Intro:

There are a lot of abandoned buildings in certain parts of Atlanta, especially as people move away from or are discouraged from visiting certain areas (Underground Atlanta, for example, or the neighborhoods surrounding Turner Field). This creates a lot of disparity and separation between groups socially, politically, and economically. There has been an increase in crime around areas like Underground Atlanta. Poorer neighborhoods have less say politically over what happens to their property. There is a clear cultural gap between people living in impoverished neighborhoods and on the street and those who live in nicer areas. The solution is to bring new life into these areas by improving them. But how can that be done?

I found an LA Times article online featuring a list of the best and the worst campaign advertisements of 2016. The majority of the ads are from candidates who are no longer in the race, but the article was still interesting. (LA Times Article)

The advertisement that stood out to me most was Hilary Clinton’s “Brave” (which can be viewed here). The ad features a young Latina girl speaking in a shaky voice at a Clinton event. In it, she expresses her fear of her family being deported after receiving a notice of deportation in the mail. She begins to cry and Clinton promptly comforts her and tells her not to worry, because she’ll do all the worrying for her. Clinton is clearly the democratic party’s candidate, so the ad was targeted at liberals, but more specifically it was target towards Latino and immigrant voters. And very effectively at that. The ad yanks at the heartstrings and makes Clinton seem personable and compassionate towards the plight of illegal immigrants and overall promoting her platform on immigration.

I’m registered to vote in Gwinnett County, and according to the sample ballot I am able to vote for president, congress members, house and congress members, the public service commissioner, house and congress members for the the state of Georgia specifically, district attorney for the Gwinnett judicial circuit, sheriff, tax commissioner, county commission chairman, county commissioner, school board commissioner, soil and water conservation district supervisor, and a number of ballot measures, none of which I was aware of until I looked at the sample ballot. There is also a special election for an local sales tax referendum. Since Georgia is a Republican state, all of the unopposed runners were Republicans. Go figure.

These advertisements very much encourage gender stereotypes. The boys’ ads are hyper-masculine in every way, which is a little difficult to notice until you isolate the audio from the visual part of the ad. The voices in the boys’ ads are ridiculously exaggerated, and the girls’–extremely feminine and dainty–aren’t much better. The male-targeted ads almost exclusively promote violence and rough play, with the female-targeted ads were mostly concerned with fashion and caring for pets and babies (or a bizarre combination of both). These ads a perpetuate gender roles and stereotypes in every way imaginable, and what’s worse is that they are specifically marketing their products to young children who will surely internalize these stereotypes for perhaps the rest of their lives.

I don’t have a ton of content on my blog at this point, but there were a few things I was able to  do in order to better organize that content. The first thing I did was create a primary menu, which has multiple categories under which my content belongs. Under those categories I included different subcategories. For example, under the category “Projects” there is a subcategory for built environment descriptions. This just makes it easy to sort all my existing posts and find the quickly.

Next, I tagged and categorized all my posts. There are a couple of reasons why I did this, the first of which is so they can be found on our class website, and the second is because, now that the posts are tagged, I’ll be able to click on the tag and find related posts with the same tag on my blog. I also categorized all my posts so they would appear in the menus that I mentioned above.