aurigus

roachboy: Without turning this into a huge political discussion, and not knowing what some of the words you are saying mean, it is way to simple to turn this into a left and right issue. Both sites use media pretty much equally. And it's two simple to define and left and a right.

Back to the original question - There is an important theory called the third person effect. A bunch of things have been written on it, but basically, it says that everyone thinks that media affects the other guy more than themselves. Of course that can't be true for everyone! So, it means that advertising affects us all more than we'd like to believe.

ARTelevision

No, roachboy, I'm not going there.
Such doctrinaire positions must stand on their own.

I will say that each of your demonstrations can apply equally to both sides of the political spectrum. Evidence is ample for both positions. This would be a dead end in a discussion where we have made some constructive headway. That's the nature of political discourse today. The only reason I mentioned this at all is because of the continuing assignment of certain misuses of media power to the right.

This could be carried forth in the Politics Forum but, as you may have noticed, I am evidencing signs of complete boredom there.

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roachboy

its more a particular institutional relation to the media that i am talking about, art, and its implciations are bigger than a misuse, i would say---and different as well--compared with advertising in any event, the analysis tends in a very different direction.

and that is the problem with the subject of adverts--or the media--if you start thinking about it, and arrive at the conclusion that you cannot analyze it in isolation, the topic gets quite big and changes ground. probably a number of times.

as for the doctrinaire element that you see in the above---sorry if you take it that way--like i said, on the topic at hand, there is an abundance of empirical information and the result of that information is not happy-making--once you see the data, then the conclusions follow in a fairly straight line--**except** for that of evaluation, of course. what i suppose might be doctrinaire in the above is that i find this trend to be beyond disturbing. others might think it hunky dory---i'd be interested in seeing arguments to that effect--but the data itself you cannot deny----sadly--not so much for the conversation (it can always shift gears) but for "reality" in america, such as it is....

it just seems to me that if you are going to talk about the manipulation of what amounts to the collective parameters of cognition (social being would be better but more vague) then the visual rhetoric of adverts seems but a single level--maybe interesting in itself--but you have to fit it a critique of it into something larger or you end up sounding like you blame commercials for things way outside their purview.

it is time to take the wonder husky for a walk--he is insistent--in the interest of not being flayed locally by husky scratchings, i have no choice but to yield the floor.

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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radioguy

Ads have more of a negative effect on me. I can't stand the Old Navy/Gap commercials, thus, I don't buy anything from those stores. I can't say seeing a certain ad has caused me to go buy it, but seeing one has caused me to not purchase the product.