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... portant role in my research report. The first man that I mentioned was Wilson Bryan Key. He is famous for the uncovering of subliminal images in advertisements. He argues that not only are we being subliminally merchandised today but the public has been subliminally seduced for hundreds of years (Subliminal Learning 27) He has lectured to people about how the advertising industry is using subliminal messages to manipulate the public (Chen 1). In 1988, there was a case in Reno regarding the parents of a boy who committed suicide, which Wilson Bryan Key claims to have been caused by the musical group Judas Priest.
He claims that this group included in a song, at a low, subliminal level, the words Do it! (Ethics of Subliminal Research 1). In the end, the judge concluded that the words could be heard but that there was no evidence that they would have been able to trigger someones suicide without the aid of the suicidal thoughts that the boy had previously engaged in. Wilson Bryan Key has also brought up the subject of the just how intentional subliminal messages are in advertisements. He has said that these images do not appear by accident, coincidence, or as the work of an individual artist.
Rather, advertising agencies spend three to five months and upwards $ 50, 000 to scrutinize every detail in each advertisement (Chen 1) The second man that I mentioned was William Cane. William Cane is the pen name of Michael Christian who teaches English at Boston College. He was educated at Boston College Law School and has been lecturing college students about subliminal messages for fourteen years. He has concluded that one of the biggest problems facing college campuses as well as society is the use of legal drugs (Cane 1) He said that his lectures show what advertisers are doing to hook youngsters into lifetimes of addiction (Cane 1). The third man that I mentioned was Eldon Taylor.
He has written many books going deep into how subliminal messages work and their effectiveness. He discusses the earliest modern references that he has found on the subject of subliminal communication such as Sigmund Freud and the areas of the brain that get affected by subliminal messages. One of Edmund Taylors major topics in his books is about just how legal subliminal advertisements are. This is, in my opinion, the most disturbing part about my topic. The truth of the matter is that there are currently no laws whatsoever forbidding the use of subliminal advertisements. This means that a commercial on television could flash a message manipulating you into buying it, and you would never even know, but yet it is perfectly legal.
Eldon says that there are many reasons as to why subliminal advertisements are legal. One reason is that the public reaction of the movie situation in New Jersey back in the late fifties to the early sixties ended where it began. What was considered by Newsday as the most alarming invention since the atomic bomb has been shuffled away to dirty mind arguments and ghosts that go bump in the night (Subliminal Communication 10). People just believed that what you couldnt hear couldnt hurt you, and that what you couldnt see, you didnt see because it wasnt there. Several states, and even the United States Senate have introduced legislation to prohibit subliminal messages in public communication media, but no legislation has ever been enacted.
People that were interviewed by Eldon Taylor about subliminal advertisements were said to fall into one of two groups: the group that believed that they did not work, or the group that believed that they were against the law. This is extremely alarming that nobody is actually aware of what they are being exposed to because the media is legally manipulating us! Some actual examples of how subliminal messages are currently being used are that in some malls, music containing the subliminal message, Buy/Dont steal is being played, and that there are some video rental stores that have subliminal messages flashed throughout some of their movies to rent only their videos! The main argument that is keeping subliminal advertisements legal is that they do not work.
There hasnt been enough evidence to prove that they work because subliminal advertisements are a fairly new field of study. It is really still in the investigative stages. However, though there really isnt any scientific proof that subliminal messages work, there are many testimonies saying that they work from people who have used subliminal messages in a positive way. I will mention a few of these testimonies to give you an idea of just how effective subliminal messages worked for some people.
I have taken these testimonies out of Eldon Taylors book, Subliminal Communication: Emperors Clothes or Panacea? A woman named Marilee had more than two hundred warts on her hands, and tried to have many of them burned off. After using a subliminal wart-removal audiotape for thirty days, the warts had completely vanished. Six months later, the warts had still not returned. Another woman named June Goddard bought a subliminal weight-loss audiotape to play secretly to her husband. After thirty days, Mr.
Goddard had lost twenty-six pounds, and was never informed of the subliminal program. My last example is of a man named Vern Water. His mother purchased a stop-loss-of-hair tape for him. He had already lost most of his hair because of what seemed to be male pattern baldness, but after listening to those tapes for less than one month, he began to grow new hair. After approximately two months, he had a full head of hair once again. These testimonies and this research paper certainly didnt prove my research topic, which was that people are being manipulated by the media through subliminal advertisements, but it did show that there is definitely a good possibility that subliminal messages may work.
We also must remember that just because we dont have the technology or knowledge to fully understand subliminal messages quite yet, doesnt mean that they dont work. If we do some day find out that subliminal messages do actually work, then we will realize just how badly we have been manipulated all of these years. However, there could also be a very negative side to that, which would be that we would know for sure that they work and then there would always be that definite possibility that people were manipulating us constantly to do whatever they want. This is where you have to wonder if we should ever really know. It all comes down to the mathematical fact that even when theres a lot of a positive, if theres a bigger negative, then its still negative. Scientists will probably continue to study subliminal messages until we have it all figured out because of our need to learn, and hopefully, our newfound knowledge will be exclusively positive!
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