Hi Team Fuglesang!
so here are the groups we arranged:
Daniel and Joakim
Jillian and Anna
Andy and Charlotte
Yao and Levina
I'm not sure if there will be a master list of contact information, but just in case, my email is yaoyang@stanford.edu
feel free to post your information on this thread:-)
Sorry it took me soo long to post. I'm really having problems with the all the different websites of this course, and not having the right passwords for the right one.
So far technology problems has been a theme for our group so I'm sure you guys understand.
In terms of Wednesday's video conference, for what little time we had, it seemed as if people saw different pictures from gender lines. I personally was not swayed by the impotence picture, as much as the large tumor. Its been 4 days later and I'm still having nightmares about that.
Hopefully on our next video conference we can get all the technology working before hand, so we can spend the rest of the time actually dealing with the topics at hand.
So...the technology issues in class on Wednesday were incredibly frustrating, but once we got all of that sorted, I think we had a fantastic discussion. To continue our discussion, I think that the EU ads we looked at were probably mainly geared towards potential smokers. People who smoke already know the possible health consequences and are unlikely to be persuaded by a graphic picture. However, I think that the ads on the whole were too graphic to be effective. It was obviously an appeal to pathos rather than logros; the message was so extreme that I found myself rejecting it on face. For example, the picture of the man with a tumor in his throat seemed to say "This is what will happen to you if you buy these cigarettes." Yet everyone knows that it would most likely take years and years of smoking to get a tumor like that. This is what I hate about most anti-drug ads. The warnings are too exaggerated to be taken seriously, and they aren't really geared towards eliciting a certain behavior. "The truth" campaign takes a different approach. Rather than telling teens not to smoke because it is dangerous (which anyway is part of the appeal), most of the ads suggest that smokers are tools of The Man -- a much better approach. The ads on the website I brought to class, http://www.abovetheinfluence.com/the-ads/default.aspx, poke fun at the typical anti-drug ad (which always seems so stodgy and patronizing).
This blog has been specially made for the Fuglesang Blog -- part of the Örebro-Stanford collaboration in winter 2007. The intention is that the Fuglesang blog members will use this space to continue some of the conversations that they begin online during our Wednesday sessions. So start posting!
