Today we looked at various magazines to see what percentage of the magazine was made up of advertisements. I was somewhat pleased to see that the percentages weren't as high as we predicted. However, it is frustrating that people are paying to look at ads in some cases (Home & Garden) more than they are paying for content. Even some of the content may be contaminated with ads as well. It also makes you wonder how many of your ideas, opinions and biases are based on ads that you may or may not be aware of absorbing. Even when we don't think we're paying attention to ads, they are still planting themselves somewhere in our unconscious.
We also spent some time looking at the biggest media companies to see what other companies they owned. I found the ownership chart to be extremely insightful: http://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart/main. It seems that there's so much buying and selling of various companies that it makes you wonder... what is the point? If smaller companies are always being acquired and traded between larger companies, are they really making changes in those smaller companies or just acquiring them to generate revenue?
I am amazed already at your media fluency, and it's great that you are seriously considering the potential negative affects of advertising on society. Hopefully you are a person that can institute some long term help to our media inundated (whatever makes money gets advertised) society-
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It would be interesting to look back at these magazines to see just how high the percentages would be if we read the articles themselves and looked to see if they support a particular brand or attitude. It's not something I've done before, but I suspect that magazines in some categories have a great deal of "content" that is actually advertising in disguise. I know this is true in many women's magazines, but I wonder what other genres have a similar pattern. Could be an interesting research study.
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