COMM 390: A revised assignment for your blogs

When I said last week I'd like for you to post links to ads that we can discuss in class, perhaps I was being a little too subtle.

I asked you to find ads that tend to prove -- or disprove -- Jean Kilbourne's thesis that advertising, taken as a whole, promotes stereotypes that tend to corrupt relationships and weaken marriages. This, of course, is leading up to a final exam in which you answer these questions: Do you agree with her thesis? To what extent? Be specific. What can we (which also means each one of you, of course, do about it as media professionals? As consumers? However, only one of you so far has posted anything.

So please allow me to rephrase the assignment.

You are hereby COMMANDED to go out on the World Wide [expletive deleted] Web and find a [expletive deleted] ad that portrays gender stereotypes we can discuss in class and [expletive deleted] post a link to it on your class blog.

Do I make my meaning clear?

Notes

1. Thanks to Gina, who has posted a link to a story about a Fetish perfume ad that raised questions about when women say "no" and mean ... what a product spokesman said was certainly not intended to be an invitation to date rape but was "meant to encourage self-expression and individuality." We'll take a look at it later. When we do, let's compare that stuff about self-expression to what Jean Kilbourne says about getting people to rebel against conformity by purchasing certain types of products. Any similarity?

2. While we're at it, I need to update my links at the top of The Mackerelwrapper start page. I noticed tonight I'm lacking links to blogs by Erick Clark, Jeff Hall and Mike Pulliam.

3. If you haven't discovered the joy of embedding links to YouTube on your blog, this would be a good time to try it. I'll demonstrate below with a classic ad from the 1970s involving a stereotype immediately recognizable in my home state of Tennessee.

A. I did a keyword search in the YouTube search engine on "Tennessee Trash," the title of the commercial.

B. Once I decided I wanted to link to the ad, I I highlighted the text in the field at the right of the YouTube page that says "Embed."

C. In the window I had open to the Blogger dashboard for my blog, I pasted the text into the "Edit Posts" field. On the line just below this point in the text:



D. Then I clicked on "Publish Post."

And there it was, embedded in all its glory. How can anything be easier than that?