Month: January 2020

An extremely popular meme that has been surfacing the internet lately is the baby Yoda meme. The character baby Yoda is from the Star Wars Series titled “the Mandalorian”. The Mandalorian is a “space opera” series available only through a subscription with Disney Plus. The series came out in 2019, and had eight episodes. The baby Yoda meme has become increasingly popular and is a way for the Mandalorian series to get free publicity through the power of media.

In my opinion, I do not believe the baby Yoda meme is advocating for some specific world view other than media support for the Star Wars series. The Star Wars franchise is worth billions, and this is another Star Wars series aimed at economic revenue. However, in the two memes I attached below, they both have some reference to a commercial item; Mc Donald’s and Lipton Tea. People have changed the meme from just containing baby Yoda, to having other commercial goods in the meme. This is a prime example at how consumer and commercial based the United States is.

This meme is all over the internet. I have personally seen it on Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook. Although baby Yoda was created by Jon Favreau and was given the name “the child” in the series there is not a known creator for the baby Yoda memes that have surfaced all over the internet. People have remastered it and made it their own by adding different meanings to it. I’ve had several friends and family send a meme similar to the two memes I have attached below. The baby Yoda character is seen as cute and lovable because if it’s child-like nature. It attracts an audience because it is innocent and is the same species as the character Yoda from the other Star Wars series previously created. People are familiar with the Baby Yoda or “the child” character because of this and find a cognitive way of relating to it because they have seen it before. 

The baby Yoda meme was extremely popular for a few weeks due to the fact that Disney+ was only releasing an episode every week or so. The first episode was released on November 12, and I would say that solely based off of social media the meme was extremely popular in the month of December. The eighth and final episode was released on December 27 and I have yet to see a baby Yoda meme in 2020. I am wondering what the Star Wars franchise is planning to do next with the Mandalorian series, could there be a second season?

The purpose of these memes is to call attention to the new Star Wars series and generate support for it. I think that the public has taken off with baby Yoda and has given “him” new meaning that serves consumer driven America. It is amazing to see how powerful and fast acting the media is and can be. Also ironic to think about is that you can only see baby Yoda in action if you purchase a subscription to Disney+ to view the Mandalorian series. Coincidence?

Edward Bernays is considered to be the father of public relations. He is famously known for his propaganda campaigns he created to entrance the average consumer in the United States. His first notable contribution to consumer society in America was his ad campaign aimed at the tobacco industry. Bernays found a way for smoking to appeal to every American. He created this idea that by women smoking, they were revolting against the societal norm that smoking is taboo. This revolutionized the smoking industry and profits began to soar. Bernays was a master at the presentation of products or a concept surrounding a product. He was able to anticipate what the average consumer would want versus what they need. The consumer in America drastically changed under the helm of Bernays. 

            Bernays was hired to create a new campaign that re-invented the way people viewed Betty Crocker cake Mix. Bernays used psychoanalysis to create the perfect advertisement around this product. The purpose of Bernays propaganda was to capitalize on people’s unconscious desires through mass produced goods. The commercial starts out with what sounds like a housewife scolding her son for touching the fresh cake she just made. The boy then says he cannot resist because the cake is so fluffy and delicious. The narrator for the commercial then starts to talk about the quality ingredients in the cake mix, finally referring to the addition of two eggs to make the perfect cake. By adding your eggs, the cake is sure to taste fresher and rise higher then dried egg whites like other cake mixes. The black and white commercial does a good job of portraying the cake at different angles. It even uses a ruler to show how high the cake rose after it was cooked. Visual representation in this commercial is important because there is no color. So you have to appeal to your audience in some way. 

The sign in this add is the Betty Crocker cake mix which is a consumer product made to be effortless for the average American housewife in the 50’s. The signifier in this ad could be the ease presented to the house wives by this pre-made cake mix. Another sign could be the “just add eggs” slogan Betty Crocker used in this advertisement. The signifier or meaning behind the just add eggs could be that by her adding eggs, she is still doing her duty to make her family food and that the entire cake is not just processed food. The egg could also figuratively represent the housewife giving her “egg” to the family. Finally, I think important to pay attention to in this commercial is the setting which is in the home, and the characters. We only see a little boy and have the voice of the mother narrated. This product is meant to appeal to a certain audience, and that is the housewife in 1950’s America.

This add is effective in its display of the product. More people found this product to be appealing because the average house wife who may have had new responsibilities due to the war may not have been able to spend time making a full meal for the family. With the addition of adding your own eggs she could find some solace in the fact that she cooked part of it on her own. She did not abandon her family by relying on processed baked good products.

I think it is important to note that this commercial aired during the 50’s. This is what appealed to the average citizen during this time. A commercial like this would still be popular today, but I believe for different reasons. Now, I think the average American would take the gender out of the commercial, and would see it as a convenience food just like all the other fast foods we have in America. 

Music plays a very important role in my life. It is one of my favorite things to do in my free time. I have a very deep connection to music because of the way I can emotionally connect to it. When I am working out, doing homework, or hanging out with friend’s music always finds a way into my life. When I’m happy, sad, or mad music is always there for me. My favorite type of music is rap, hip-hop, and R&B. The first thing that usually catches my attention is the beat of the music; this is when I determine if I like the song or not. Next, is the vocals they really add flavor and personality to music. As I have gotten older however I have noticed different things about music. Many of the songs produced in this generation talk about drugs, guns, money, or are sexually explicit. Now I may seem like a hypocrite, but some of my favorite songs refer to one if not all four of the characteristics I listed above. I think that a reason why we have so much violence, overdoses, and sexual assault in our world today is because of how music glorifies these things. When a rapper raps about any of these attributes they get respect and are seen as “cool”. This is something that I do not agree with. The music industry is fast paced and constantly changing to please the public. In order to stay on top, you must do whatever it takes or the music industry will chew you up and spit you back out. 

            A very specific example I would like to further talk about is a song written by a rapper named YNW Melly titled “Murder on My Mind”.  YNW Melly was arrested in February 2019 at age 19 where he was charged with two counts of first degree murder. The two victims who were shot and killed by YNW Melly were members of the YNW crew whom he was close too. In the beginning of the song, Melly is talking about how people are suspicious and that he was locked up on Christmas and wasn’t able to see his family. Then the next lyrics state that “Got molly mixed with promethazine cause every time I wake up in the mornin’ I got murder on my mind. AK-47’s, MAC -11’s, Glocks and 9’s” (Murder on my mind 2017). Already mentioned in the first 30 seconds of the song is drugs, guns, and violence. The first time I ever heard this song I was so focused on the beat and his voice that I had not really payed attention to what he was saying in the lyrics. This used to be a song I listened to all the time. When I heard he was arrested for murder, I immediately stopped listening to him because I could no longer support someone with such violent tendencies. Throughout the entirety of the song, Melly puts himself as first person in this song stating that “I didn’t even mean to shoot him he just caught me by surprise, I reloaded my pistol, cocked it back and shot him twice” (Murder on my mind 2017). As a consumer, this would make me very wary of what exactly he is cognitively referring too.

On the surface level this song seems to be very catchy and Melly has a very unique style and voice when in reality, I think this song is about how the artist YNW Melly killed two of his best friends. He has another song called mind on my murder which is a reversal of roles where he is the one being acted upon. Versus in this song murder on my mind he is the one performing the action. 

            In a verified interview where Melly was talking about his lyrics he claimed that he found his first gun when he was 9, and that he is in love with them and the way they look. In the last few lyrics of his song “Murder on My Mind”, Melly states that “B&*ch, I’m a murderer, I might just kill the boy” (Murder on my mind 2017). I am not sure what message he is trying to get across, but I’m sure I do not agree with all the violence he portrayed in these two songs. 

Fear in the Media

A personal encounter that I had with a piece of media that scared me, and continues to scare me is the news. Every day, since I was in kindergarten my mom would wake me up an hour and half before we had to be at work and school, and we would watch the news together; it became our routine. This early encounter with news at a young age made me very insightful as a child. I was able to share with the class if the teacher ever mentioned what was happening in the news. Upon entering high school however, I started to notice a trend on the news channel we watched. They only seemed to be reporting on issues that involved murder, homicide, war, or political turmoil. This started to depress me that our country is obsessed with reporting on these issues. There did not seem to be anything positive or upbeat in the news. For this reason, I stopped watching the news because I could not handle all the death that the media was portraying. A very specific example of a story reported that scared me and probably changed my way of thinking forever was the Trayvon Martin shooting that happened in 2012. I started to really think about what it meant to be a person of color in the United States because of the way the media portrayed the story. Before and after this historical shooting, several other cases similar to this one occurred. 

News was created to mass produce and inform the public on current events. I would say that news and all the different media outlets we have like newspaper, television, and radio have advanced and give us more opportunity to soak in the information being sold to us. News can be a great asset to human life, but also present many issues of ethicality at the same time. 

Pillow Talk 1959

            An extremely big hobby of mine is watching movies, specifically older movies from the 50’s,60’s, and 70’s. Personally, I would like to analyze one of my favorite movies. The name of the movie is Pillow Talk released in 1959 starring Doris Day, Rock Hudson, and Tony Randall. My favorite types of movies usually revolve around romance, suspense, and fairytale endings. Recently, I decided to add a sociology minor to my degree here at Whittier. In doing so, I have gained an exceeding amount of knowledge on all the foundations that society has built itself upon. By this I mean the way we dress, act, the way in which we behave in society, and social norms that dominate society. Recently I re-watched this movie after not seeing it since my elementary school days, and I noticed a lot of social cues, and societal norms that were okay in the 1950’s versus now in 2020. Currently, in the United States, we are moving toward a more accepting America where the ability to express oneself should not be limited, curbed, or stopped in any way. Seeing where we are in society today versus back then raises a lot of questions for me.

A scene in particular from this movie that I would like to do a close read on is when the main character Jan (Doris Day) goes into the local telephone company’s office to complain about Brad (Rock Hudson) whom she shares a party line with. Brad is constantly on the phone singing to various women at all hours of the day and is portrayed as a playboy making sexual advances to women he hopes to hook up with. The telephone company tells Jan that unless she were to have an immediate emergency of some kind there was no way they could give her own telephone line. By emergency, the man in the telephone office was referring to her being pregnant. Most women during this day in age were expected to birth children and stay at home. Jan on the other hand smashes this social norm as she is an ambitious career oriented women. At the conclusion of her meeting with the telephone company, they tell her they will send someone over to investigate Brad’s behavior over the telephone. Ironically, they send a woman to investigate Brad, and with his charm he is able to evade any warnings from the telephone company, and get Jan into trouble at the same time by having the investigator state her complaints are unwarranted and false. 

There are many other examples of how women were constantly taken advantage of or dismissed in this movie. This is one of my favorite movies, and it makes me a little sad that women were subject to this kind of negative behavior from men in the 50’s. In youth, the themes in this movie went right over my head, as a young adult they intrigue and make me think more about what this movie was really trying to say. Yes, it is just a movie, but this kind of behavior toward women was common back then.