reading reflections: numero uno

While reading Hines, the part that stood out to me the most was the discussion of a virtual ethnography lacking face-to-face experience. While it will be difficult for a lot of us to have face to face experience in our research, the marketing aspect carries over from the Internet to the real world, so I think it will be important for me to get some personal interviews on the effects of marketing in today's society. It was also interesting that she talked about how a virtual ethnography is not necessarily unbiased. Since we are studying a culture that we are actually a part of in some ways, it would be pretty much impossible to leave out some opinion, no matter how hard we try. We are obviously trying to evoke a feeling in our audience, so we'll have to do our best to not intentionally sway them one way or another.

The networking article applied to a lot of aspects of my project. It brought up the point that with the creation of the Internet, media is now directed toward individuals, not groups. This plays a huge part in marketing. Companies can now pinpoint target audiences down to their hobbies and religious views. It is this personal "attention" that makes us feel special, as Anonymous says. There is a false sense of relationship created between the online ads and the actual person. More than likely, no one actually cares behind the ad, yet when we see an email that greets us by name, we are much more likely to at least glance over it. This technique gives the marketers just enough to catch our attention and draw us in. Next thing we know, we are clicking through to their website and buying those cute shoes that we never would have seen before if it wasn't for the email. In some ways, this new era of marketing has created opportunities we never imagined; but it also can waste our time and money, among other things.

I'm currently reading Mediated and I plan to garner some ideas from that as well. I'm thinking I'm going to focus on how the personalization of advertising/marketing on the Internet has affected us...and go from there!