Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Walk on the wild side

Walk on the Wild Side:Subliminal Advertising
Ever been watching a movie and suddenly get the munchies? Or sitting on your sofa watching TV and suddenly get the irresistible urge to buy a new car? If so, you may be the victim of a subliminal advertising conspiracy! Proponents include Wilson Bryan Key (author of "Subliminal Seduction") and Vance Packard (author of "The Hidden Persuaders"), both of whom claimed that subliminal (subconscious) messages in advertising were rampant and damaging. Though the books caused a public outcry and led to FCC hearings, much of both books have since been discredited, and several key "studies" of the effects of subliminal advertising were revealed to have been faked. In the 1980s, concern over subliminal messages spread to bands such as Styx and Judas Priest, with the latter band even being sued in 1990 for allegedly causing a teen's suicide with subliminal messages (the case was dismissed). Subliminal mental processing does exist, and can be tested. But just because a person perceives something (a message or advertisement, for example) subconsciously means very little by itself. There is no inherent benefit of subliminal advertising over regular advertising, any more than there would be in seeing a flash of a commercial instead of the full twenty seconds. Getting a person to see something for a split-second is easy; filmmakers do it all the time (watch the last few frames in Hitchcock's classic "Psycho"). Getting a person to buy or do something based on that split-second is another matter entirely. (The conspiracy was parodied in the 1980s television show Max Headroom, in which viewers were exploding after seeing subliminal messages called "blipverts.")

 I won't claim no eager beaver account executive ever slipped a subliminal message into an ad,  but Wilson Bryan Key is the kind of guy who could find something suggestive in a dial tone. Revealing testimony on this score comes  from the Skeptical Inquirer. The images are just happenstance, the equivalent of seeing a face in the clouds.


 We Fall for "Tradition"

Some people believe that squeezing a lime into a Corona beer is a time-honored Mexican custom that came about to enhance the beer's taste. Others maintain that the ritual derives from an ancient Meso-American practice designed to combat germs, with the lime's acidity destroying bacteria. The truth? The Corona-and-lime ritual dates back only to 1981, when, reportedly on a bet with his buddy, a bartender popped a lime wedge into the neck of a Corona to see if he could start a trend.

This simple act, which caught on like wildfire, is generally credited with helping Corona overtake Heineken as the best-selling imported beer in the U.S. market.

 Shapes Have a Draw
A large food manufacturer once tested two different containers for a diet mayonnaise aimed at female shoppers. Both containers held the exact same mayo, and both bore the exact same label. The only difference? The shapes of the bottles. The first was narrow around the middle and thicker at the top and on the bottom. The second had a slender neck that tapered down into a fat bottom, like a genie bottle.

When asked which product they preferred, every single subject--all diet-conscious women--selected the first bottle without even having tasted the stuff. Why? The researchers concluded that the subjects were associating the shape of the bottle with an image of their own bodies. And what woman wants to resemble an overstuffed Buddha, particularly after she's just spread diet mayonnaise on her turkey and alfalfa sandwich?

 Subliminal advertising--hidden messages embedded in ads--is considered a deceptive business practice by the Federal Trade Commission. Yet a legal kind of "subliminal" persuasion happens every day. Shoppers are regularly encouraged to buy by appeals to their senses or unconscious assumptions. I believe it is plausible, some just tend to over do it.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Unpopular culture quest

  Negative Effects of Porn in popular culture

We all think that we are not affected by porn, but we have because it's embedded in surrounding pop culture.Porn effects you whether you view it or not.
It's ironic, but it is hard to have an adult conversation about porn. In some areas, topics are so taboo that you risk your reputation even to raise them. Kind of like I am doing bye picking this for my unpopular culter quest.

 Anti-pornography activist, Gail Dines, notes that young men who become addicted to porn “neglect their schoolwork, spend huge amounts of money they don’t have, become isolated from others, and often suffer depression.” (Pornland, 93). Dr. William Struthers, who has a PhD in biopsychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago, confirms some of these and adds more, finding that men who use porn become controlling, highly introverted, depressed, dissociative, distractible, narcissistic, curious, and have high anxiety and low self-esteem (Wired for Intimacy, 64-65). Ironically, while viewing porn creates momentary intensely pleasurable experiences, it ends up leading to several negative lingering psychological experiences.

Porn demeans and objectifies women.This occurs from hard-core to soft-core pornography. Pamela Paul, in her book Pornified, quoting the research of one psychologist who has researched pornography at Texas A&M, writes,
‘Soft-core pornography has a very negative effect on men as well. The problem with soft-core pornography is that its voyeurism teaches men to view women as objects rather than to be in relationships with women as human beings.’ According to Brooks, pornography gives men the false impression that sex and pleasure are entirely divorced from relationships. In other words, pornography is inherently self-centered–something a man does by himself, for himself–by using another woman as the means to pleasure, as yet another product to consume

Porn lies about what it means to be male and female. Dines records how porn tells a false story about men and women. In the story of porn, women are “one-dimensional” –they never say no, never get pregnant, and can’t wait to have sex with any man and please them in whatever way imaginable (or even unimaginable). On the other hand, the story porn tells about men is that they are “soulless, unfeeling, amoral life-support systems for erect penises who are entitled to use women in any way they want. These men demonstrated zero empathy, respect, or love for the women they have sex with … (Pornland,).”

I know I enjoy the company of women and when I was much younger I viewed porn. I believe we all did at some point in our lives, whether your willing to admit it or not is another thing. I now have evolved beyond all that. I hope my argument was persuasive enough.