Weird or Real? January 23, 2008

I never have really thought much about communication. Therefore, when I had to take the module this semester, I did not realise that it had so much to with psychology. It was surprising that, communication, just like psychology, had different perspectives, and theories. What I thought would be a boring module has actually turned out to be very interesting, and informative.

When we talk about communication, its basically about individuals creating communication, communication creating individuals, communication as a partnered process or communication as something deeply rooted with culture which is almost tied hand-in-hand with some of the psychology theories I have learnt last semester.

One advertisement that has always interested me is the one about smoking. This particular ad has been pasted in bustops , and has even appeared in newspapers, and televisions. The advertisement tries to discourage smokers from (obviously!) smoking by showing a picture of a woman with tongue cancer, making her look very hideous. What interested me were the comments of the people.

It seemed that non-smokers actually found the advertisement to be utterly revoulting while the smokers could not care less! (How ironic is this!) In a survey posted online by the Health Promotion Board, it seems that only 47% of smokers acually stopped smoking after seeing that particular advertisement. For some, the statistics shown here might be alright, but we are in a country where almost 70% of the population are smokers and it is increasing as the years go by. In my opinion, I feel that more effort could have been put for the advertisement. One smoker even said that he knew that such a thing will NEVER occur to him; therefore, he could not care less. Even though this is an advertisement that appeared last year, when I took up this module, the first thing that popped into my mind was this advertisement since it created such a stir among the public.

Since one part of communication is persuasion, I doubt that this advertisement actually achieved its original purpose. Smokers seemed uninterested, and non-smokers were increasingly agitated. They complained that the children were getting affected, and scared unnecessarily. Hence, the media development authority of Singapore actually shifting the screening of the advertisement on the televison to after 10 pm so that the children will not see it. Instead of creating a persuasive technic to dissuage reluctant smokers, all the advertisement did was to increase the worries of the general public.

Furthermore, when the New Paper revealed that the woman posing for the advertisement was actually a non-smoking model, the little persuasion that the advertisement had was totally gone. I feel that such advertisements are just simply attracting people without achieving their main objective. I doubt that majority of smokers actually stopped smoking after seeing the advertisement. Moreover, I feel that if the advertisement actually sets out to persuade a certain group of people, den it should not straight away stop after one advertisement. Instead, they should continue releasing similar advertisements in the same format so that the public will be constantly reminded. Of course, this will be a strain economically on the sponsers.

However, it is evident that if u want certain people to stop a certain habit, they have to be continually reminded of its negative effects, if not they will just be without any apathy for that particular issue.  

Since one of the theories I have explained above talks about 4 processes, one might be wondering where these processes fit in together with this advertisement. I think this advertisement should fall under the pragmatic perspective as it is about interdependent moves that become patterned over time. For instance, the media interacted with the public by publishing the advertisement. This might be called a 2-act sequence which is known as an interact. Afterwhich, the public responded by giving negative comments to the advertisment and creating unnecessary publicity which had nothing to do with smokers stopping their smoking. Lastly, the media reacts to the public by stopping the advertisements slowly and then completely stopping the publication and airing of the advertisement.

The pragmatic perspective likes communication to a game. Likewise, the relationship the media has with the public is also like a game; each party waits for the other to respond so that eventually both parties will have patterns of interaction that satisfy them both. Furthermore, silence in this case is also considered an important part of communication. When the public keeps quiet after the advertisements are no longer being published, the media understood that the problem was solved; therefore, they no longer had to worry about the negative publicity that they would get further.

The downside to this is that the pragmatic perspective states that only the moves that the parties engage in are important, the game itself is not important. For example, the media stops publishing the advertisement after it receives negative publicity. However, it does not know whether there were any other social factors that could have affected the public’s decisions. In this manner, the pragmatic perspective dissaproves the individuality of an individual and makes creativity utterly useless.

Therefore I feel strongly that for the case of the smoking advertisement, the pragmatic perspective could be very much put into use. There are many similarities seen between the pragmatic perspective and the relationship between the media and the public. Just like this, all other communication theories can be applied to real-life situations as well.:)