Ryan's Readjusted Prospectus

I have changed my topic somewhat since class this afternoon. Here are my new ideas:

My research paper will be an investigation of the interplay between advertising and personal values. The broad background is the psychological affect ads have on us. First, I want to learn about how advertising uses and/or manipulates American values in order to sell goods and services. I will uses outside research and studies and hopefully several ads themselves to demonstrate how ads use what we hold dear in order to satisfy our desires (or make us want to satisfy a fictional desire). Advertising, by definition, makes us want to buy things. But I think Americans are looking for something when they latch onto advertising. We are looking for advice, reassurance, and comfort in advertising, and ad manufacturers take advantage of these desires and values. So, the second dimension of the paper is that advertising in turn reinforces, adjusts, or perhaps even recreates some of our personal values. Although this topic essentially has a broad basis, the paper will be looking more at how advertising affects our values as individuals. I would like to argue that advertising can shape values. (I may bring in international sources here to prove that ads affect values in general, not just Americans’ values.) I will analyze ads from different media, but I would like to focus on television, magazines, and “brand names.” The fundamental point is that ads do more than just encourage us to buy things. I will try to prove that advertising, both obvious and non-obvious, has a profound effect on our values, but one that we might not always see right away.