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Category Archives: Class Prep
Political Ads: Motherhood
This ad is clearly targeted towards women, a group that Trump has been having trouble identifying with throughout the election. It focuses on women and their roles in 21st century America. In some ways, this can be taken negatively. For example, the title of the ad is literally “Motherhood” which may turn off some women by suggesting that their only legitimate purpose is to be a loving mother. But in the ad itself, the advertisers use Ivanka Trump the self-proclaimed “mother, wife, and entrepreneur” to represent that women can and should be more than that. Throughout the ad there is a focus on Trump’s reforms that support women in the workforce and in the family.
This is also one of the few Trump ads that isn’t directly attacking Hilary Clinton. In those that do, ominous music, dim lighting, and horror film-esque effects are used to portray her as a terrible person whose sole purpose is to run the country into the ground. In “Motherhood” however, the advertisers employ bright lighting, beaming faces of women and children, and uplifting music to convey a happy and bright new world for women under Trump’s leadership.
Election 2016
Using ballotpedia.com, I found out what elections I can participate in in the upcoming election. First I will obviously be voting in the general presidential election between Trump and Clinton. Gary Johnson’s also on there but ehhhhhh no. I can vote for the Georiga representatives in the Senate this year between Jim Barksdale, Jonny Isakson, and Allen Buckley. For the House of Representatives, I can vote for the candidates from District 6 of the 14 Georgia districts. At the state level, I can vote for the Georgia Senate District 48 (even though there is only one candidate), and Georgia House of Representatives District 50 (also with a candidate running unopposed).
Gender Roles and Advertising: The Gender Advertising Remixer
The Gender Advertising Remixer made me realize how staunchly different ads directed to boys and girls are. They are both at completely opposite ends of the gender stereotype spectrum. Either the advertisers went all in making the toys directed at boys feel more violent and action oriented, or they made the toys directed at girls feel hyper-cheerful and fun. The ads targeting boys used more dark colors and intense music. The ads targeting girls featured more bright pinks and happy music and singing. Merging two of these ads together made for a pretty weird advertisement that just felt wrong. This is probably a lingering effect of the gender roles ingrained in me from such a young age where boys were supposed to play with “action figures” and girls were supposed to play with “dolls”. Looking at these ads now it’s easy to see how gender is so easily seen in black and white. From youth, we are bombarded with media and advertisements basically telling us that we have to be one or the other. And as we talked about in Dr. Fernandez’s class today, that simply isn’t the case.
Discussion: Unit 2 Readings
In Arcades, Magasins de Nouveautis, Sales Clerks, why does Benjamin choose to write his description of the Arcades in such a convoluted way? I understand that including multiple commentaries on the Arcades suggests a larger effect that the built environment had on the community, but in the end I think he could’ve made his text a little less intimidating and a little more straightforward for the sake of understanding. I think organizing the text would have taken less attention from how the text was written and added more to why it was written.
New Blog Design
So last week during work I was really bored and, instead of beginning my 10 page research paper due two days from now, I decided to play around with my blog. I ended up completely changing the design of my blog to make it more organized and less noisy than before. I had already had all of my posts categorized but now the categories are at the top of the home page for easy access. I went through my posts and added tags to make them all easily accessed as well. The design I chose has this cool feature called a “tag cloud” that shows all of the tags in one big cloud. The largest tags are the ones most frequently used on my blog.
I really liked this theme because it puts all of my posts up front and center on the home page. My last one had a static homepage and then you had to navigate to my posts separately, which I thought was really annoying. This theme is much simpler in design (there isn’t any repeating GSU logo) but more complex in presentation of the content I publish. Hope you all enjoy!