Questions for 2/10

Casey Penaluna
Questions for 2/10

1. In Charles Larsen’s book Modern Media and Persuasion he writes, “Literacy opened the remarkable door to opportunity for Franklin and for many others, but it also enslaved us to some degree.”

Larsen goes on in the paragraph to talk about how with this new and great advent of the written word we would have to dedicate large numbers of hours to “’learn’ all the things that literacy had led to and as a result we had to invent ‘childhood’”. This seems a strange statement to me because I have never been aware of a time, especially in the pre-literate days when people were born as adults.

I know that there were not many options for children in those days to have much leisure time considering that without the advent of modern machinery, gas stoves and food processors many of the children had to assume the same responsibilities as their parents to help out with the chores at home so that their family could continue to eat, be sheltered, stay warm and in many cases prosper.

Children were still children it is just that literacy afforded a new reality of what childhood could be and what it has become. But still many children in the early days of the written word could not afford to attend school, nor could the family afford to lose them during the crucial harvest seasons and if that wasn’t bad enough teachers were in short supply since many of the adults knew barely more than the children they sought to teach.

And I am not sure what he means by remarking, “Naturally, the length of childhood has had to be expanded several times as the amount of information to be learned has increased.” I guess if you think about the fact that child labor was a daily practice in early America and that schooling was not seen as a necessity and contrast that to today’s society where even the most mundane household chore can be perceived by some as child labor and school takes up an eight hour “work” day then sure it makes sense we have merely swapped the school for the work. Today’s reality is not the same as that of the pioneers coming up in the new literacy and I think that Larsen has failed to take that fully into account as he wrote this particular passage. I feel that he is not acting in good faith by glibbing over the subject in such a manner and recklessly making this particular comparison between generations.

2. Moving on to Larsen’s thoughts on the sight script. He talks about how advertisers use an ad campaign in such a manner that the information they are trying to get you to “buy” into is presented in a form which “resonates with the experiences stored in the conscious or unconscious minds of the audience” (consumer). This is the most highly effective way to guarantee that you will indeed think of their product the next time you are out shopping.

He goes on to talk about a clever ad that TV Guide used on one of its covers. The celebrity on the cover was Oprah Winfrey and the message was basically – look how good Oprah looks after her latest diet. The issue I have is that the cover image was not a true representation of how Oprah really looked after this latest diet. Yes it was her head and she did look beautiful with all the make-up and hair styling but her head was sitting atop Ann-Margaret’s body.

What I don’t understand is how anyone can say that the ads messaging, about Oprah’s weight, is neither true nor untrue only memorable and has no more relevance to the public except that this particular “planted” audience resonance can be drawn on at a later date to sell any number of products (diet I assume).

Isn’t this blatant false advertising? I guess super-imposing one star’s head onto another’s body is o.k. as long as that body is clothed and as long as that image is being used to help promulgate the yearly stock-dividends of the various companies that make up the diet industries empire.

3. Larsen then moves onto the age of the computer. He talks about how the computer has turned many of us into anti-social members of something he calls the “lonely crowd”. He laments that computers have driven us inward “to a world occupied only by the self, the machine and the task at hand”, but how is that possible when there are millions of people on line? When there are countless social networking sites, online book clubs, weight loss meetings and photo sharing communities. We can make contacts and perhaps life-long friends with people in Europe, Asia or even Antarctica who many of us would never have had a chance to meet otherwise. We can self-publish our memoirs, locate lost relatives and even obtain a college degree.

Our work duties have been sped up through the invention of the internet, meetings can be held via webcam, client interaction can be done totally online in a real time chat session and many companies employ an inter-office IM policy.

Gaming which in its early onset was very much a solitary pursuit has busted out into the virtual world courtesy of WI-FI capabilities and the ability to represent yourself to the online gaming community through a personalized avatar. Gamers have the ability to not only play with someone in their own living room but they can challenge someone on the other side of the world.

Now I ask Mr. Larsen how do these examples of the use of the internet via the computer lead to his conclusion of the “lonely crowd” and his theory that those of us who choose to spend our time on a computer are wallowing in isolation and don’t desire human contact?