How has social media helped evolve the role of the audience in commercial advertisement? Is this a negative thing?

As the social media evolved throughout the years, its range of target audiences has extended by far and now is able to directly address different genders with specific targeted information. There have been ways created in order to discover the most products or other things that are appropriate for gender ethnicity and age. One could be any person out of the blue, and still find one’s self addressed in those advertisements. The use of characters value has a negative effect on genders such as women being objectified and degraded and men being stereotyped and given sky high expectations. Those set boundaries for the youth viewing those advertisements on regular bases. Also another aspect would be how consumers as a youth these days subconsciously advertise products that they have "liked ages ago" but are still contributing to the betterment of the business market.

Pop Culture

Fun – We Are Young

“We Are Young” is a song recorded by the American band Fun, released on September 20, 2011. The song made a breakthrough at the time, being the most downloaded song in several countries. The song emerges around the idea “Young” which is entitled within “We Are Young”.

The song starts by the lead singer talking about drug abuse, by explaining that his friends are in the bathroom of the bar, getting higher than the empire state. That further emphasizes how much they abused the usage of drugs, which lead for them to get “higher than the empire state”. The name of the song attracts hip hop listeners, who are mainly teenagers (the young age group). The song advertises the usage of drugs and sends messages; the listener will accept the message without realizing it. “Higher than the empire state” does not sound that bad; therefore as a result young listeners might start to resort to drugs when facing difficulties in their lives. That is because the usage of drugs was introduced in a fun manner, rather than being introduced as an issue that most societies from all around the world face.

The music video shows violence, by presenting a calm mood at the beginning of the video, then later on escalating into a tenser mood. Many say that the song refers to a conflict that happened between a couple, as a result she left him for a guy wearing glasses “My seat’s been taken by some sunglasses asking ’bout a scar”. The second part the expresses the scar, it can have different meanings, but the meaning that is being understood is that, she talks to the guy in glasses about emotional scars left by her previous partner.

This shows that songs can alter how teenagers think, since all the statements that have been stated earlier have not been intended by the band itself. The singer has been confronted later on, by a feminist, and she argued and asked why he would talk about emotional abuse. He confessed by saying that his song actually carried the idea of domestic abuse.