Aside from our in class speeches this semester, I haven't actually attended any speeches or presentations in a great long while. Full full time work schedule, along with my training habits, keep me from being terribly active with extracurricular stuff on campus. But! I do have a fondness of watching presentations online. A presentation that I watched recently that had quite an impact on me is Jean Kilbourne's Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising's Image of Women. The topic of the media's influence on negative body image is a subject that I am terribly angry about, so this video has stayed with me.
And part of that is due to Kilbourne's fantastic use of digital media to drive her point home. But to be fair, with a subject like "Advertising's Image of Women," I think you can't go wrong by using examples of advertising media. She opens with advertisements from years and years ago that she began clipping adverts out of magazines just as a side project, a hobby that made a collage out of her refrigerator. Ads that stuff like "Made for a woman's extra feelings," speaking of her anti-perspirant, or "I'd probably never be married now if I hadn't lost 49 pounds," and even "If your hair isn't beautiful the rest hardly matters." Oh, and "keep her where she belongs," with a woman on the ground near a pair of shoes.
Kilbourne also takes a moment to show us how advertising is so heavily integrated into our lives by listing a number of places where adverts can be found and giving a visual for each one of them. Now, in the book it says not to overwhelm your audience with slides but in this instance I find the method to be very powerful. It's a long list and visually seeing adverts in each one of the places that she mentions really drives the point home. She also uses video examples to demonstrate subliminal messaging in commercials and films.
Now this is more of a presentation than a speech, so Kilbourne uses media liberally to illustrate her point. And again, with a subject like advertising, the presentation is going to be media heavy. There are periods in which we aren't focusing on an image but on the speaker herself, but for the most part our attention is on the media. I find that her use of images isn't redundant at all; in fact it really emphasized for me how negative advertising really is everywhere. Since watching these videos I am so much more aware of advertising and how it is trying to manipulate me, and I think it is certainly in part to the huge amount of examples that she gave. In the past I may have thought that a given advert was mostly benign whereas now I see how absolutely awful advertisements are.
Finally, Kilbourne is a fantastic speaker. She keeps great pacing, has a wonderful cadence to her voice, she is eloquent, and witty to boot. She's been a bit of a speech hero since I watched these videos. She is passionate and well educated in her subject, and her presentation is incredibly informative. I highly recommend watching this presentation to anyone that hasn't seen it already.
Links!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ujySz-_NFQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4-1xCf3I7U
Thanks for sharing the video of "Advertising's Image of Women.” I did watch it carefully, and I do agree she, Jean Kilbourne, has effectively used the massive media to educate and persuade her audiences about the improper women images in advertisings which have been ubiquitous in our society. Nevertheless, she is a professional speaker and educator; and her presentation media were designed by many experts to achieve her purposes: education and persuasion. However, I, as a freshman in the area of public speaking, would like to step by step to develop my speech’s skills. Sincerely, I really appreciated your sharing with this video because I have learned different areas of significant concepts, such as how to recognize the hidden intentions in advertising, and to improve the public speaking skills. Good luck!
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