media ethics

 

After watching the six videos, they all seem to have a common theme that is online and especially in advertising there are a lot of deceptions and propaganda used to sell a product. One idea I found interesting was that advertisers are not advertising the product, but they are advertising the idea of owning that product and the lifestyle that come with it, when the video was talking about this idea my first thought was cigarette companies and how the company Marlboro starting doing this in 1954 by using a cool cowboy smoking a cigarette to try to make man at the time feel as if they were to start smoking that they would also be like the cool cowboy. But in the video “How one man manipulated all of America (Edward Bernays)” I learned that this type advertising had been done by cigarette companies even before the Marlboro man, after the first world war ended a similar campaign had taken place to a greater extent that’s aim was to try to get women to start smoking. Unlike the Marlboro man which aimed to sell a lifestyle when Edward Bernays sold smoking cigarettes to women, we were trying to sell them the idea of having their ideal body while also being more independent, Bernays also did not at any time directly advertised cigarettes, he manipulated some women into wanting to smoke, and he tricked the rest of society by making it more acceptable to smoke.

The video discussing how dark patterns trick you online was very informative, as when I went to delete my old Facebook, Twitter and Amazon account I ran into trouble trying to delete them and ended up having to google how to do it. The map used to describe dark patterns reminded me of the layout of an IKEA, like how once you’re in it's not impossible to leave, but they have made it as difficult as possible to do so. I have noticed how hard it was to delete my old accounts or unsubscribe from an advertisers constant spam emails, but I never knew that these were called dark patterns and I never thought that these subliminal patterns could be used to misdirect my attention to either click on something I didn’t mean to or completely forget what I was originally trying to do, for example if I was trying to delete my account on Amazon as the video showed I would have to scroll to the bottom of the home page and go through several steps before even been given the hidden option to delete my account most people wouldn’t be bothered go through all these steps and just create a new account and leave the old one inactive as I know many people including my self that have done that.