Media relations, what?

I want to go into the media for my career, whether it’s with Public Relations or what have you, I want to be behind the scenes pulling strings and making things appear for the public. With that, I also whole heartily believe in doing things for the common good, so I’d like to believe that corporate America wouldn’t swallow me whole and turn me into a money-making, spinning machine, but rather an educated individual who has some power to make some positive change for at least one person.



In my Visual Rhetoric class we’ve been breaking images and the study of images and meaning down into really sophisticated words (seriously, this class makes me feel like I’m actually in college because I never understand what we’re talking about), and because of that I have been drowning in advertisements and images that the public sees every day.



Coupled with that, in my Student Alliance for Gender Education class (SAGE), we just finished a segment on media images. I've learned about the effects of media on society a hundred times over, but it never fails to shock me at how much the subjects being marketed are so negative.

We saw advertisement after advertisement focusing on women as objects, supporting violence against women and fragmenting women into their body parts-sexual parts.



Everyone says “sex sells,” and these advertisements that appear in Vogue and other high traffic publications must pass a lot of desks to get there. How can these executives not notice a trend? And if it is a trend, it must be successful if everyone is reproducing it. Is there a way to make a societal shift via advertising that’ll actually be effective for the purpose of advertising? And if there is away, how do you get there? How do you get noticed by the top exec companies dishing these loaded images out?



Years of institutionalized oppression to not just women, but minorities in general, have led the advertising world to become what it has. People support it by not speaking up, by subscribing to Vogue and horrendous publications like Maxim and Playboy, and by buying the products that these ads are selling.



Take for instance this billboard:

















What the hell was Sony thinking? It appeared in various Dutch areas and was eventually pulled due to the controversy surrounding the historical and cultural meanings implied.
"White is coming"?
If its images like these that are selling Playstations, then I certainly don't want this "white" Playstation. I don't support white power, superiority. Does this company? Does Sony?

I need to figure out my life. I am so attracted to the media and what it can do for society, but how do I successfully contribute to it if I don't support the terrible themes it communicates?