Amazing Group Experience

This has been the best group project experience I've ever had at school.

Jenny, Kat, Francisco - All very intelligent, motivated, and friendly people. We formed our group off the basis that everyone was serious about doing a good job and I think it shows in how professional our final product turned out.

Our Group Blog! - handy tool we used to keep each other updated, share opinions, banners and logos. We linked a lot of items on the blog through Google Docs as well.

Required Work - The memos, time, group update papers, etc., really helped to make everyone aware of what was required of them and working smoothly. I really wish every class that had a group project worked like this.

All in all I think this was the most rewarding, least stressful group project I've had.

Tom Sumner's lecture/book publishing

I enjoyed listening to Mr. Sumner talk about publishing. He had some interesting views like the inevitability of coming changes. Personally I believe people can have an opinion on a subject even if its inevitable, but I do understand his "why waste time on an opinion" point of view.

I found one of his books that I glanced over quite interesting. It was the one that examines the use of written English. It had examples of Dan Brown's poor phrasing in the Da Vinci Code.

I had posted the question about if it meant the same today as it use to, to say you were published, but I'm not sure I really understood his answer. I believe he said it's easier to get a book out on the market if you're willing to cough up a lot of money?

The Persuaders

I thought this movie was very insightful. It showed how marketing works on the emotional level and what to watch out for. I gave my thoughts on the questions the author posed.

Is there something about Americans that makes them uniquely persuadable by advertising messages?

I don't believe American's are more persuadable than anyone else, I believe that we are in fact the opposite. America is the capital of capitalism, and marketing is the tool by which capitalism functions. Douglas Atkins points out that American's have been come very market literate because of how inundated we are by these messages. American's know very well when an ad is trying to deceive them.

What are the ramifications of a culture dominated by marketing and consumerism?

Douglas Rushkoff mentions that our culture has been replaced by marketing. We've become a consumer based culture. Instead of creating social bonds at church, we now bond at Starbucks or through branding. I would say that putting so much value into a material item is a bad thing, even if they are good values. Empowerment, going green, are great values to have, but not when your required to purchase an item to possess it. I believe this is just masking the value of possession with more respectable values, and is just covering deeper issues.

What might the future hold - where are the techniques of persuasion headed?

It looks like the future holds even more emotional based persuasion. Identifying the emotional bonds people create to words and ideas as they grow so they can be marketed to at an even deeper level. Marketers will try to use these emotional bonds to tie consumers to their product and to one another. A good example is the Harley Davidson example used in the movie.