Vacations

Now that everyone has returned from home and travel for the Thanksgiving break, it seems worthwhile to examine vacations as media. There are a few different reasons for vacations and different types of vacations satisfy these reasons. Sometimes vacations are to relax, which beach vacations, cruises, and resorts are good for. However other times vacations are full of information. Cultural and historical information can be transferred from country to visitor, host to guest or guide to tourist. This makes locations as well as vacations to them an interesting type of media.

Throughout the semester we have repeatedly seen how technology and our digital age evolve how news is delivered via media. Similar ideas apply to travel. It is much easier today to physically travel far distances because of speed and ability to overcome distance, similar to the ability for a message to travel quicker today than in the past. Rather than having the message come to us via media, travel is the media which delivers us to the message.

While you can get messages by going on vacation in the form of learning things the type of vacation can be the message as well. This is similar to how we started the course; the media can be the message. A relaxing cruise or beach vacation has different meaning from a safari full of learning. Regardless of the type of vacation, it can revitalize people for when they return. Thanksgiving break is a nice tease as to what is in store for us during winter vacation a few weeks from now.

Breakfast

Food in general can definitely be seen as a medium but breakfast is much more telling about a person and therefore is a more specific medium that contains a more detailed message. Originally I said media was anything that transmitted a message. Breakfast can do this in a number of ways.
First messages can be transmitted over breakfast. If you eat with a group of people it becomes a social activity. In this sense stories can be shared, news exchanged, and friendships born. For me this has been an especially important part of breakfast in college. Especially at busy times, meals become a chance to see friends when we otherwise do not have time.
Second, the breakfast itself can be a message. Initially there is whether or not a person eats breakfast at all. This can say a lot about a person in itself. It can show that they are a healthy person or that they get hungry easily throughout the day. It can also demonstrate whether or not they are morning people, willing to get up early enough to go to or prepare breakfast.
The third piece of breakfast which sends a message about the eater is what they person chooses to eat. This is where breakfast becomes the same as any other food. The person's decision about what to eat tells a lot about them. Are they a toast person? Or do they like a more filling breakfast of eggs, sausage, and two strips of bacon? Perhaps they're more of a yogurt and granola type?

Next time you're in Trim for breakfast, try to notice what those around you are eating. See if it fits in with what you think they would eat based on what you know about they're personality. You'll probably learn more than you think.

Looking in the Window

Few things are more important to stores than their displays and product staging areas. This is most noticeable when walking along city streets or through well-decorated malls.The settings that retailers create are getting more and more elaborate and emphasize attributes and ideals of products which they are trying to sell.

More than anything stores want to embody the lifestyles their products are supposed to give people. They have to put up an ideal and create an image that people want to see themselves as a part of. In the summer, beach scenes are particularly noticeable and make it easy to imagine perfect family beach days with a cooler, umbrella and all the items required to outfit a group for the beach.

The storefront window is likely the inspiration behind all types of retailing advertisement. Magazine images, electronic ads, and tv commercials all try to stage some kind of ideal, similar to storefront windows. Old Navy even took it a step further and made manequins, the primary means of displaying their product in the windows, into the main characters of the television and print advertising.



This also goes back to the reading that we discussed about media being the message. Setting up something physical and three dimensional drastically changes how people interact with it. Old Navy tries to bring this into their television advertising with some success but makes it more of a character situation than a setting. The setting is the emphasized part of store windows to try to make certain aspects of that setting appeal to consumers.