Have I Grown Up?

etc?

      Let's keep it real. How much do I watch tv? Not all the often. How much do I look at magazines and other types of printed sources for entertainment? Not all that often. Yet, getting down to it, how often am I on twitter, snapchat, Instagram, and other forms of social media? The time keeper on my phone says four-to-five hours, daily. So yeah, I guess all that often. So what does that mean for me? Well it means out of my fifteen-hour day I spend about five hours being bombarded with advertisements in and out of the main stream media. At one point I only knew of the mainstream media, but I didn't think much of it. Little did I realize that the world I live in is shaped by the marketing campaigns, main media, personal media, and the few people who live with influence.
      I would say I am better at looking at at advertisements and realizing the difference between "BS" ads conveying lies as compared to ads which tell me what I need to know. However, I would not call myself literate. To be literate, to me, means to completely understand the underlying intentions for the creation. After this class I would be willing to agree some can do this and be considered literate, but for I, I am not one of these. I am taking quick steps in a positive direction towards media literacy. After this assignment and this class I can without a doubt watch a commercial and find everything from assumptions to pathos, ethos, and logos. My natural view of an ad has become more scientific than it had been just months before. Rather than counting myself as a viewer, I would now appreciate the term analyzer. For I have grown.

        Why is my simple growth such an important part of my life? Why is literacy even needed? Well, the answers are quite simple really. It all dates back in time. Advertisements, propaganda, and commercials began as more than just Coca-cola asking you what color Santa's suit is, or Volkswagen changing to pathos due to TDI Clean Diesel tricks. It started in war time. Leaders hired propaganda artists to sway the people and create a world where their image is spread across the land. Hitler spread ads in media in order to expel the Jewish people from the land anyway possible. Martin Luther King Jr. used it to spread the message of inequality among a "free" nation of "peers." Yet the trick to literacy is in the moment of this happening deciding when it is right to listen to the ad and when it is right go against the media's idea of correctness. Our world is overrun by the media, it's our job to realize the good from the bad, to have control when it's needed, and to see what an ad is really showing for what it is, not what it's painted to be.