What's behind the Media?

Media shapes reality by making people believe that we have to buy what we see on TV. The advertisements are very interesting and eye catching that’s makes people feel like they need what they see in the advertisement. For example, lets say we are the producers and we want to make a commercial for beer. Our target audience for this example is young men in the need of attention. In the commercial we want the perfect man, a buff, tall with a nice smile man holding a beer. Next to him there is his perfect match, a young beautiful girl dressed very provocative trying to get his attention because there is also other girls holding on to him by his muscles. This particular commercial would make young men in the need of attention go buy a beer thinking that they will get girls attention just like the perfect man in the commercial.                                                                                       Now the question is, how do the researchers get society to follow the new trend? Market researchers study teen culture to find cutting edge trends leading advertisers to use those certain trends, which mean the trends, become part of mass culture. Back in the 1990’s Sprite was popular, MTV found a way to introduce hip hop to society by paying kids to dance and drink sprite to show how cool they are. Sprite became associated with the ‘coolness’ of hip-hop. Those are examples of how producers get us to buy their products to be part of the new trend. Now that we know how they catch our attention let’s talk about consumerism. Consumerism creates problems with how people spend their money, how teenagers and young adults get manipulated and how it creates an emotional connection to specific restaurants or brands, resulting in consumers to blindly follow marketers’ expectations.                                                                                                                                        Advertising makes individuals believe that it’s a positive outcome to keep buying their products and the promise ads make to teenagers is that spending money helps them fit in. It’s easy to catch teenagers’ attention as we see.                                                   The American culture can manipulate us by making us believe that we need to have the money moving from store to store. When in reality buying things we don’t need is a waste of our money. In the article called “ Debtor’s Prism,” the author shows that there are many contradictory messages about debt. In the article the author talks about how if you don’t spend your money you will be an unhappy person, but it’s a negative reality because if you spend too much money you will catch yourself borrowing money leaving you in debts that may have to be paid until death.  The author writes “It’s not whether you have it: its not even how you get it, exactly… it’s what you do with your riches that really counts”. The message behind that is that as long as the money moves you are good. The article also brought up Ebenezer Scrooge, a character that did not like to spend money on food nor does he liked to spend money on food for him. Even some ads had recognized that he would just sit on top of his money.