Advertising as a legitimate art form. I see this as being very true. I worked with a marketing team this summer and was challenged to expand my mind and engage my creativity more than I had expected. I think even more today advertising has become even more of an art form. With ads virtually everywhere we go in our daily lives, it takes a special advertisement to really stand out to you and make an impact on you. Sure, everyone can throw together an ad with a picture of a big juicy burger and a tag line, but its those few that can take that burger and relate it to something totally different yet totally the same. How will entice you to choose their burger from the thousands offered everywhere else? This is why so many small businesses fail. I think I heard somewhere that over 80% of small businesses fail within the first few months of opening. This is because it is not that hard to start up a small restaurant or shop, but it is extremely hard to attract customers, keep them coming back, and constantly giving the best. Only those few can really draw people in with their ads and keep them coming back for more.

In McLuhan's article The Galaxy Reconfigured, he discusses several ways individuals used their imagination and creativity to come up with very innovative and new technologies. Take the concept of the novel for example. It is a fairly simple concept: maintain a single consistent tone to the reader the whole time. Addison and Steele came up with this concept and it changed the way people read all throughout the world. Their idea may seem simple, but no one had thought of the idea before and because of them, literature changed forever.

Along with the idea of the novel as a new technology, McLuhan states that, “new technology possesses the power to hypnotize because it isolates the senses. In the case of the novel, it isolates certain senses for an extended period of time and I would say it often places you in a state of hypnosis. If you are really into a book, you become consumed by it and thrown into the story yourself. If an author is good at grabbing your attention and keeping it, a state of hypnosis will set in and people can go for hours reading one book. If a style of writing clicks with the reader, they can be drawn into the book the whole time. If an author is not good at choosing a style and isolating certain senses, this hypnotic state will not consume the reader and they get a completely different feeling from the book.

As I lay in bed the other night, reading a book my professor had suggested I read, In Cold Blood, I was overwhelmed with fear and surprise but still could not put the book down. It was so compelling and drew me in so much that I couldn’t stop reading it even though I knew that when I did close the book and turn off the light, I would probably have a few nightmares. One of the best feelings that I really enjoy is that sense of reading a book and finishing it and then feeling that the time invested into the book was worth it.

To comment on what Leslie was talking about and the shock of starkness in landscapes when there is an absence of advertisements, I seem to feel this way too when I find myself in a similar position. My freshman year I attended a university in a very small rual town. In order to get there from my hometown, I had to drive for over 5 hours through cornfields and flat land and not much else. Coming from a large city as Chicago, it was often shocking, and a little frightening actually, to look around when driving and see nothing for miles. Not billboards, not large buildings, just land and sky. For me this scares me I guess because I have become so accustomed to seeing advertisements all around me that they have become part of my world. To be thrown into an environment entirely lacking this was frightening to me. There is no one there telling me what to wear, where to shop, what to eat, ect. While I tell myself that I ads are invasive and I dislike having them in my life, when I am totally detached from them I am frightened and do not know what to do with myself.