Standing Ovation: Reading Response 6

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Reading Response 6

Advertising is something people look at and see the big picture, what is being sold in the ad, but what many people don’t realize is they are being sold a relationship; which to company makes you thing the product will give you. In her article, Jesus is a Brand of Jeans; Jean Kilbourne advocates that advertising is changing. The ads are changing in a way that makes you more attached to the product; “Ads have long promised us a better relationship via a product: buy this and you will be loved. But more recently they have gone beyond that proposition to promise us a relationship with the product itself: buy this and it will love you.”

This new way of thinking about advertising is truly what advertisers are doing and have been for a while. People are addicted to products, brands and just even items. Kilbourne states that it is easier to love a product than love a person and we in our society clearly believe this and do it daily. Also, she goes on to show that relationships with products are one way and you don’t have to deal with the other side, the product, breaking your heart or being unpredictable. I do agree that products are much easier to love, but then you do not form that bond that you can with humans; we are making objects into humans by forming relationships with them.

Along with forming relationships with products we also, in general, are brand specific. By this meaning, buy one brand of something and stick to that brand. It’s just like being loyal in a relationship with a person; we are loyal to a brand the same way. People are this way because products are easy to have relationships with and people are not, but if you wanted easy this is a good way out, but who wants to take the easy way out, I know I don’t. I think people resort to this because they don’t want to have to deal with humans who will fight back, state their opinion and maybe even tell them no.

In Kilbourne’s article she states that what she hears at her lectures is “I don’t pay attention to ads… I just tune them out… they have no effect on me.” I would like to think that I do that too, but then I realized through this article, that I am very tuned into what is said and done in advertisements, and they have a bigger impact on my life than I would like to notice. Before reading Kilbourne’s article I had somewhat of an idea of how advertisements were but now, what I thought before is nothing like what I know now. The way I thought before was that advertisements were just trying in any way to appeal to consumers to buy the products, now I realize that ads are trying to get you to form that connection with a product and then once the connection is formed then get you to buy the product.

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Welcome

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Standing Ovation”! The title of this blog refers to the audience of active readers we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?
As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! I encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later).
Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. I hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it!