In the first weeks of the semester, I was so busy with the concept of the project. Every week my plans have changed and finally I came up with a more detailed project proposal. Briefly it is about the visual language that advertisements are using. Creating awareness about messages that are manipulating our life and trying to make us obey the rules of the capital system.
Here is my updated proposal:selinsargut-proposal2
Research has a crucial importance for my project and during this week I spend by time by making research. I need to focus on how people are affected from advertisements.
Psychological theories of motivation show that I should observe advertisements in 5 categories:
1. Physiological needs, such as hunger and thirst.
2. Safety needs, for security and protection.
3. Social needs, for a sense of belonging and love.
4. Esteem needs, for self-esteem, recognition, and status.
5. Self-actualization needs, for self-development and realization.4
Advertising appeals to many different values, to emotional as well as practical needs, to a range of desires and fantasies. The multitude of advertisements are selling the joys of buying, promoting the idea that purchasing things is, in itself, a pleasurable activity.
John Berger also has too many work about the subject. Here is his documentation about advertisements.
Ways of Seeing (final episode)
He says that publicities both promises a dream and it threatens us. There is an illusion of a glamorous world and people should envy it. In this world making money shown as something magical and we are becoming anxious about money. In a general perspective it can be said that:
1. People shown in advertisements are part of a good life. They are smiling and everything surrounded them are objects of pleasure. They are promising us the greatest pleasure.
2. Skin has crucial importance in advertisements. This is a skin without biography. Generally, nudity of woman is showing another form of dress and skin is a surface that we can touch.
3. A far away place emphasised. Traveling to elsewhere, being in two worlds at the same time, being pure and innocent and ready to travel are part of the imaginary world in advertisements.
Advertisements are working on our imagination and interpreting the world around us. Exclude us as we are now and behind the paper there are our hidden needs.