Political Campaigns! This intense battles that happen every 4 years in most countries, potential presidential candidates go around the country to campaign, huge posters are witnessed everywhere, TV ads are focused on the campaigns, and lots of heated arguments are spreading all over the social media websites! Here is where our best friend, the media, comes into play... The question that I ask myself here is, to what extent does the media influence the success of these campaigns, keeping in mind that these elections determine the way that the country would head in the next half century(assuming ideal conditions).
One of the most popular photos of 2008
Most of the media, as we discussed before is controlled and run by people who have certain agendas and goals that they want to achieve. It is very easy to see the relation here and to know that this is a very sensitive issue... how transparent is the media when it delivers the information that is going to drive the nation into choosing its next leader?! My guess would be, very little at the best. Since elections are purely based on numbers and who gets the most votes, the smartest thing to do is to try and convince as many people as you can to vote for you! If 50 educated, very highly ranked citizens in the society vote for you and on the other hand 51 uneducated, unaware citizens vote for me, I win! So, it is very important to get the numbers right, and this is when things get ugly... Campaigners would do and say anything to get to the majority of people with the simplest of minds, the media that is controlled by tycoons would help whoever is going to help them stay as they are and get even stronger if they win the elections.
Finally, the amount of money that is being spent on these campaigns is really alerting! Take for example the 2008 elections in the US, here is an article by Washington Wire breaking down the dollars that was spent on the Ads for the different campaigns!
7000 years ago, the Pharaohs wrote and drew on the wall.
2000 years ago, artists painted significant events in history. Finally, around 100 years ago the first camera was invented by a Muslim Astronomer/Physicist/Mathematician Alhazen.
Ever since then, cameras evolved to what we come to see right now from advanced technology and endless variations. All along, these cameras played an integral role in conveying news and portraying events throughout the history. However, we must ask ourselves, how accurate are these images we see from the cameras in portraying reality?!
Cameras take still images that captures less than a fraction of a second in a static manner, everything before and after the shot is not visible, everything out of the frame is not visible, many factors can aid into manipulating the image and the response we can induce from the viewer with a camera, for example taking a photo with high angle can give a sense of insignificance to the subject in the frame. Photographers are very smart and can use a lot of techniques to play and shape the opinions of the viewer, photography can go under the maximum amount of biasness in my opinion!
In this video, the artist uses manipulation to do the opposite
of what most photographers do nowadays, he manipulates the
viewers opinions to create love and to make us realize that we are
all the same! Its a lengthy video but its worth it!
To know more about the project visit this link. HERE
Who is right? Who is wrong? What is happening? What caused this? Why did this happen? All of these are questions that may never be answered when seeing a powerful photograph that you come across everyday in the print media or the Internet.
On the other side of the coin, we have to realize that photographers around the world endanger their lives and put themselves in uncomfortable situations everyday just so that we could be aware and well informed, they conduct one of the most noble and artistic jobs in the world, provided it is done properly and without them any media would not be as effective as it should be.
Last summer my friend made me watch a movie called Cellular when I went over to his place and I was extremely pleased by it. The movie starts off with a nice kick and keeps going! It was well written, with an excellent cast and very good plot twists that were surprisingly convincing unlike most of the other thrillers that fills you with disbelief. However! This movie was filled by products advertising throughout, in fact the products in this movie were an integral part of the story and were advertised in a very clever manner. I don't want to spoil the movie for people who plan to watch it(I advice to do so) but Porsche, when they were just releasing a new car model. Nokia when the old 6600 was just coming out and was like the iPhone now and Cellular, an electronics store(which is also the name of the movie!) are all placed and illustrated throughout the movie. I know that most people do not necessarily like or agree with product placements in movies, but if this placement is done in a clever manner, do not manipulate the watcher and try to make them believe false claims and at the same time do not have moral or ethical issues, then why not have product placement in movies? But then again you will always have that poorly and all-out-on-your-face product placement that might maddens you like the one we see in the series "Chuck"(I actually like this show)... here is an article about why product placement is helpful to some shows and at the same time why people might dislike them.
Photographer: Okay, a little bit to the left... no, right. Simon! I am not talking to you I am talking about the Coca-Cola cup!
We all know the products did not magically or by mistake end up and was emphasized this much in the movie, I believe that everyone who watched the movie would have this much common sense to realize that this is a built in advertisement, and if these advertisements come off as too cheesy and unrealistic then I think that this would hurt the product image with the public rather than help it.
Here is the trailer for the movie... notice how they sell the nokia 6600 with all its "new" options!
Media, which is the way in which advertisements are transported to the consumers was evolving ever since it was born, weather it is in print, radio, television, then internet the ways in which companies advertise themselves or their products has to evolve too so as to match the modern era and not fall behind!
In the past, the media outlets were limited and so was the ways in which advertisements can reach the people, but now with the emergence of internet and the ease with which people can access all the types of media advertising now things are different than the way they were past, the process, the costs, the quality of advertising is definitely taking a new shape than the way it was in the past.
Right now, revolutions have been planned through the internet, a single event on facebook gathered millions of protesters to uprise against the ex-regime in Egypt last January, this is how effective and viral the internet can be if used as a way for advertising be it advertising for a product a protest or just as an informative campaign. Also, the demographies that use different types of media outlets are changing rapidly... teenagers now use computers/laptops more than televisions for example so if your advertisement is going to target teenagers, it will be smarter and more efficient to invest into ads that appear on the internet rather than appear on television channels.
Finally, normal advertisement is not the only way in which a company can advertise its product... there are many other smart ways to reach the crowds that can even cost less than television ads! YouTube is one of these ways, AT&T & T-Mobile, two very famous telecommunication companies are a leading example of taking full advantage of the flexibility of the internet...
This article discusses a very successful campaign by AT&T that was very successful and was later picked on by the internet and made viral. (Here is link to all the images of this campaign)
One of the images by AT&T 2009 "hands" campaign.
The following video of a flash mob organized and funded by T-Mobile proved to be very entertaining to everyone that witnessed it and was then passed on all over the internet to reach millions of people all over the world!
Also, this is another smart 2011 ad made by AT&T that takes the idea of the flash mob that was mad by T-Mobile to advertise its new 4G network coverage!
I got this ancient ad from a blog entry titled 40 Gorgeous Vintage Tobacco Advertisements while I understand why the author would call these ad gorgeous(probably because of the vintage effect and the colors) we can clearly see how harmful this ad is, especially that it involves cigarettes and also from a media literacy point of view, since they used a lot of very well known techniques that are used to fool and persuade the consumers who are exposed to this ad.
The techniques used in this Ad are numerous, I will try to list all of them and give a brief example of discription from this Ad...
Hyperbole: i.e. exaggeration... we can see this technique when they used the words "Tangy" "Rich" "Luscious" and "Delicious".
Beautiful People: the use of good looking people and faces is very apparent in this ad, which makes it more attractive.
Simple Solution: in this ad, they want the consumer to understand that if you buy this brand of cigarettes and blow some of the smoke on a womans face... she will follow you everywhere! Magical isn't it ? While what I really think is that if you blow smoke on someone's face, the least you can expect is a slap in the face.
Lies: I really find it hard to classify if this lie is a big lie or a small lie... but from the description of the ad, they say that you can "get smoking satisfaction with inhaling smoke" which does not make sense... since the "smoking satisfaction" comes from the nicotine that is absorbed when you inhale the smoke into your lungs, and no other satisfaction can be achieved by cigarettes other than this way.
Although almost every country has organizations like the ASA(UK's regulator of advertising) to control and regulate the ads, its contents and placing these techniques are still overused, while I was looking around for ads to use in this article as an example, a lot of the new very modern ads use the same techniques and ever more, so the next time you come across an ad, whether it is a poster or a TV ad, take a minute to think of all the techniques that might give you false hope or information!
Football is one of the many things that keep me going in life, I am a big Arsenal fan, and as anyone who follows football will know how heated and competitive the transfer market is every year for the football players between the clubs. Here is where the media comes to play, especially as an Arsenal fan, you read stories everyday of how player X comes out to the media to talk about how desperate he is to leave his club for another one, only for the player to come later and completely defy what was said about him or what the newspapers claimed he said. Now there is a lot of reasons why newspapers would tweak ones words and make them look or feed into a certain direction, like was discussed before on this blog, they might be following a certain agenda, or for the simple sake of exposure and to sell more.
Calling a 1 - 1 draw a win... an extreme case of bias!
A very simple example that I can call of the top of my head is how my uncle once told me about the time he was waiting in line for the counter desk in a supermarket, and a famous celebrity magazine cover caught his attention that had its main title saying "Shakira threatens to murder on of her fans!"... Upon further examination of this article, it was very clear that the title did not really reflect anything that happened in reality, the story was about how Shakira was heading out of some party and the paparazzi were following her and taking picture, she was really mad at them so she screamed at one of them saying "get out of my way or I will kill you!" she obviously did not plan to kill him. But titling this story with "Shakira gets mad at paparazzi" is Boooring, and would not really catch anyones attention, as opposed to what the other biased title did to my uncle who really would not even look twice at these type of articles!
Now how can we check the credibility and the accuracy of something we read in a newspaper or a magazine... the following is a few simple steps that I believe might work:
Common sense: like give me one good reason Shakira would threaten one of her fans in broad day light ? who would actually buy something like that ?
Research: you can read more about the background of the author or the newspaper he is writing for, to have an idea about what might be his intentions or agendas.
Cross-checking: next time you read about a certain number of causalities, the performance of a team or anything that you suspect might have been tweaked, look for other newspapers of different backgrounds and other news sources to confirm.
Finally, read this article by a media awareness website about the types of bias in the news, a very useful website too that might help in the MCM 102 course itself.
In this weeks blog I want to discuss the parodies that most of us are familiar with and watch for laughs on YouTube and other video-sharing/social websites. One of the most successful and very well known spoofs is the "Hitler Reacts to ......" parodies that have been going on for almost three years now! The scene is based in a room that has Hitler and a lot of very high ranked army generals facing him. He then orders most of them to leave the room except for a few, and then goes on an anger rampage yelling at them in disgust and disbelief. From a filming point of view, the acting in this scene was amazing and it makes you really live in the moment, which made it a very fertile soil for a parody, especially since it has the very well known Hitler in it, who was known for his no nonsense attitude and his awful history. The original movie that this scene was extracted from a movie called the Downfall (or Der Untergang in German) released in 2004 this German/Italian/Austrian epic war film is directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, it depicts the final ten days of Adolf Hitler's life in his Berlin bunker and Nazi Germany in 1945, so you can only imagine how serious and climatic this scene was originally planned to be!
This entry of Ranker describes it best, the author of this entry says:
"Usually the video clip starts with someone informing him of something horrible, Hitler brushes it off as a solvable problem. Full of fear, his commanders tell him that his solution is not possible. He tells everyone who isn't important to leave and then goes on a huge tirade about something. Of course, this meme has always been in German, so people replace the subtitles in the original German film to make Hitler rant about pretty much anything. Examples include everything from Disney buying Marvel, to random movie reviews, to the lack of new features in a new tech product."
After a lot of research to know how this specific "Hitler Reacts" parodies started I got to a close approximation after some discussions with people in famous forums and blogs. It is said to have started with the Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live, and rightly so, the oldest one on the internet is this one, uploaded on the 7th of June 2007 with an astonishing 6,191,322 views so far! Thousands of other similar parodies have been created following this one.
Additionally, the director of the movie was once interviewed and asked about what he thinks of all these parodies that they made from his movie, his response was really positive.
One of the funniest "Hitler Reacts" parodies I watched was the one made by one of our very own AUS students, who in this parody makes fun and mocks the problems an AUS student would faces when registering his courses on banner, in this Hitler in AUS video. This shows you how popular and spread out this parodies are! People normally love this stuff because you can fit in as many racist/pop/inside jokes as possible, it was also a mean in which news could travel really quickly. Many people would not even know who Usain Bolt is for example, until they watched the parody and then read/reasearched/wikipediad him to know what the parody is all about, so in a sense these parodies can act as a very powerful media/news tool!
Let me describe to you a very well known phenomena around the world, let us say that some long time ago a group of people with the same ethnic background exhibited a certain behavior or trait and until this date, people around the world would prejudge anyone of this race and think that they all have this same habit everyone is said to talk about... this my dear reader is a simple explanation of what a stereotype means!
Some of the very famous stereotypes floating around these days are... "all Russians are alcoholics, the British have horrible teeth, Asian people can't drive, black people love fried chicken/watermelon/sugary-stuff..." and the list goes on and on (I stopped here so that I don't offend anymore people. Say what you want to say but I am pretty sure everyone reading article has some kind of stereotype at the back of their head that they truly believe in. You might think that you are the most unbiased person you can think of, very noble, and very smart, too good to be driven away like the general public and believe in stereotypes, but unless you really work on it and put a lot of effort in order to stay away from believing in them, you are most probably a victim of this way of thinking too, and it is not completely your fault. Its human psychology, there is a process in the human brain that is called confirmation bias (click on the word) that makes us vulnerable to believing in stereotypes. Rather than basing our judgments on pure unbiased analysis, our flawed brains tend to look for evidence and interpret them in a way to confirm and go with preconceptions we had about any issues we face. This leads to a huge error in our mental statistical analysis of almost everything, not only when judging people around us.
If you laugh at this, you are a racist!
I hope that the next time you meet a person from a certain race, you forget about all the things that people tell each other and judge them for what they really are. Your fingers don't all look the same and the same applies for the people around you.
Finally, here is a video from Family Guy illustrating the famous stereotype about Asians!
As an Egyptian, January and February of this year has been remarkable! It marked the start and the end of the Egyptian revolution, something that came to exist almost 30 years late... However, this is not the topic I am going to discus today, I want to talk about a specific incident that happened during this time.
The Egyptian revolution was planned and executed successfully by the Egyptian youth, who planned it all using the new popular media like facebook and twitter to gather and start it. Later on, the Al Jazeera channel worked full force along with other numerous news channels to cover this rare event(at that time) meanwhile, the Egyptian local news channels also covered the ongoing revolution, in their own way that is. With a desperate attempt from the ex-government to stall the news until they can get everything under control.
I hope this previous pictures gives you a clear idea of how the naive the media was thinking that people would buy what they are selling, now the reason I mentioned this example is to show that news stories, especially the ones that shows on local news channels, or even corporate ones, do not really give a realistic view of what happens in reality, this is because governments and the owners of such channels have their own agenda, everyone has an agenda and naturally this agenda would affect what to show and what not to show on their news. Governments normally like to stay on the top and make sure everyone knows that everything is under control and super Okay! Corporate news channels want to have the most views in order for their adds to sell and influence the world... we can take a very good example of Rupert Murdoch, the man who "owns the news" (click here to know more)
But here is when things get interesting, with the emergence of youtube, twitter, facebook etc. there are many ways in which people can easily share and interact media pieces with each another. This makes things more exposed and opened for verification just like what happened during the Egyptian revolution, had the internet not existed during this time, the Egyptian revolution wouldn't have happened and the rest of the world would not have the slightest idea of an attempted revolution all together. With these social networks, one can easily and quickly verify anything that comes up in the news, I personally developed the habit of going on these websites to verify any piece of information floating around be it from the news or people gossiping around.
So I go into my first MCM class this semester in the new SBM building, it was really lovely and the class was going great, until the professor brought up the question "Do men and women think in different ways?" naturally almost the whole class nodded in agreement, to which the professor replied to by "How so?" then comes the interesting part, without thinking and without really choosing my words, I say "Women are irrational". I could already feel most of the females in class hating on me, not a great way to make a first impression I know, I then went on to try and explain my point of view(under several angry stares), I really did not mean what I said, it was merely a poor choice of words, but I think not everyone was convinced and it is going to take more than that to clear the air!
How many times do I have to tell him its orchid and not purple!
Men and Women do indeed think differently, its obvious since our bodies are wired in different ways, these traits that affect why men and women think differently are hard wired into us for thousands of years now, probably because of the different roles that men and women had to play in society throughout history. Blame it on evolution ? may be. I do have enough evidence to back myself up, what I really meant to say by women are "irrational" (the more I think about it, the more I realize how stupid I was to say that :D) is that women seem to have emotions affecting their decision making while on the other side of the coin, men are very focused and they do not let other extraneous factors affect their way of thinking in a specific topic for example. This makes a very interesting subject for both genders and enable them to excel at different task or group of tasks! Click here or here or here to see what I am talking about.
Well, in my defense, no one told me that this car does not drive on railroads!
However, the professor later then explained that this way of thinking that is being noticed in both genders might be due to the way in which each gender has been raised in different societies, I have to admit that I did not really think about it in this way before BUT it somehow compliments my original theory and the findings that has been discovered my many researches (here & here) on this matter, if the way you raise each gender affects this gender's way of thinking then I am pretty sure the way men and women operated since Adam and Eve have a bog role into shaping up this modern male and female psychology.
Finally I would like to conclude by saying that there is no right or wrong way of thinking. Each gender has their own strength or weakness which makes each of them excel at a different tasks or group of tasks, I read sometimes back an article in which the author said that women for example can see colors better than men since they were responsible for getting berries and knowing the poisonous ones from the good ones by the slight variation in shades, while men are better in directions since they had to find their way back to the cave after a long day of hunting! Sorry for writing such a long article (I did not know it will turn out like this :/) and I would be more than happy to explain any ambiguity you find here, just drop a comment below.
