Review Paper #3

Mr. David Mayeda
Cross-Cultural Relations Soc-3380
3rd Review paper Sociological Images
Nile C. Finney
Tension in Consumer ad’s

I found this particular assignment to be really interesting to work with. Besides the articles that I selected for this review paper I did get a chance to read many articles from this website which were also very intriguing. The first article I did read was labeled “Tickle Me Elmo and The Gangster Meme”. This is about a toy ad that uses rap music and what look to be like gang signs as a marketing approach to lure kids to buy their product. This kind of marketing scheme in my opinion is not that bad as people make it but by all means they could have made a more appropriate commercial that is more suitable for children. In the commercial I did look like the children were throwing up gang signs but at the end of the day you have to use common sense and say,” Hey, I really doubt these children are throwing up gang signs!”, simply because of how young they are. Some people also say that this commercial is also somewhat racist or discriminating but again I really can’t see anything racist that is big enough for anyone to mention. In today’s society I think cultural diffusion is a part of life that is important for America’s growth. I think me need to get a hold on the racial tension in this world because you can really cut it with a knife!
The second related topic that caught my eye was the “Alvin and the Chipmunks- Modernized? Urbanized? Racialized? All of the above?” In this you can see many updated versions of the chipmunks. They have more of hip-hop style and swagger about them. This is a very smart way of marketing because kids think this kind of a style is cool. In today’s society kids are more into the urban wear such as the type of clothes the chipmunks have on in the advertisements. If I had to answer the question whether or not I think that in these advertisements do “Alvin and the Chipmunks” look more modernized, urbanized, and racialized; I would have to agree in some of the cases. In terms of this advertising being modernized and urbanized I would have to agree, but I don’t think it is racialized. It is definitely modernized because it gives the chipmunks a more up-to-date look compared to the old style of the group. Because of the style of clothes the new chipmunks are wearing is urban I would think it would qualify under as being urbanized. I wouldn’t say that this is racialized because then you are saying in my opinion that because “Alvin and the Chipmunks” are wearing urbanized clothing that this style is only for minorities (primarily African-Americans). So in that sense I would not classify these children advertisements a racialized.
The last topic I came upon was called “Pointlessly Gendered Products”. It was probably the most interesting out of all the material that I used for this assignment. On this page of the website it had a lot of funny (of course in my opinion) and pointless genderized advertisements. One that I found to be really useless was an advertisement for Shoprider GK-10 Scooter for people that are not able to walk or move as well. I found this particular advertisement to be useless because they scooters were separated not by attributes but by color. To me this is stupid because I highly doubt someone is going to choose a scooter based off color especially if those two colors are pink and blue. But as scrolled down on this page and noticed all the other advertisements I notice that all of them for the most part were gender motivated. In my opinion this just goes to show how discrimitive and gendered based America is. All the advertisements where differentiated by girl or boy characteristics. For, example there was an advertisement for costumes; but for boys they only had superman and for girls only Tinkerbelle. Another example was a pair of earplugs for people while you sleep. The only thing was that the earplugs were pink and had a woman on the cover of the box. To me this sends a message saying that only men snore loud enough to the point where anyone would need to buy earplugs. After using these articles and reading many more from the website given to us from Mr. Mayeda tells me that this world is still a long way from correcting America’s problems not with cultural diffusion and discrimination but also dealing with socialization (obviously), social stratification, and prejudice.
Resources:
http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/09/30/tickle-me-elmo-and-the-gangster-meme/
http://contexts.org/socimages/2008/04/10/modernizing-alvin-and-the-chipmunks/
http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/01/21/pink-earplugs-for-your-beauty-sleep/