Logos-Pathos-Ethos, Another Look

Yes, I'm here again, mostly just because I can't keep myself away. Honestly this is starting to grow on me as one of my favorite topics so far in this class. I cannot help, I've noticed, judging things with this mindset in place. It's just that Mr. Beitelman has given a name to the way I think. It's kinda difficult, though, to think about it in terms of Logos Pathos and Ethos. I start to think of those three magical words every time I see a commercial or a billboard now, what exactly are these things trying to get at, I wonder. I've always wondered what everyone is trying to sell me, and I think everything is trying to sell me something, whether it's an idea or a friendship or some fruit roll ups or whatever. Now I've added another question to the list.

How are they trying to sell it?

Using these two questions I can probably become the kind of person that no one really wants to be around. That's not what I'm going for, though, so I suppose I'll have to wait till I'm home alone, watching TV or looking at the computer screen, and I'll wonder just what America has turned in to. And not just America. The whole world.

This Blessed House

The short story we read in class (a long time ago, I know, I have trouble remembering to come back here) was interesting to me. It looked into the idea of religion, and what exactly that can mean as far as what people with different religions can mean to each other. In the story there is a little statuette of Jesus, and this causes some trouble for Sanjeeve, a lot more that it would to, say, a guy named Mike, who was Christian. It just goes to show you that you can never really be sure just what's going to offend someone, and, in my experience, it's probably better not to leave behind your Jesus. Really though, religion is one of those things that is always going to be touchy. It's a cut that's scabbed over and keeps ripping off, every day, thousands of times per day, and it will do that forever. Some people don't believe in God, or in any God, or in anything religious at all. And even those people get offended by stuff like this. It's a lot more powerful than you might think, at first.

Advertising and What All This Means

Talking about advertising really interests me. That may be because my mother works in advertising, but I don't think that's all of it. I think it may be simply because advertising is just really interesting in general. It's like a window into the American soul. This is true because you can tell, looking back through the years of advertising--how it was done, who was targeted--where America was as a country. All this is really interesting to me, especially when you consider it with Logos Pathos and Ethos.

I think it's funny, and also more than a little sad, in many ways, that while using Logos Pathos and Ethos as guidelines to sort of take apart these advertisements, we are basically saying that they cannot really be trying to do good. Sure they can do good, but if they don't advertise on a certain channel they're just trying to bump up their Ethos, and so on. I think that's probably because there seldom ever is a company that is actually trying to do good. Well, not quite. Everyone tries to do good, but only if the consumer can see it--It's like they're showing off for the attractive girl/boy in their class, and they're getting what they want. I think it's probably the most effective when they make you think you're doing good by buying their product. As Clint talked about with his (RED) Dell laptop. I've seen the commercials, and they don't really appeal to Logos at all, which is true for most commercials, these days, but I think that's important here. They want to make you think you're helping people by buying this product, but as Clint said, you're not really doing that much good. Whenever I hear an ad saying "For every item we sell we'll donate 10 cents to these dying people over here," I feel like these guys with money are holding these people without money hostage. They're basically saying--we have all this money, and we can give it to these people who need it, but only if you pay for this thing that you don't really need. And we'll make more money. And so on.

Obesity, How Fat is Too Fat?

I've been hearing about obesity for a long time now, it seems. About as long as I've been hearing about anything else that people have a problem with these days. We hear a lot of different takes on this one, which is sort of why I'm interested in it. You see with most big problems that we face in the 21st century, everyone mostly agrees about the problem itself, if not the solution, but with obesity it's a bit different. You see some people don't care about obesity at all. Some people might even like it. People enjoy eating; it's something that we all have to do, right? Why not make the most of it? We talk a lot of fixing this problem. Whether we should start young, with prevention, or just lose the weight once we have it, or both. I think you have to do both, because if you just start trying to lose the weight, then you're going to gain it back, and your children are going to be just as fat as you.

Codrin said something in class along the lines of "We are fat because we as humans were not meant to live such a sedentary lifestyle" and I think that's an interesting idea. Within a reasonable amount of time in the past, we as human were generally much more active than we are now. But, as standard of living increased and the amount of work we had to do to be happy decreased, something else started going up. Something too big to be sneaky, but too quick for us to have caught in time. That thing is obesity. We don’t really know what hit us, honestly. We just do what we do until one day we look down and we can’t see our toes, and oh how shocked we are! This is just one place where you can see a statistic. They all really show the same thing--We're getting fatter. Especially in our neck of the woods. What I want to know is how to inspire people to do something about it. Any ideas?