dude i guess?

In chapter 5 of Gauntlett’s book he talks about Anthony Giddens’s perspective on identity. Giddens says that there are boundaries in a society, but in the world we live in today these boundaries are to be crossed freely. Media do not just reflect the social world, but contribute to it’s shape, (98). The things we buy to ‘express’ ourselves impacts the way we think about ourselves, (102). We then develop “lifestyles” that make it easier to make a self. These lifestyles can come from all different places in media.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyMSSe7cOvA

I started thinking where we get our lifestyles in the media. I think it's in advertising not the actual programing we want. The characters in film and television are mostly presented to be people who we should only really identify with on some emotional level. The people in ads are the ones we are directly presented to look like. Obviously. The more I see myself or something good in a person in an ad the more I think the product is something I should have, and or that's what I should be like.

This commercial doesn't necessarily depict a certain lifestyle, but it definitely builds on this sense of male self. This idea that I should be hip, I guess, and use words like dude as a main form of expression. Whether I buy the product doesn't matter in the end. If I do I buy it then I buy into the image that is being portrayed even more, but even if I don't buy it I still probably relate to it in some way. I don't know anyone near my age who has never said dude. Constant advertisements help shape what I do and don't identify with. Because I find the ad funny it conditions me to continue to use that slang so I can find that same humor in my own life that I relate to.