Alcohol and Domestic Violence....woohoo I just made a joke!

 Whether advertising comes from a nationwide TV commercial or a flyer in your dorm's hallway, people see it.  This accounts for many, many people of different backgrounds, upbringings, and, yep, unique emotional experiences.  So, you can understand why this sign advertising a bar's beers (originally posted on Reddit)  could be offensive and completely uncalled for, no matter who sees it:

Chances are, everyone knows someone (or someone who knows someone) who has been domestically abused.  And while feminism likes to center on domestic abuse, it is largely a human rights issue.  So, feminist or not, most people don't really think domestic abuse is okay.  HOWEVER, you have your regular douche-y, asshole internet trolls who think this is REAAALLY funny and, you know, totally okay: 

Thank youuuu, neckbeards. Your contribution to society is certainly valued. /sarcasm

This is where feminism ties into everyone's lives--sane, empathetic people prooobably don't think domestic violence is okay.  So why did this sign even go up in the first place?

We live in a rape culture society.  This is exactly what it sounds like--people think it's okay to make rape jokes, compare something being destroyed, dominated, or annihilated to rape (for example: man, i raped that test!).  Rape, among beating and verbal/emotional abuse, is domestic violence.  Herein lies the problem--we think it's okay to say these things.  And it really shouldn't be that way.  Maybe that's why we are so desensitized as a culture and can write these things on a bar sign, say we "raped" our opponents in a sport or game, or even watch some really, really disturbing Family Guy episodes without batting an eyelash.

And to me, that's not okay.

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Freebie

I'm using this as my free pass for the semester.

Genre within the community

After some exploring, I've found a different type of genre within my community.  While most of the community consists of one person writing a blog post/article/Tweet, then others responding, I stumbled upon a kind of forum on the popular Feminist website, Jezebel.  On the home page are a bunch of recent articles by the most popular authors, all of which have various comments on them.  This is the most common way that my community interacts on this specific website.  However, after some exploring I found 2 more ways that members could interact:

•  The Powder Room, where members of the community can write their own articles and upload them themselves
• Groupthink, where members do not write articles, but can simply post a few sentences that they want the other members to reflect on or offer their input for.  

I think these are great--especially the Groupthink part of Jezebel's website.  Maybe someone may not have the resources to write a full article, but this is a way that members can still interact with each other just for fun, it seems.  Most of the submissions on group think are just everyday things that someone would like to talk about--the new Grand Theft Auto game, questions about the dating site OkCupid, someone's grandmother being assaulted, or even just someone getting invited to their 10 year high school reunion.  This is the more personal part of the community that I have been searching for--definitely more intimate than comments on articles or blog posts.

The Feminist Discourse Community Regarding Advertising

Our reading for this week was Swales' "The Concept of a Discourse Community."  In the reading were six characteristics that made a Discourse Community function.  These characteristics were things that made sense, yet not completely obvious to someone who would just be browsing through a site used by the online community.

1: Commonly agreed public goals

This is a fairly obvious one for my community.  The online feminist community in general has several goals, but in a broad sense, the online feminist community is simply trying to eradicate the sexism present in our everyday lives.  More specifically, the Feminist Community concentrated on the portrayal of Women in Advertising is trying to achieve goals of ending oversexualization of female bodies, using the female body to sell products, and ending body-shaming by many companies, among many other goals.

Boots = naked? Thanks for clearing that up, UGG.

2: Mechanisms of Intercommunication

I was a little confused about how the reading described this, but I feel like it was describing ways that some communities didn't or were unable to interact.  However, I feel like this doesn't apply here, and what is going on in my community is just plain intercommunication.  Many blogs and forums exist for my online community and it is entirely possible for many people to be connected to a variety of them.  There certainly is a lot of overlap when it comes to people communicating because they may read subscribe to a blog, follow the blog's authors on Twitter, and communicate with the community in a variety of ways.  

3: Using Participatory Mechanisms to Primarily Provide Information and Feedback

This one definitely applies here--the whole point of my online community is to first, raise awareness about what is happening with women and advertising, and then come up with a solution to the problems that arise.  This is the information part.  The feedback part happens in two ways: 1. The online community provides feedback to these authors, Twitter accounts, even other commenters who are taking part in the online conversations by creating discussions on the subject at hand and 2. providing feedback to the companies which have caused offense to the community, or, sometimes providing positive feedback to companies who actually do a good job of representing women in advertising.  In these ways, the community is using their participatory mechanisms to improve the community and further continue toward their goals. 

4: Using Genres to Work Toward Goals (?)

The wording of this whole section is awkward to me.  I'm not really sure what the fourth goal means, I'm just interpreting it as using different ways of communication depending on the communication outlet to further work toward the community's goals.  If this is right, this would be the way that people in this community interact in areas such as blogs or Twitter.  It is definitely more beneficial to the community if the members comment on blogs and start conversations there, however, it is quicker for the community to simply retweet a link to a relevant article.  

5: Acquiring a Specific Lexis

Okay, this keeps getting worse.  I just had to look up what "lexis" means.  I'm guessing this is referring to the language that a community uses.  This is fairly simple (once you get past the complicated wording of the article).  One term that often comes up is "body-shaming".  This is basically the way that advertisers portray women in their advertisements to make real women feel inferior to the pictures/videos so that the women will buy their products in order to achieve the pictures perfection in the advertisement.  Many more terms exist, but this is the one that I have seen the most often lately.  

Young women aren't the only victims of body shaming--think of how often we see advertisements like these directed at middle-aged to older women. 

6: Members with Expertise 

This one is fairly simple.  Basically, the way this applies to my community is that the more experienced members of the community have kept their blogs and magazines alive--a lot have even grown to be more popular than they were at their beginnings.  Newer members to the community--such as myself--can go explore these larger areas of communication and learn more broader things about feminism before honing in on feminism and advertising.  Also, these experienced members will often link to the personal blogs, Twitter, or Facebook accounts of the network of other experienced members they have found to be relevant, interesting, etc.  This large network of experienced contributors has a large role to play in the success of the Feminist community regarding Advertising.  

Let Toys Be Toys!

Remember when your brother's friends wouldn't let you play with them and their toy cars?  Or when you couldn't play with your brother's gameboy because it was "for boys only"?  Or how about the look of disgust on a neighbor boy's face when you asked if he wanted to play with your dolls as he said "thats for giiiiiirls"?  I do.  Here, we see the how advertising affects young children by classifying toys into two separate categories--pretty, delicate, and girly for girls, and rough, exciting, and bold for boys.  Even at this young age, we see how advertising is blatantly forcing boys and girls to separate, and interact in different ways because of the differences in their toys.  This often leads to the Mean Girls-esque mentality of exclusion outside the group (in this case, gender), reminding me of this little tidbit: 

HOWEVER, (cue valiant day-saving music) a new movement targeting these kinds of advertising has begun! Let Toys Be Toys is an organization that's targeting this exact thing to put an end to it--and it has already had some mild success.  Already, Toys R Us's in the UK have pledged to stop labelling and separating their toys by gender.  AND, the organization has recently become popular on social media sites like Twitter.  

What does this mean?  Well it'll take some work for parents to abandon the idea that dolls can be for boys too, just like cars can be for girls; pink and purple doesn't = GIRL just like blue and red don't = BOY.  

And just what sort of effect will this have on the children?  Well, they might, oh I dunno, maybe NOT be forced to segregate themselves because of their different toys, not be ashamed to play with different things, and *gasp* PLAY TOGETHER?? WHAAT? 

On a related note, here's a great advertisement that the Let Toys be Toys Twitter account posted a few days ago.  You'd be hard pressed to find anything like this today, but hopefully with the LTbT organization, we can see more of these.  

My Community

At first, I had decided to focus on the feminist community for my blogging assignments.  However, it soon became apparent that this topic was far too broad--from the myriad of issues presented to us in the United States, to the wide range of issues still needing to be addressed in all parts of the world.  Therefore, I decided to go with something that would be interesting to me--particularly because it is something that so desperately needs changed.

The community I will be studying is the Feminist Community with a focus on the Portrayal of Women in Advertising. 

At first I thought I would do women in media and advertising, but this is still too broad.  Advertising is something that is ever-present in our society.  We are bombarded by advertisements everywhere--on billboards, in the sidebars of websites, in newspapers and magazines, television, radio, the list goes on and on.  

We may not even realize the presence of advertisements in our lives.  For example, we may be walking and have a bus pass us, glance at it, and not even realize that it has just advertised a product to us.  On an average person's commute to work, the radio could offer at least half a dozen advertisements to the public.  Eating our breakfast with the television on could advertise many more products to us as we zone out, wishing for a few more minutes of sleep.  

However, advertising is not my desired community to study.  It is the content of the advertisements that is causing a community to react--the portrayal of women in advertising is often oversexualized.  This has caused feminist communities everywhere to speak out--especially online.  One place where this can be observed, very clearly, is Twitter.  I follow a handful of feminist collaborative online blogs, online magazines, and such, whose broad focus is feminism altogether, but often times will focus on the effect advertising is having on women and the perception of women alike.  Other places where I could observe this online community are the many tumblrs made to shed light on this issue.  Some examples of the places where I will observe these interactions within this online community are Jezebel.com, Missrepresentation.org, ad-busting.tumblr.com, MsMagazine.com, and so on.  

I am greatly looking forward to studying this community, and even participating in it myself, especially because this is an issue I believe to be very important to the feminist movement.  

Online distrac--AHH GIF OF A KITTY AND ITS FLOATING ON A HAMBURGER AHHH

This week, our readings (Nick Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid" and Net Smart Chapter 1: Attention!...) were heavily based on how the internet is shaping our attention spans.  Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, both authors agree that the internet is definitely affecting our abilities to focus on one thing at a time.

One thing that specifically stuck out to me in Carr's article is that he was now unable to concentrate on reading a long novel.  Before I truly became addicted to the internet, I was reading a lot, and often.  For me, summers were three months of solitary reading time, uninterrupted by the tediousness of school.  Now, however, it seems so hard to be able to finish a full length novel with the same enthusiasm I had in my childhood.

I realized that I have become a slave to my MacBook, iPod, and Galaxy S3.  I honestly cannot remember the last time that I have opened a physical dictionary, or consulted the library instead of simply googling a combination of words to find an answer.  As Carr states, this is both good and bad.  It is good because no longer do we have to partake in that time consuming task of looking up a fact in a reference book.  In fact, the internet has helped society advance and communicate ideas and incredibly fast speeds.  No longer do we have to wait until the Omaha World Herald relays information to us about current events--events their reporters would have had to wait to be informed of themselves.  Now, we can rely on online versions of newspapers, as well as solely online news sources, to keep us up to date.

Yet, herein lies the problem.  We go to the internet as a reference and this may lead to a few problems.  The first being the basic problem that was discussed in our readings today--distractions.  Even as I am writing my blog post now, I keep looking up to the open tabs at the top of the window and see that the "cat gif" search on tumblr is still open.  I may or may not have already clicked on it a few times to browse over more adorable, majestic cuteness.  While I was reading both of the assigned readings for today, I found myself opening the new Tweets at the top of my Twitter timeline or checking my notifications on Facebook.  It even took me a few seconds to realize what I was doing--and to realize the irony of what I was reading.

However, our short attention spans are a small price to pay for what the internet gives us--knowledge.  Whether you use that knowledge to learn how to make a scarf for a friend's birthday, save your cat from an allergic reaction, or find trustworthy resources to reference in your research paper at 3:30 am, the internet remains infinitely valuable to our personal and professional lives.