OCT 28TH:
Humans and technology are thought to have a symbiotic relationship with each other. Technology and media are meant to help humans do things that they cannot normally do. The media is meant to deliver a message to the people using technology that can spread the same message across the world. If you are sending a letter, the letter is just a piece of paper, but what is written is an extension of your personality. If you are writing a book, the book is just a collection of paper put together, but it is your voice that is found throughout the book. However, not everything that we create will benefit us in the long term.
Technology and media work for us, but one day it may be possible that it will replace us in describing the messages we want to convey without us. Since technology does what we cannot do as well as a machine or at all, we use it as a form of progress. Despite this, technology does not some developing after we have enough help from them. It is meant to solve one question, “How do we make the task more efficient?” . After a while, the only way for technology to keep solving that question is to do the task entirely on its own. We can see this today with the developments of self checkout in places like grocery stores that aim to make the user experience quicker and easier, but they take jobs away from regular cashiers who cannot keep up. Another example may be the advanced testing of drones that aim to eventually replace mailmen and women in bringing your mail to your door.
Overall, the development of electric age technology has more of a negative impact in my opinion because of the long term effects of developing machines as smart as we are. As people, and even more so as designers, technology should be something that we tell what to do. As media is an extension of our voice, technology should not do anything to change that.
NOV 4TH:
Here we see a target ad that seems to be a sale for back to school products. We see four children, and we can see that two of them are white. This ad is trying to convey that it does not matter who you are, there are back to school stuff for all kids alike. (https://frequent-ads.com/target/target-weekly-ad-L9OtbIrojN-0)
Here we see an old navy add that is very similar to the target ad. We have a group of four people collecting gifts for black friday. What makes this one somewhat controversial is the use of pairing black and white people as couples.Especially since it seems the couple, or seemingly close friends, on the right are still teenagers. (https://9to5toys.com/2018/11/05/old-navy-black-friday-ad-50-off-sitewide-cardholder-benefits-1-socks-more/)
Our last ad is a billboard created by verizon to advertise their brand. We see a large group of diverse workers of many races of both men and women, working together to help bring you quality cell phone experience. If that is actually true is another story entirely, but for the purposes of the ad, it has shown that you can rely on all of these people to have a strong network. (https://flic.kr/p/5iHYmU)
