Week 6 Homework

1. Bring in a print advertisement and do a one page, double-spaced write up describing how the advertisement you found portrays women or men. Is this portrayal positive or negative? Is it clear what product is being sold?

2. Read the article below.

Expert from “Meaning and Ideology” be Judith Williamson

But it is too simple to say that advertising reduces people to the status of things, though clearly this is what happens when both are used symbolically. Certainly advertising sets up connections between certain types of consumers and certain products; and having made these links and created symbols of exchange it can use them as ‘given’, and so can we. For example: diamonds may be marketed by likening them to eternal love, creating a symbolism where the mineral means something not in its own terms, as a rock, but in human terms, as a sign. Thus a diamond comes to ‘mean’ love and endurance for us. Once the connection has been made, we begin to translate the other way and in fact to skip translating altogether: taking the sign for what it signifies, the thing for the feeling.

Advertisements are selling us something else besides consumer goods: in providing us with a structure in which we, and those goods, are interchangeable, they are selling us ourselves. And we need those selves. It is the materiality and historical context of this need which must be given as much attention as that equation of people with things. An attempt to differentiate amongst both people and products is part of the desire to classify, order, and understand the world, including one’s own identity. But in our society, while the real distinctions between people are created by their role in the process of production, as workers, it is the products of their own work that are used, in the false categories invoked by advertising, to obscure the real structure of society by replacing class with the distinctions made by the consumptions of particular goods. Thus instead of being identified by what they produce, people are made to identify themselves with what they consume. From this arises the false assumption that workers ‘with two cars and a colour TV’ are not part of the working class. We are made to feel that we can rise or fall in society through what we are able to buy, and this obscures the actual class basis that still underlies social position. The fundamental differences in our society are still class differences, but use of manufactured goods as a means of creating classes or groups forms an overlay on them.