COMM 390: 'What the $%^#?" -- a note (and a link) on strategic reading and reading between the lines

Did you feel like you needed to put on hip boots to wade through today's reading from "Ads, Fads, & Consumer Culture" by Arthur Berger? There's good information there, but there's a lot of stuff about Freud, about French post-structural philosophy (bet you were happy to see it, weren't you? Oh boy, I haven't read any good French post-structuralism lately), and a bunch of other stuff you can relax about because you aren't going to have to worry about it for COMM 390.

But there's also a little bit of good common sense in there, too, along with the academic bafflegab. So how do extract it? Skim-read. It's that easy. Huh? He say what? Skim-read through all that stuff that doesn't make a @#$%! bit of sense? How am I going to do that?

Easy. Just keep skimming till you come across something that does make sense.

Example. When I read through Friday's assignment in Arthur Berger's "Ads, Fads, & Consumer Culture," I didn't find much in the front matter that interested me very much till I got to the mention of Vance Packer's "Hidden Persuaders" on page xvi. It was an influential book, and it made an important point -- that we're all manipulated subconsciously by ads, without our being aware of it. So I circled it in green ink. (Like a lot of teachers, I don't use red ink. I don't want to brutalize your little psyches by turning back papers that look bloody.) The books are cheap, and I'm not going to sell them back. By marking in the book I can come back to the passage more quickly when I need it later. Doesn't take me very much time at all.

Try it yourself. Do it a couple of times. Once you get used to it, it'll save you time.

Here's a link to a handout from Virginia Tech about a reading technique known as SQ3R that I recommend highly. It stands for Survey-Question-Read-Recite-Review (or something like that, I tend to do the three R's all at once). It sounds gimmicky. Worse: If you took developmental reading, or "study skills" as freshmen, it sounds like English 099. But it works.

If you're studying something for total recall, say for an oral examination or if you need to operate a new piece of complicated machinery without slicing your fingers off, you go through all the steps of SQ3R. If you just need to find some information, you can get by with the first one or two.

So when I was ripping through Berger's introduction, I was doing the "S-Q" part of SQ3R. I was surveying it and asking myself (questioning) what information I could use. When I found something, I marked. The "3 R's" come later, when and if I go back to it.

Today in class we'll go through the rest of the assignment, chapters 8 and 9 on how to analyze ads and commercials, with SQ3R in mind. We'll survey it first. What makes sense? What doesn't, so we can skip over it quickly? What does? Let's identify the parts we can use later and mark them. That's getting into the "Q" part of SQ3R, when we question what we're going to be able to use. Right?

Hint: The chapters are on analyzing ads and TV spots, and each one has a list of common-sense questions on what to ask yourself as you do an analysis. Don't those lists kind of stand out from all the academic bafflegab and make you want to slow down and remember them?

Then we'll look at the ads Berger analyzes. Another hint: In addition to the Freudian, myth-and-ritual, Marxist, feminist and other academic analyses, can we just do a common-sense analysis as consumers and media professionals? What's the message? (Let's call that the text of the ad, just so we're all on the same page.) What's being said between the lines? (Let's call that a subtext. A message, or text, can have more than one subtext.) See also what Arthur Berger says about texts on page 137 of today's reading. Below are links to websites that feature both ads.

• In case you didn't get anything out of the tiny b&w illustration in Berger (figure 8.1 p. 141), here's a better picture of the Fidji ad with the picture of a woman wearing a snake around her neck. It's from a webpage on semiotics (see below for a definition) in advertising put up by Scotland's Heriot Watt University. You can also find larger pictures on eBay, by doing a Google search on keywords like Fidji perfume ad girl reptile.
  
  
• To see the 1984 Macintosh ad, go to YouTube. The ad is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8". And there's also a six-minute clip of director Scott Ridley discussing how he shot the ad from storyboard to classic TV production.
  
  
• Feel like you've seen this before? If you followed last year's election, you have. Before the primaries, a supporter of Barack Obama put togheter a mashup featuring Hillary Clinton as the unsettling "Big Brother" figure in the ad. And here's Slate.com's take on the mashup by political analyst John Dickerson.

The point to all of this? (And, yes, there is a point.) There's more to an ad than meets the eye. You don't have to use academic bafflegab when you go looking for it. But you do have to look. If you don't, you're allowing yourself to be manipulated.