Thu Aug 27 13:33:14 CDT 2009 Eactivist wrote: > In a message dated 8/27/2009 11:23:37 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, > pdml at web-options.com writes: > I think you're missing the point. It's not the photoshopping that people > are > upset about, it's the racism. > > Bob > > ========= > I think we all get that Bob. It's pretty obvious. > > It's just not a good photoshopping job either. > > Marnie aka Doe ;-)
What she said. On another hand, after thinking about it further, I am not sure if it can be classified as racism. I am not even talking about distinction of racism and xenophobia (or prejudice), although one can argue that the latter in mono- or almost mono-national and mono-racial countries could be prevailing. I am talking about effectiveness of advertisement. It is typical and reasonable that any advertisement that is targeting some particular population (or a part of it) uses means that appeal to that population. The potential buyers need to be able to associate themselves with the advertisement personages. Despite all PC hype, for most cases, companies like Victoria Secrets do not advertise bras using male models. Tools/guns/... advertisements tend to use male actors using them (with an exception of female actors posing in bikini next to the advertised object - but that could be considered even more sexist). Kid's toys advertisements use kids playing with those toys, not the seniors. Etc, etc. There is nothing wrong with that. In Poland, obviously, the population is more racially uniform than, say, in the US. Hence, it would be less effective to use people from other races and even visually different nationalities to be in the pictures (unless the stress is specifically on the international nature of the advertised object). One of the responses (unrelated to PDML) from Europe was that it's strange that MS didn't try to replace the asian-looking person. So, I think, in this case, the situation would be equivalent to replacing a picture of a man in an advertisement originally targeted at men, with a picture of a woman, for the the ad is presented to a female audience, or changing the age of the person, to match the targeted audience... To summarize, - MS did a sloppy job - in many aspects, and it may not be necessarily racism. Igor -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
