Next week in the Media Literacy for Youth class, we will be talking about video literacy. So I am giving my students space to provide feedback on yesterday’s Super Bowl ads and to share critiques they find online that they want to share. The goal will be to discuss how we raise youth awareness of these critiques, but also how we involve young people in crafting their own critiques.
For my part, I am sharing this critique of the Dodge Ram commercial from vox.com: Dodge uses Martin Luther King’s anticapitalist sermon to sell pickup trucks, which is especially problematic and discussion-worthy given the unquoted content of the same speech:
“And so we see it everywhere, this quest for recognition. And we join things, overjoin really, that we think that we will find that recognition in. Now the presence of this instinct explains why we are so often taken by advertisers. You know, those gentlemen of massive verbal persuasion. And they have a way of saying things to you that kind of gets you into buying. In order to be a man of distinction, you must drink this whiskey. In order to make your neighbors envious, you must drive this type of car. In order to be lovely to love you must wear this kind of lipstick or this kind of perfume. And you know, before you know it, you’re just buying that stuff. That’s the way the advertisers do it.”
Alaine Martaus 