new trick!” We’ve all seen articles with similar headlines. In fact, they’ve gotten so common that we rarely think anything of them anymore. They’re all over the Internet - on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram. However, although they may seem rather pointless or annoying, there is a reason that journalists use clickbait to headline their articles. Justin Bariso argues that although nearly nobody enjoys seeing clickbait, journalists utilize it simply because it is effective, and people should be more understanding about it, as it is not pointlessly annoying. He strengthens his argument throughout the article

Dave Ramsey, America’s most trusted financial adviser and a radio show host, once said, “We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like.” (Ramsey). Ramsey’s quote reflects the state of consumerism that our society is going through. Most of us can easily relate to this quote, let’s be honest most of us have been there done that and then later question our genuine need for whatever we have bought. Regardless, if we feel guilty or not we ought to ask ourselves why and what made this purchase seems so important and necessary at the time. Although this might not come as a surprise to most of us, the answer would be the advertisement industry. In 2016, The United States has spent more than 198 billion U.S dollars on advertising, making America the leader in advertisement in the world (Statista). These ads are designed to force consumers to keep buying things that are unnecessary by sending subliminal messages and applying psychology to trick the consumer into a spending spree. In his short story, “Subliminal Man”, J.G. Ballard uses science fiction approach to illustrate to his readers the preposterous techniques that the advertising industry has been using to boost consumerism. Ballard believes that the consumer’s brain has been tricked into buying against their well, by using technology and applying subliminal technics. Ballard short story questions the effect of consumerism on our moral values, lifestyle, and behavior. Ballard claims that

In addition CNN ran a story on Vietnam that was proven inaccurate. The radio waves and television sets are flooded with sensationalized shows featuring beautiful young women and handsome men. The news watched today is sensationalized with one catastrophe after another. Is excitement what the market wants, or is the excitement expected because of a precedent set by the corporate owned media? Even in the reporting of sports, sensationalism rules. Channels like ESPN, owned by Disney , report homeruns, slam-dunks, and touchdowns with a dramatic twist. What effect does sensationalism have on the media¡¦s market? A survey done by the American Society of Newspaper Editors reports that ¡§spelling errors, bias, and sensationalism are corroding the credibility of newspapers.¡¨ The survey shows:

How has writing and the way we read changed in the last fifty years? Technology, reading, and writing has changed greatly over the last five decades, but how much has it affected our culture? Technology has become our culture, we are cyber culture. We need everything as fast as we can get it, somehow we’ve lost the time through the years to read and write as we once did.