When I was a little girl, I couldn’t sleep. Perhaps this was because I was a restless, sensitive kid constantly worried about what would happen if I fell asleep, but I would force myself to stay up for hours. After a while, I didn’t have to force myself anymore. Hours and hours without sleep, I would get extremely bored. The only thing that gave me comfort as a young insomniac was infomercials.
Young me was fascinated by these commercials. It seemed like this product—a baking pan, a carpet cleaner, or a vegetable cutter—would save my life. Like the actors in the video, young me also struggled with basic household chores. I also wanted to make a cake that you could stuff with apples or pudding. As I got older, it became a game: How many informatics would I see in one night? The answer is a lot. There were plenty of infomercials to laugh at.
Younger Lauryn failed to realize that these commercials used specific tactics to get a potential customer to buy their product. Whether using a black-and-white filter to discuss less-than-stellar cake pans or showing how this pan can be used, these advertisements used subtle marketing tactics to get a potential customer to buy their product.
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| Oh no, look at this terrible cake! |
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| Yay, look at this better one! |
What I failed to do while watching these advertisements was to analyze and reflect on what it was trying to do. In other words, I lacked the media literacy to understand what they were doing. Media literacy is analyzing, reflecting, and creating digital content. It’s the ability to look at an infomercial and understand what a corporation or person is trying to tell you. When it comes to social media, almost everyone is trying to promote or sell you something, so you need some form of media literacy. Even the strange cake pan infomercials I grew fond of were trying to make me do something.
According to Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Message, McLuhan believes technology drives social and cultural change, and I couldn’t agree more. This especially applies to Renee Hobbs’ article about the five competencies. With McLuhan’s framework in mind, Hobbs comes up with five essential steps to engage with social media literacy: access, analyze, create, reflect, and act. In essence, Hobbs argues that to engage with media effectively, a person has to access the information, analyze it, create the product, reflect on it, and then share it with others. These five things are crucial when engaging with any form of content.
As a librarian, I encourage patrons to engage with the content they consume. Media literacy is critical to me, and while I don’t use Hobb’s five competencies by name, my goal as a librarian is to be a resource for understanding media and helping my patrons engage in media literacy. While I can’t ever force my opinions onto a patron, I can be a free resource for them to navigate how to engage with media critically and effectively. So, if someone like me asks them about 2000s infomercials, I would happily help them.
I had honestly never thought about how infomercials use these media/marketing strategies until you talked about it, but it makes total sense. The ways that marketing is designed to dig into these manufactured ideas of less-than or more-than is really interesting. When it comes to media literacy, this is a great way to help people understand what it is and why it might be important, and its a much more fun way of introducing the topic and ideas rather than jumping into the potential for misleading news articles and social media. I think that all librarians are constantly engaging with McLuhan and Hobbs' ideas all the time, whether we call it that or not. Engaging with media, all media- digital or print, is a core function of what librarians do, and passing on the knowledge and understanding of media literacy is so important in an age of misinformation.
ReplyDeleteYour story about late night infomercials as a kid really stuck with me. What really resonated was your reflection on how media literacy is about looking beneath the surface like asking, “What is this trying to make me feel, believe, or do?” It’s wild how even a goofy infomercial can hold deeper lessons about persuasion, production choices, and intention. These ideas could further lead us into conversations about how algorithms are amplifying these messages that are being sent! Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteThere are so many subconscious elements that occur when viewing media that it's hard to know how you are being impacted. That's one of the main reasons to *teach* what these elements are. In this way, we can be more in control of our moods based on what we engage with.
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