Laying Bets: W Will Win

kelley kwalker2 at gte.net
Tue Aug 15 07:08:43 PDT 2000



>
>I have no taste.
>
>ken

but ya like me??? heh. anyway, why do you think that people are sheep in such a straightforward way? there are, for one, plenty of reader-response type studies that show how people interpret media images rather differently and this is strongly connected to the basics: gender, age, class, race. it is plainly evident to me that this is the case when i hand out a magazine advertisement in class. have 25-40 different students look at it and they were get rather different messages -- and not the ones i sometimes expect at all (and, of course, this wouldn't be a surprise: i'm reading from a distinctly different perspective, looking for symbols that they don't, reading them because i've been trained to read, say, cigarette positioning or camera angles as signs of that the person who composed the ad was trying to convey a certain msg, etc)

it is even more evident when i read or see something and pick up on all kinds of cues that someone else, particularly with different politics, just won't see.

so, i'm not sure that media so even handedly and uniformly shoves points of views down people's cranial cavities.

kelley



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