Advertisers Moral Responsibility

I personally believe that advertisers do have a moral duty to avoid stereotyping people. Why so? One of the biggest problems, even in today's society and developed stage, stereotyping is a massive problems. The media, with the enormous impact media has on a society nowadays, it should feel the need to respect and treat everyone equally. However, due to the firms only being concerned about maximum revenue, the consequences and impact on the non-targeted audience is often neglected. Even if possibly unintentional - like in the Mountain Dew ads by Tyler the Creator -, they leave an impression on the viewers of how an ethnic group/race/etc. is viewed or is essentially supposed to be viewed. In the case of the Mountain Dew ads, they display all criminals as black people, which is a clear indication of stereotyping, and negative critic is easily justified. Despite the motive wanting to exhibit the product as something great and superior, racial bias should be considered and thought through. This is just one example found in the US. Nevertheless, ads promoting stereotypes happens everywhere on this planet. Multiple examples can be thought off the top of my head (e.g. a watch commercial generalising women as complicated and always late). To conclude, to help eradicate or at least drastically decrease the usage of stereotypes, the media should feel a moral duty and responsibility in portraying everyone as equal and unique.

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The ad by the US Army reveals a lot about how a society and/or a nation is meant to view the military. It portrays a young soldier leaping across a dark gap, onto a bright edge. The young soldier is one indication of the intended audience, which is presumably young men starting from the age of 16 and above. What supports and broadens the audience, is the text at the bottom of the ad. It clarifies that anyone interested in a business career has better chances if they join the military. As mentioned before, the soldier leaps onto an elevated, brighter surface. This is imagery and/or symbolism and describes that joining the army guarantees you a bright future. To add onto this, the fact that the camera is angled upwards at the soldier, and all the vectors point towards the sun and brightness, depicts the army as heroic and encourages joining it.

As pointed out in the lower part of the ad, they value teamwork and promote qualities gained through the army. It does so by linking logos and ethos strongly together. And example of this would be "9 out of 10 employers said that they prefer the qualities of determination, good judgement and self-discipline." leading onto the next sentence "Qualities that the army develops." Not only does this depict facts, but also uses them to make the army more credible and useful for the future. This can then again have an emotional impact on the viewer by making them feel proud, thus developing pathos.

Since the army is rooting for itself, the empowered in this ad would be the soldiers. Through the use of a young, fit, male model, it presumably only targets young men who are physically in shape. This also outlines societal norms of the US culture. Typically, the men are present to serve and protect and fight and strive for achieving something whereas the women stereotypically have stay-at-home jobs.

Pitch for "Conflict Zone Shelter"

We were tasked to present a pitch in front of class on certain assigned topics. Alyx and I had the topic "Affordable and easy to build conflict zone shelter". This was quite a difficult topic to prepare, mainly because of the audience and how this would be presented. We finalised the audience to be Governments and NGOs which are currently deployed in conflict zones, and are struggling with housing.

In order for this pitch to work, we had to focus on specific appeals. These were as follows:

• Rational or logical appeals
• Give reasons and explain how product is better than competition
• Need to satisfy curiosity
• Mention how the tent could use recycled material → environmentally friendly
• Price efficiency
• Need to achieve
• Talk in on how the NGOs and governments want to solve conflicts and troubles regarding housing of refugees
• Need for Affiliation
• Talk about how companies who help achieve the goal will benefit by having their company name in the online video

How did these work and why did we choose them? It's fairly simple. We chose these because they are a more professional approach as to choosing a product. We wanted to achieve exactly this with an ad.

The persuasive techniques used were mainly ones relating to professionalism. For example, involving an expert who has been in action in conflict zones would be very convincing to governments and NGOs, as they would bring in first hand knowledge. Another example would be extrapolation, hypothesising that the specific shelter would clear all problems. These were most effective due to the audience they are aimed at. A high-class, professional audience needs expert proof and statistics.

The audience played a major role from the beginning. We knew that conflict zones could only affect one specific audience, as mentioned previously. This meant that we had to think of very concrete ideas and they had to pinpoint exactly what the governments and NGOs want. It also influenced the way we wanted to present our pitch. We needed to behave very confident in order for the company to see where we are coming from and to believe our expertise.

I believe the content was fairly well thought of, as approved by our teacher multiple times throughout preparation. However, changes I would make include: longer preparation time, more confidence, and possibly a different presentation layout to cause the maximum impact on the company we are pitching to.

VW Ad: Darth Vader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGZNocni6zE


To sum up the ad, a young boy dressed as Darth Vader attempts to use "the force" to move and turn on certain objects. After it obviously not working, the father comes home in his new VW Passat and parks the car. The son rushes out and attempts to turn on the car with the force. The dad then turns on the car using the car key leaving the son amazed at his own force abilities.

Since the ad by Volkswagon aims to promote its cars, the intended audience is anyone who is able to drive and is able to afford the car. Using logos, the company increases its audience by listing the price of around $20 000, which for a mid-range car, is a fairly cheap price. While watching this ad, you will notice the music in the background plays music from Star Wars. This could also increase the audience size by using pathos to inflict a nostalgic sensation among viewers. At the end of the video, the ad uses logos by stating statistics and numbers that are listed at the bottom of the screen. This again could cause Ethos by showing positive test results on the CO2 output and petrol consumption. We now all know that the numbers are all faked (VW scandal 2015). However, back in 2011, this all seemed very convincing and for the price of the vehicle, it called for a very decent deal.

Letter to the editor

This post responds to the "Twtr? It's majorly bad" article

Dear Editor,

I would like to respond to an interesting article posted on the 24 March 2014. First of all, I completely understand what your ideas are based upon, however, a few given arguments seemed very biased and inconsiderate of the positives “text speak” might offer. For one, everyone I write with regularly over social media or infrequently over email, I communicate and write casually, yet the person I communicate with and myself have barely ever used “text speak” like described in the article. The few times we have used it was to mock or essentially “make fun” of people who use it regularly. Casual in this context also means I write like I speak. I don’t use very sophisticated or any complicated language with my friends. I for myself will say “Innit”, but I would not ever think of using it in my academic writing. 

Along with this, I personally believe it’s not the actual texting which leads to problems in grammar and spelling. I believe it is the amount of time a student, especially a young developing student, is exposed to such language is a key factor which influences the way students write out- and inside of school. This leads back to the parents’ responsibility of specific allowance times for internet devices. If parents cut back the time their children are allowed to be on social media, the exposure to such “text speak” is reduced, hence reducing the adapting of “abbreviations and colloquialisms”. 

The teacher also makes a wild assumption that the next generations or the generations to come will not be able to have “correct use of grammar and spelling”. There is no statistical evidence behind this statement. After talking with a few English teachers I have had throughout the years, they all tend to disagree with that statement. Most of them said that “text speak” is a very momentary and brief period of English, which will most likely be forgotten or “eradicated” over the next few decades. 

Now I question you fellow readers, do you, or do you not agree with this head teacher and why? How often do you use “text speak” and does it influence your life as much as the article discusses?

Fictional Magazine Interview

For this task I have chosen to write a fictional interview with twenty-six year old Taylor Swift. She is an ever-growing pop star with one of - if not the - biggest fanbase of all time (245 000 000 followers across all social media).

*Disclaimer*

I am not stating I am a fan of her or her music, but I personally think her lyrics and the way she describes things are powerful and have a lot of meaning to them. Reading through the lyrics of her songs, I see how people relate to them and why she has been able to accomplish what she has … accomplished…?

Moving on, here is the fictional interview with Taylor Swift after her 4th studio album release, Red:

I:  Good morning Taylor it’s lovely to see you, welcome to our interview.

T: Hey thank you for inviting me, it’s great to be back.

I:  It’s feels like forever since you’ve been here.

T: Yes it really has been. 2 years, am I right?

I:  I feel like that’s accurate. Since you last album “Speak Now”.

T: Yes that was it.

I:  You are now here for your new album “Red” which has sold whopping 420 000 copies in it’s First. Week. Incredible

T: Thank you so much!

I:  New album, new songs. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the album?

T: Of course of course! The new songs are about the past 2 years of my life since the last album. They have been very important years to me, a lot has been happening, I have been going through a lot and I have learnt some valuable lessons.

I:  How has writing music become such an important part of your life?

T: Ohh I don’t think I could live without music anymore. It has become such an important part of my life ever since I was a little girl. I was inspired by my grandma who was an opera singer. To start out with, writing songs and poems was a way I could express my feelings. Now I can use it as a tool to communicate with all my fans and people who listen to my music.

I:  I can only compliment your artistic skills. How have you and your music changed since the last album? What is different about the two?

T: Personally, I feel like “Speak Now” was a way for me to say things which have been on my mind for a very long time, which I was either too shy or did not have the power to convince myself to let go of these things. So “Speak Now” has taught me to be a bit more daring in a way. So now with “Red” I have grown up a little, matured a little, and changed my perspective on things as well as the reasons and thoughts behind the new songs.

I:  When do you find yourself sitting down and writing down lyrics for the songs? And do you write the songs one by one?

T: I will find time anywhere to write down lyrics. They just pop into my head at given points. For example, I could be doing the laundry, it could be during a movie, or even during an interview. Now to answer your second question, whenever a line or a lyric is thought of, I use the closest thing to write that down. I could record a voice memo, sing it and record it, or simply write it down. Because of the way I take down all the lyrics, I usually write songs all over the place.

I:  All over the place? How do you keep it all organised?

T: Ohh I have my ways. I usually keep them in little stacks or folders/binders.

I:  When you piece the song together, do you have any strategies?

T: The first and most important to me is: how can I piece this together to portray or convey my exact emotions. How can I make a fitting melody to this? Then I think about my fans. How can I help them with my music. How can this song support what they’re going through? And last but not least I think about the performance. If I were to perform this, how would it look like with all the lighting and dancers? I think that’s it yeah.

I:  Well thank you very very much for this lovely interview. It has given me a great hindsight as to what you do.

T: No thank you! It’s always a pleasure to come here

I:  I definitely hope to see you for your next album!

An episode of my life

When we were given this task in English class the other day, it did not take very long for me to think of a very specific time period of my life which more or less formed a lot of my identity and how I react to specific things.

Straight off the bat, I am the exact opposite of an extrovert. I’m an introvert. This is clearly visible in classes which are not my strong points or in large groups of people. I feel more or less comfortable talking to a group of people not larger than 4. Any group of people larger than 4 I’ll usually stay quiet.

Now to get back to the episode of my life. I had just moved to Uganda and entering third grade. I had a tiny problem though. I could not speak proper English. It was very broken and my vocabulary was very very limited since I had lived the prior 4 years in Germany not speaking any English.

I roughly remember what happened for the first few weeks. Due to the fact that no one was really able to communicate with me, I felt fairly alone and always did things on my own. Every break and lunch I went to the library and just “read” English books. During these few weeks, I took extra lessons with my teacher, “read” a bunch of books and just did stuff by myself. But I am not going to lie, I felt happy doing this because I was learning and was always surrounded by a quiet area.

Some time into these weeks, the teacher asked a few students to do stuff with me. I was young and did not know how to react, so when one of the students asked what I wanted to do, I told them I just go into the library to read. So smooth. 

I remember at one very specific moment, I met a guy from the Netherlands. I do not know why or how, but he suddenly just came to me and we became good friends. He told me that he went through similar experiences, managed to get over it and wanted me to have a good time in the school. We even managed to communicate in a Dutch-German-English cross.

This time stands out to me as an important life lesson I had learnt. You don’t need to speak a language perfectly, neither do you need a lot of friends. As long as you have a good friend who understands you and is able to communicate with you, you’ll be in safe hands.

Mother Tongue

In the text "Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan, she talks about the exposure of different types of English. Whether it is the English spoken in school, or her own "language of intimacy" with her mum and her husband.

That is something I would like to focus on in this post. "Language of intimacy". What does this mean? Personally, I feel like it means it's a form of communication only you and someone else communicate in. It does not matter whether it is a code language or, as Amy Tan has mentioned, "simple" or "broken" English. As long as it is a form of language you and someone else share between each other, it is "intimate".

How do I relate to this though? English is a language I grew up with since I can remember. You may remember that I mentioned this in my introductory blog post. However, my parents learnt English in school, thus making it their second, and in my mum’s case, third language. A few weeks back I saw a video which describes phonetics. In this video, they explain how babies are able to adapt phonetics for any language. Once they reach a certain age though, it becomes increasingly difficult. This is exactly what I notice when I hear my parents speak English. They are so used to German pronunciations, that they make the “th” occasionally sound like a slight “z” sound (The —> Zé). It is not as “bad” as it may sound, but it is noticeable. If you hear them speak you will know they are German.

Back to what the post is supposed to be about. “Language of intimacy”. Whenever I am with my parents and it is necessary to speak English to someone, I will genuinely shift into a slight German accent. I notice this and it is very obvious to me. But I do not change it, because I know it is something I share with my parents. Not only this, but my brother and I share something as well. Since we lived in Uganda for most of our “developing” years, we have adopted an “Ugandan-esque” accent whenever we speak with each other. We are not trying to imitate anyone, it is just something we do and something we are used to.

To me, these are choices I like to keep special. I love being able to communicate with my brother the way I do. I also think it is really interesting to see how our brains adapt to different “Englishes” when we are with other people.

But that is all I got to say about this. How do you feel about “language of intimacy”? Do you communicate a “special” way with only one or two people? Let me know, I am always curious about this!

My name and it's history

As I have mentioned in my first blog, my name is Cedric. My parents told me that there is actually a really simple story behind why they chose it. Even though it does have some history and "legends" to it, I was given the name because someone they knew had it and my parents liked it. That is pretty much the story of how I got my name.

My mum's best friend from childhood (they are still in contact) has a son with the same pronunciation, but different spelling. Sedrik. I feel like writing this out does not feel right, mainly because I am used to spelling my name the way I do. Moving on, my parents asked her whether they could use the name, but slightly alter the spelling.

Researching my name, I came up with some interesting results. According to behindthename.com, Cedric (the way it is spelt now) was first used by Sir Walter Scott in his novel "Ivanhoe", where it has been altered from the "semi-legendary founder of kingdom of Wessex", Cerdic. The name Cerdic has no known meaning. It does not even appear in old English. However, some (my parents) say the name originated in France before moving to the english language.

Here is what I think is craziest. At least the craziest thing I have heard about my name. This was at a sports summer festival and the mother of a teammate asks me for my name. I tell her and she looked in surprise and said: "Ohh, was that not the name of the black knight?" That was the first and last time I've heard someone say that. Now that I read up on the history of my name, the novel "Ivanhoe" uses my name as the black knight, a fierce and powerful knight. This description of the name could not be more opposite than my personality. If I can avoid physical contact, I will.

But that's all there is to my name. Reading up on this, I feel like there could be more about my name if I researched more, but I am happy with what I have found and will pass on the knowledge to anyone who asks about my name (most likely no one).


sources:
http://www.behindthename.com/name/cedric
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanhoe

Cultural Markers

This post genuinely took me quite some time to think about and properly get started. Nonetheless, here we go.

Since I have lived in a few places across the world, I do not count myself to one specific culture or culture group. Considering my background, I will stick with the German culture and all its associations. I have never found a culture to be important to me. All that ever really mattered to me was the ability to communicate with the people in my surrounding.

Germany is accompanied by a few “stereotypes”, which both have positive and negative associations. To start off, I shall lift the mood by talking about the positive ones.

According to many rumours around the internet, we are supposed to be extremely punctual. From personal experience, this - sadly - is not always the case. During the time that I have lived in Germany, I have met some very punctual people, however, I have also met a bunch who prefer arriving thirty to sixty minutes late. Along with this, efficiency is a trait the rest of the world uses to describe us. I am not too familiar with this to be honest. To an extent, I know that german firms and our government has always been efficient in getting a job done. That is about where my knowledge ends on this topic. 

Now to the part of this post I am honestly not looking forward to too much. Starting of with a milder assumption: we do not have a sense of humour. True. We are not allowed to laugh. Incredibly funny joke aside, from experience, no day exists without fun. This is probably the least correct of all.

Last on the list, and I almost feel bad for having to include this, is our link to national socialism or nazis. I am not going to lie and say that I have been called a nazi and been told to go to my hitler shrine. This keeps me speechless. I cannot physically express how this makes me feel. It kills me to say this, but links to national socialism do exist in Germany, more than necessary. Especially now with the influx of refugees, the number of “Neonazis” keeps growing. Even though german lessons exist for the refugees, the refusal to communicate with them makes everything a lot more difficult than it needs to be. If all the right-wing citizens open up to communicating with the refugees, we would know more about their background and why they fled in the first place.

Hence I believe in order to communicate in peace, it is important to understand ones cultural background. How do you feel about this? Any suggestions or additions? Leave them in the comments below!

Blogger Introduction

My name is Cedric M. Schmitz and this is my first Blog.

I was born in Munich, but moved to Singapore after 2 months of my new life. I lived there for the first five years of my life. We then moved back to Germany for 3 and a half years, before leaving to Uganda. These were honestly the best five years of my life growing up. Uganda has offered us the most variety of things to do, while still offering a "normal" human life. After the end in this spiffing country, my family and I headed back to Germany once again, where we stayed another 4 years before moving to our current country, Abu Dhabi.

Within the recent years, I have discovered a passion for a few things. These involve football (the English one), golf, physics and maths, computers and last but not least, Star Wars. I've always like Star Wars, it was my childhood, but I recently discovered a deep passion for the Star Wars Universe.

Growing up bilingual, language was always an important factor in my life. Even though I am German, I wouldn't consider the language my mother tongue. I've always been better - not amazing though - at English. Due to my luck of having the privilege to grow up bilingual, I've never fully experienced exclusion due to language barriers.

To finish off, I shall discuss my planned future: I'm 90% set on what I want to study and be when I have the opportunity to. Since languages have not been my strongpoint, I've always strived to work in the field of physics. Right now, I plan to study some form of engineering, whether it's industrial/economic engineer, electric engineer or software engineer.


"Do or do not. There is no try." - Yoda, Empire strikes back