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.

Corners- Blog Post Chapter 2

This image is one I found and I saved it to my computer for a number of reasons.

Reason 1 is because it reminds me of how many people are out there that are extraordinary in some way, whether it be the music artists, actors, authors or even the huge amount of people who aren't famous, and how everyone is from a different place. I know that I don't particularly have any talents of any kind and a number of people I know are without talents and sure, we can be interesting, but who do we inspire? Probably not very many people while there are in fact a lot of interesting people we know we'd want to meet but might not have the chance because they are out spreading their "interestingness" in different places.

Reason 2 is because the image of the actual picture, the corner of the room and a glimpse of an ordinary chair struck me as symbolizing how everyone has their own little corner of the world and even somewhere plain can house creativeness.

I know that this picture probably speaks to me more than it does to most people because of my infatuation with all the interesting people I watch on YouTube and how I'd love to meet them but they all live across the country or across the world and instead I'm stuck in my place of the world watching them but not doing anything of interest myself.

It kind of inspires me.

Objective Truth

Whenever we were discussing Chapter one and the whole idea of subjective truth, this image came to mind and I hope it fits with what we're supposed to be talking about.

This is the image of the Devil that people claim to have seen in the twin towers when they were hit. I thought that this was the only devil in the smoke image but when I searched for the picture, I found that several more images of different looking "devils" exist which even further made this all seem like a propaganda type scheme.

The act of terror on the towers is of course terrible and of course, it happened, despite all of the people who think it was some kind of conspiracy and this image doesn't represent objective truth because people all over the world are trying to turn it into some kind of sign from God saying that the terrorists are the "devil." As extreme as religions can be, this is making the whole debate into an even deeper religious conflict.

You know, anyone can see anything they want in things like clouds and smoke but I feel that this image is biased towards what religious extremists want the United States to represent. I can't say for sure if, had I looked at this image without someone pointing out the "devil," I would have seen it, which is why I didn't post any images highlighting where the image of the Devil is supposed to be. How many of you can see it, if you haven't seen it before?

Again...not sure if this image really fits with the assignment, I wasn't sure if we were supposed to find an image that was pointedly made for a specific reason or if this would work...

Political Shorts

Jrn 131 Week one, first blog post
What should and shouldn't be in the news

On a recent trip the Grand Canyon, the weather of which we all know quite well, a certain first lady by the name of Michelle Obama led her family to enjoy their vacation. As she stepped out of the family private jet, she started a debate over something not so controversial - - a pair of shorts.

Why does society care so much about her shorts? Karina Bland of the Arizona Republic writes, "more than 300,000 people responded to an online poll by the Today show, with 83 percent saying Michelle Obama had the right to bare legs. Of course she does, though even I was surprised at first to see her in shorts." Several comments on the articles website show the debate over the shorts.

"Muscular gams" my ass! Those shorts were horrible and she deserves every ounce of criticism she is getting. She looked like anything but the "First Lady", in fact, she hardly looked like a lady at all! Capri pants in a khaki material or even, gasp!, knee length shorts in a more feminine fabric than denim would have come off MUCH better. This was an embarrassing move on her part." and a response to this was one comment I thought very fitting, "Damn her free will. Get a life."

Sure there was a time when people of status were meant to dress as modest as possible, but that time is certainly not now. Free will is supposedly pretty much America's motto, and aren't there worse decisions made that we should be focusing on instead? Wearing shorts, no matter who you are, in Arizona heat is hardly an issue worth mentioning.

http://www.azcentral.com/style/fashion/articles/2009/08/24/20090824bland0823new.html

In other news, we all have heard at some point the bad publicity associated with social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook. We should all also know my fascination and love of the website YouTube. For years now I have followed the lives of various video bloggers, aka "Vloggers" and have seen their rise to internet fame and the amazing things they get to do with their lives because of it.

One of my favourite vloggers is Myles Dyer, a guy from England who for four years now has, once a year ever year, held a 24 hour long webcast to raise money for the charity Unicef. He stays up for 24 hours straight and entertains viewers and has other youtube stars guest star in short videos, all to raise awareness and raise money for the charity.

There are of course other youtubers doing things for charity, which I think is amazing because these people, these random every day people turn into something much much more because of a website that allowed them to be creative in front of an audience, and they are using this audience of luck for a greater good. I wish more people would hear about these things.

http://blog.stickam.com/index.php/2009/08/12/14-hour-stickaid-marathon-to-benefit-unicef-streams-live-815/