Commercials Suited for Late Night

On a night much like most, I found myself still awake in the wee hours of the morning unable to sleep and glued to the soothing lights of my television screen.

As I am sure many know, the quality of television programming takes a steep decline once midnight hits. So, I am ashamed and yet amused to report I was watching Cheaters. Ah yes, that’s right, just one of Americas finest late night viewing splendors — complete with cheating spouses and a television crew waiting in the dark to shine the lights on the unsuspecting culprit. It is no secret that this show is geared towards a particular viewing audience, and I feel comfortable to say, a perhaps less educated one.

I noted, interestingly, that the commercials during this program seemed to mimic the quality of program it periodically interrupted. In the period of half an hour I was bombarded with advertisements for a raunchy late night chat with a big boobed blonde, pills to enlarge my male member, weight loss pills and, if that wasn’t enough, I can also work at home and earn $1000s/day!!

Now, really, most intelligent people understand that there is very little truth to these commercials. Mostly, they are money wasters and fantasies over the phone. I will assume that these commercials are placed in this time slot for a reason…that they just wouldn’t fly after school when little Bobby is watching cartoons, or on a Sunday afternoon when the fam’s back from church. Oh now, there are people out there, well aware of who would buy into the false promises of late night commercials.

Everything seems to be planned perfectly in the media business and why shouldn’t some late night – low budget commercials not want a piece of the action?

Happy Televisioning!

Hypocrite Behind the Screen

Today I sat in a two hour lecture for my Contemporary Media Studies class. In fact, if it were not for that course, I would probably not be writing my thoughts down here for public view. The notion of sharing some of my opinions openly for the cyber environment is an intimidating notion to say the least. I find my anxieties on the subject of some interest.

In a world where media rules; or at least it does in this writers eye; the invasion into privacy should be no shock to the system. I am a self admitting Facebook user, or more accurately, addict. I freely post my favourite music, movies, books and even photos documenting my life for the world to see. I have no problem with my so-called-friends viewing all of my latest social outings and giving them a glimpse into my life. Is this normal? Has it become such a normalcy to ignore the invasive nature of media via the internet and television that we can comfortably share ourselves with the world with one quick click of a mouse? My concerns for just how much the media is becoming a part of our lives and how much we are becoming part of media’s life is just that, a concern. I am a hypocrite in how I can freely bash our media driven world, and then choose to sit at my computer and mechanically conform to the Facebook community.

I want to sit here and write that I am going to take a stand and ignore the powers of Facebook. I would love to jump out of line from the masses and really look at what Facebook has done to my generation in it’s short lifespan thus far. Instead however, I am perhaps just in too deep. I can not cut myelf off from the Facebook drug cold turkey.

My plan of action is to ween myself off and hopefully when this class is finsihed, I can analyze all the reasons I have developed a love-hate relationship with media, especially the all-to-consuming Facebook.

j.