Looking and Thinking Part 2

This post relates to my previous post. I found an example (show below) of an advertisement where different people will think different things. I looked through some advertisements and then came across this one. At first I thought it was funny because of the "tough guy" becoming soft. I also thought it was funny because the website I was looking at also had other funny advertisements, so it was natural for me to think of it as being funny because that is what kind of advertisements I was looking at. After my initial reaction I started to think how some people may not find it as funny. Some people may find it that the advertisement is trying to say that bikers and such are not caring or don't give to charities. The advertisement has stereotyped a group of people who they look at and don't see as charity givers. It may be funny to some, but maybe not all.

Looking and Thinking

When I look at something like an advertisement I don't think about who created, I just know that it was created by or for whatever company the advertisement is advertising for. I never really thought about me not thinking about the individual or team who created it until I read about Producer's Intended Meanings in Practices of Looking on page 52. Now when I look at an advertisement I am wondering who made it. I find it very interesting how one person can look at an advertisement, for example, and think one thing while another person can think about something else. One reason why people look at things differently from others that was discussed in the book was because of the things we see around a piece or what we have seen before it. Now I think I'll always wonder what others are thinking about when I look at an advertisement and other works.

Who to go After?

In Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity piracy comes up a lot. In one part of the book, the author discusses how the Internet is making it easy for people to share content that is copyrighted, which robs the copyright holder of potential money (pg. 17). While the people who share content that is copyrighted are wrong to do so, I think that sometimes the people who are trying to stop piracy from happening try to go after the individuals who do this, when they should really go after the people or companies who allow it to happen. Instead of going after each person who shares copyrighted material by using a tool on the Internet to do so, they should go after the makers of the tool and stop them from allowing users to pirate material.