Sam's Workshop

One of the things I thought was a most interesting point brought up by Sam’s readings was the concept of “ownership” as it applies to health information. This was brought up in the Hardey reading, and yet I feel has a lot to do with what Sam is looking at in the birth control commercials. The question of who “owns” the medical information that was presented has a lot to do with how the information in the commercials is presented—do we view the speaker presenting the risks and benefits of the drug as something that an average person should have in her purview? I found that to be a very interesting question as we examined Sam’s data.

I was also particularly struck by the ways in which the data that Sam presented really did represent the “postmodern” commercial, or perhaps a mix of the modern and postmodern. Although much explicit information was given in the commercials (as was necessary per FDA standards), much information relied on other connections we could make, often intertextual ties to our understanding of women’s history, what a birth control pill pack looks like, what women’s bathing attire indexes, etc. The goal of the commercial was not entirely to sell us on the benefits of the product but rather to sell us on a particular feeling that we ought to have about the product—that it makes us freer, sexier, more modern, etc. (Incidentally, it was also very interesting given Pat’s presentation, to go back to the kinds of ideologies about manhood that his focus texts evoke.) I think the way these themes play out, in accordance with the kinds of ideas that Proctor put forth, might be a really interesting spot of exploration for Sam. I was very intrigued by the ways the two sets of commercials “talk back” to each other, and exploring the ways the talking back incorporates some of these concepts of how we’re meant to “feel’ could be very useful (for example, the correction Yaz commercial still uses the same actress in the same swanky bar instead of say, a doctor in a lab coat).

Connecting the concepts back to my own work; I think probably the most interesting piece I came across in Sam’s workshop were some of the ideas about ownership that Hardey explored. This concept of the internet making knowledge more communal, and knowledge being weighed not against its validity but against the availability of other knowledge, is one I think is particularly useful to my own work. WK to some degree deals with the question of whether one person’s reading of a particular text is valid vis a vis anothers’, and much of this has to do with the presence or absence of both opinions and the prevalence of one versus another. So I think some of the same things apply, e.g. people growing skeptical of skewed information because there simply is a lack of volume.