Emotionally Charged

I know I already used an image from the twin towers for another assignment but I was really thinking for a long time about an emotionally charged image and after like, all week, this came to mind and I thought, well, how perfect! I can't think of anything that could be more emotionally charged than the image of the towers either before or after 9/11.

Images like these represent SO many things. This image is now one of the ultimate symbols of patriotism. I would assume that when most people look at it they automatically associate it with any number of things like thinking anti-terrorism or mourning the loss of people who died that day or even of all the aftermath it has caused even to this day of family members who are over seas. Some people probably still see it and think of being scared to fly.

I can more than bet that when people see this image they think about what they were doing when 9/11 happened. I was getting ready to go to school way back in the 7th grade when I saw it on the news. It probably reminds some people who survived from the buildings and the emergency crews of how scared they were and basically...I think this is a perfect example of something very emotionally charged because anywhere you see this image I can guarantee that anyone old enough to remember the day will associate it with some sort of feeling or memory.

For me, personally, I know it might sound a little selfish but, when I see the twin towers, I think of my mom, who passed away two years ago, but 9/11 was her birthday and she always used to say oh well, my birthday was just another day anyways, but too bad something like that had to happen on it.

World of Warcraft

Instead of a link to the game, I posted a screenshot from the actual gameplay from World of Warcraft, the MMORPG which stands for Massive Multiplater Online Role Playing Game. I've been playing on and off now for about 5 years. Although I've never been addicted to it like a lot of people I know, I do like it and play quite a bit.

World of Warcraft, or WoW for short, most fits the "Virtual Technologies" category in which your avatar is seen and while it's your avatar and it's meant to represent you, it's ALMOST a third person point of view, not quite, but it gives that sort of experience. Unlike a first person shooter that is meant to represent you moving through space, WoW lets you view what you are doing instead of just seeing the result.

WoW uses technologies that let you group with other people, talk with other people invarious chats depending on which group of people you want to talk to, for example you can private message or "whisper" one certain person at a time or talk to different groups all at once. There's also other technologies like codes you can do to make your characters do things. For example, typing "/dance" in the game will actually make your character dance. All the different types of characters do different dances. Mine does the Electric slide. There's an elf that does the Britney Spears dance from her music video for the song "Toxic."


This is my character, Impervius is the name (it's a spell from Harry Potter haha) and my boyfriend is the other person there. When I asked him why he likes playing the game so much, he says it's because he likes to interact through it with all the friends he's made. Once again, I love the internet!

When I saw this assignment I was thinking, wait, what does this really have to do with advertisements or media?

I would say that an ad equivalent to the type of game World of Warcraft is would be an Ad in the same point of view. In this sort of ad, you would see a person meant to represent you, as in, meant to represent every person, universally. You would see this person going through a situation in a way that you could also see yourself going through personally.

Say this person is learning about a product, for example sears appliance comercials, progressive auto insuance comercials, etc, and now that you know about this product you can go out and go through the same experience with a feeling of familiarity.

I suppose video games using different points of view can teach us this =)

Chapter 3 - The Norm

With how creative people in advertising are, I kind of began to realize that most ad's can fit the description of normal and "other." I think that this assignment was a bit of a challenge though when you take most things and cleverly advertise them, they become something of an "other" automatically.

Take this FedEx ad, for example, it's taking a normal every day thing, a t-shirt, and turning it into moving advertisement for their products. It looks like the wearer is carrying an envelope with them. It's definitely an "other" type of Ad.



I also liked this one of the "yoga-straw." The creators of the ad cleverly used something normal, the flexibility of a straw and turned it into an ad for an activity in which you make your body flexible.



Lastly I liked the Ad on this truck for Hot Wheels. The normal for big rig trucks is that they are, well, big. This Ad was clever in showing the "other" in that it shrank several sizes of the truck until the Hot Wheel size was revealed.