Week 6 Responses

1.
-Facebook, although the most popular social networking site in the world, is very hesitant to let users know it's real purpose; to make money by advertising more specifically than ever before.
-I agree with the fact that facebook indeed separates us from our actual lives instead of "enhancing" our relationships. Quantity is definitely more important to social networking users than quality.
I also agree that facebook is deliberately trying to replace nature and the real world with a virtual world, which facebook's original board member Peter Thiel admits himself. He quotes Thomas Hobbes who said that life was nasty, brutish, and short, saying that the new virtual world of facebook will bring about the conquering of nature. He has also given money to researchers that experiment on artificial ways to make people live longer.
I don't agree with facebook's ridiculous claims of a fake version of privacy. The small print in it's privacy statement is enough to make the strongest stomach quiver with nausea. It essentially tells you that anything you enter into your computer at any point in your life will be saved and even if you decide to change it, an original version will always be kept.
I also don't agree with the way advertisers are exploiting facebook users on a whole new level by targeting them with super-specific ads that they almost can't resist. Facebook quietly sits back and lets users enter all of their interests into the networking site, and then this information is sold to corporations to put ads on specific people's pages.
2.
Williams' article went over almost everything we have focused on in class when it comes to big media controlling the way we see things. From TV to newspapers to video games, ads are subconsciously remodeling society and what we desire from it. Parents can only be "good" parents for so long by not letting their children watch TV for hours on end or submit to their incessant begging for toys/merchandise. At a certain point, schools will be influencing children with ads just as much as if the kids had sat home all day and watched TV. Besides being a total recluse, there is no way around it. The only way to prepare for what's to come is to properly educate those who won't recall a time we didn't have cell phones or internet access 24/7. It takes much practice to realize that when you see an ad something on TV, it is most likely much different in real life, and mush less satisfying as well.
3.
-Younger women are used in ads to target a younger crowd.
-Men are depicted as strong and resilient, while women are seen as vulnerable and quiet.
-Only 5% of the female population of the world could ever look like the ones in advertisements, and it would be genetically rather than because of dieting.
-Girls self esteem is fine before they hit adolescence, but it then drops because they don't look like women on TV.
-Violence towards women has recently been seen as erotic, if not wanted. "No means yes?"