Zev's Media Blog

        Keeping this blog and taking critical thinking has acted as a rude awakening for me. Before having taken this class, I was a lot more unaware of many aspects of media than I would have like to have thought at the time. For instance, I did assume that companies used certain tools to try to convey to their audience that their product will be useful and worthy of consumers to buy. However, I never would have imagined every single technique, and how detailed the techniques are, they use, and how desperately they try to get them to work on their audience. I thought at the time that advertisements were attempting to market towards everybody, not just a select group of people (target market audience). However, this has now become obviously false.         Now that I am more aware of the strategies employed by advertisers, I am less likely to be pursuaded by their ads. While watching commercials and even some TV shows, I can identify a lot of t...

        I think the key to a well-performing and successful media site is intuition. If a site is not easy to operate or figure out within the first couple times using it, the majority of the potential audience is lost.         Before I chose to write about this topic, I was thinking about a different subject. I had imported my images (about five) to blogger and was trying to format it properly. I kept jumping back and forth between the post "composition" window and the "preview" window, trying to get the pictures to appear well-formatted. I spent easily over ten minutes trying to get the pictures to align the way I wanted them to. Eventually, after searching for multiple solutions, I gave up, because blogger's formatting wasn't letting me put the pictures where I wanted them.          Looking around at the successful media sites, such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc., they all have at least one fa...

        This is a problem that cannot go unaddressed. It surrounds us: in and out of the workplace; schools; social events; and so on. Women are constantly subjected to torment over what they wear and how they choose to wear it. As much as some would like to think otherwise, this is even a problem at C.K. McClatchy High School.         I have witnessed/heard about a countless number of dress code violations since I have been here. Out of these, the vast majority of those accused are women. I can't help noticing and being concerned at this-why is this happening?         I took a look in the student handbook, flipping to page 11 where dress code policy was addressed. If you would like to look for yourself but don't want to bother finding your handbook, you can find it here . (On the website version, the first three bullet points discuss "revealing apparel", "length of pants, shorts, and skirts", and "wearing pants, shorts, an...

                      As discussed in Merchants of Cool, cool hunting is the method used by professionals to predict upcoming trends by surveying or observing trendsetters (cool kids)/a given company's demographic in attempts to become ahead of the game. These professionals then report back to big companies their findings. It's essentially a big formula--cool hunters survey trendsetters, present a company with their information, the company then turns around and uses the info on what's cool to tweak their products, and so on and so on. However, at the end of this chain, what this cycle ultimately suffers from is that the cool product is cool for a split second, the trendsetters move on, and suddenly the whole process starts all over again.         Keeping in mind that what's now considered cool won't be tomorrow, cool hunting is to blame for this horrible circumstance. What this process does is create indu...

        Recently, I have felt more and more trapped in social media. I have started to realize different platforms' techniques to suck users in and keep them there. One example of this is Instagram's smart search feed which picks out posts you'll like based off of what you've previously viewed and liked. However, the most prominent example of this would be Snapchat streaks--where the user has to send their friend a picture everyday and expects one back from their friend. Snapchat keeps track of how many days in a row you've consecutively you and your friend have sent pictures back and forth. They add that number of days along with a couple emojis next to your friend's username.         There are a few problems this causes both in real life and on social media. The first, and most damaging, problem is that people assume that because you don't return their streaks, you don't like them. And if you break a streak with somebody on purpose, they are c...