Blog #8

One thing that could very well happen in the future is the elimination of commercial breaks. With so many channels now availiable for easy access from a remote, commercia;l breaks very often lose the viewer for possibly the entire show. I forsee commercials being abandoned and advertisements within the shows. Either by puting the comercial on half the screen while the show is still on on the left, or some sort of variation of this. The use of telling the viewer how long the commercial break is, has become a very regular thing on television. But it doesn't work for me. I hear that and I think, "Well I know when it is going to come back on, so I might as well find something else to watch in the meantime." But what will happen is that I will find something else and get hooked on that. I feel that the next step will be non-commercial break shows. I feel that the first network to do this could have a humoungouse boost in ratings, and then the entire network television concept would change. It could be revolutionary, and totally awesome. This would almost guarantee that the consumer would be exposed to the advertisements. Maybe they wo'n be fully concentrated on them, but they are not going to change the channel because then they would miss part of their show. This would be totally cool, and an awesome change to television.

Blog #7

The coolest concept that we have explored so far this year in our class is deffinately the argument of media affecting the culture, or culture affecting media. There are so many arguments for both ways that both have seemed to be true at different times. Media deffinately affects culture. We see the new things on commercials and we go out and buy them. The advertisers appeal to what we value in America and make us go one step further and buy their product. On the same note, media bases a lot of its advertisements off of our core values. We see many things involved in advertisements. Whether it be a a youthful star used to advertise sports, or a rich successful buisness man driving a car. There are so many ways that both media affects culture and culture affects media. At the begginning of the year I was almost convinced that media was only affected by culture. I simply didn't understand the knowledge that was behind the media. Almost everything is carefully planned out to get us, the consumer to buy our product. Sure we do have an impact on what is being shown in media, but also we are basically owned by media. We are told what to buy, we are told how to act, and some times we are even told what to think. This argument is very interesting, its answer is not set in stone, and that is what makes it an interesting topic.