2010년 10월 11일 월요일

My media history

My media history

It is not necessary to say that these days we are so many kinds of Media. I think that we are getting much more involved in media since smart phones are introduced to the market recently. I am watching TV, listening to the radio, surfing the internet and reading news. (Actually these days on the internet, not news papers)

However, the media which influenced on me when I was young was little bit different from one now. When I was six to nine years old I used to watch one of kids programs, bbo bbo boo. This program was so popular not only with kids but also adults. I could say that every kid used to watch this program and every parent knew this program at that time. I always sang the title song of the program and liked to do imitate what the other kids did in the program.
          




When I little bit grew up about 12 years old, my favorite TV program was one animation which is pocket monster. Even though I did not really like animations, I always needed to watch this and liked to watch because it was like what the children that age had to do. It was not just about the animation on TV. We always wanted to have all things related to the animation, pocket monster. There were lots of products with the pocket monster characters but the one which had a huge influence on children was bread.
By buying that bread we could get the stickers of pocket monster characters. Every elementary school student collected the stickers and the children wanted to have many kinds of character stickers or the stickers which others do not have. The more stickers they wanted, the more bread they needed to buy. Even they threw away the bread and just got the stickers.
During my middle school days, TV and internet were main media for me but when I entered to high school I started to listen to the radio. It was difficult to watch TV and surf the internet because I stayed at school till late at night. So the only media I could keep in touch with was the radio. I never thought about what influence the media had on me at that time but maybe it was like friend, break and the only easy way to get out of the pressure of studying.

These days, as a university student, one media which is really important to me is definitely the internet. Without internet I could say that I can not live. Even I watch TV programs on the internet, read news and text friends. Internet is almost everything in my routine and I think it is same with other students and workers. Recently, smart phones are getting popular. In this wave I guess that the influence of the internet become much greater. If we think of the rapid spread of many SNS (social network service), we would know this.

2010년 9월 13일 월요일

Ad deconstruction

Can you guess what this ad means?


If you see this ad without any context, it might be hard to understand what this picture for. These are just like pictures of women from Japan and India. The special thing of this ad is that the tongue part is three-dimensional. This tongue makes people try pulling out it and it comes out. On the tongue, it says “get the native tongue” , “institute of foreign languages” and its telephone number.

 
 
This ad appeared in Korea University in December 2008 to advertise the institution and lecture interestingly.

This advertisement is intended for people who want to learn foreign language especially students, considering the place where it appeared.

But, this ad is a little bit different from other language lecture ads with the tongue picture and the copy, “get the native tongue.” From this, we can guess that the lecture is for the students who would like to improve their language skill in pronunciation and communication, not only focusing on reading and writing. Also it might be for over intermediate language learner.

This ad is really noticeable because of colors and design and it is kind of simple. It uses white color for background, it makes two women pictures more noticeable. And it just shows faces without any other body parts since it can express what it wants to say with only the tongue or even it can emphasis its meaning without any other body parts. The traditional costume strengthens the copy “native tongue”. Simple picture without any commercial words comes to us more friendly because people tend to avoid ads which look too commercial.


Moreover, looking at this photo closely, you can know that this ad is posted very near the button for the elevator. People are tempted to pull out the tongue since they have to push the button which is located just below the ad.