A Commercial for Thought

So the other night, I was watching America's Next Top Model. Like any other television show that we watch, there are commercials over a span of five or so minutes. Right off the bat, one of these commercials caught my attention because of how silly it was. It was an AT&T commercial for their new BackFlip phone. The commercial included two African American guys, probably about college level sitting on a bench outside. The commerical begins with one of the guys texting about the theme of clothing for that day (for lack of remembering, let's just say day one was jackets without sleeves) and the other guy texting back. Then the camera pulled back to reveal that both guys were wearing jackets without sleeves. The commercial continues to do this for about two or three more days, with a kind of music playing that I like to call "phone commercial music". You know the type, the music that seems to have a sound in common within the music no matter if the commercial is Sprint or T-Mobile. Anyway, the guys text back and forth for about two more days about the theme of clothing they are wearing before going into info about the phone (which was afterall the point of the commercial to begin with).
I feel like this commercial is so silly. It uses two things that I find that high school and college students both love to gain and keep your attention: clothes and cell phones. I think that the intended function of this commercial is to get people (mainly the two groups I said before) to buy
these cell phones with keyboards to make texting and tasks such as updating your status on Facebook simpler (as it does say in the information giving part of the commercial something about Facebook). The part that I find most silly is the secondary function of the commercial. I think the "hidden" function(s) of the commercial is/are:

• texting your friends while you're sitting next to them is cool
• wearing matching outfits with your friends is cool

I don't know about you guys but the only reason I find it valuable to text my friend when they are right next to me is if I have to tell them something that I just canNOT wait to tell them and we are around people that I can't gossip in front of. Other than that, it's a waste of a good text (although I have unlimited). And when I was in high school, me and all my bestfriends would wear matching shirts and stuff like the guys in this commercial did but we only did it on special occasions like Valentine's Day. We didn't do it on a day to day basis. And now that we're in college, I highly doubt that we would wear anything matching. College is a chance to express yourself and find your identity. You just CAN'T find it trying to be like someone else, even if it's a simple thing such as dressing like them.

The Social Networks We Use

We are "Generation X", which means we have more access to technology than any other generation before us. We use the web to log onto social sites such as Twitter and Facebook everyday and think nothing about it at all. But who would've ever thought that people use Facebook almost as a blogging site to get their points and views across? As crazy as it may sound, it's true. Social sites give people a persona to develop and portray to hundreds of thousands through the World Wide Web. You can develop opinions about things you feel passionate about at the same time as telling people what you are eating for dinner. If you have ever made a status on Facebook about something that everyone may have an opinion on, you may have tried to persuade others to think like you. Even when you get a handful of people to comment on that particular status, in a sense, you have become a "blogger" and you have a post that people either agree or disagree on, or are indifferent about. Crazy right? Well it's true in a crazy way. We use these sites everyday and if we used them in a "blogging" kind of way, we could inform people of the problems of the world and also get messages across quicker. Plus, the words won't get mixed up because it's not via mouth =).