Advertising is one of the main storytellers in our culture. One central story it

Question

Advertising is one of the main storytellers in our culture. One central story it tells is that happiness is the result of consumption.

In this clip, communications scholar Sut Jhally explains how we often ask the wrong questions about advertising when we focus on individual effects. Instead, he argues that we need to understand advertising's collective impact on our culture. Watch this video: Advertising and the End of the World - https://wwnorton.com/common/mplay/6.8/?p=%2fcollege%2fsoc%2f&f=advertising_end_of_the_world&ft=mp4&s=bt&cc=1.

Then Answer the following questions: Think of an ad you have seen recently.

How does it reflect a cultural value?

What cultural values do think advertisements do not typically reflect?

What do you think our culture might be like without advertising?

What impact do you think that advertising has on our culture as a whole?

Explanation / Answer

I have seen a cigarette advertisement which depicted smoking as a sign of manliness and status symbol. It also depicted that girls will be attracted to them. This type of sensuous and wrong value is thrust on people and they just believe it. Today the number of people smoke has increased tremendously.

Advertisements don’t depict the lifestyle of ordinary people and regular life of people instead, they create an ideal life style and ideal self-image which are very unrealistic. They don’t show the ill effects of the products and the financial struggle people will undergo.

Our culture will be safe without advertising because they promote materialistic and consumerist society. People can retain their self-esteem as there won’t be any ideal self – image or ideal life style to compare and get stressed.

Advertisements have made people consume products that are more than their buying power thus pushing them towards loans and EMIs. They have created artificial needs and made them develop a complex if they don’t have that product. Besides, advertisements make people compare their products with others. This way, they have made most of the luxuries into needs. They also try to make it as the dominant culture in order to promote their products. People are stressed out because their expenditure keeps growing while their earning remains same.

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