Remixes: Appropriating Mass Media

This is a video entitled "E-Trade Baby Loses Everything," posted to the youtube profile politicalremix. The video, created for a humor and parody site called College Humor, borrows from a series of commercials by the company E*Trade, that depicts a baby using their services for buying and selling stocks and the like. One can say that the advertisements attempt to garner customers by making the act of buying and selling assets seem less complicated, but they also serve to make such activities seem less risky or dangerous. The parody here plays with that attempt by taking the original elements of the ad and reintroducing some more realistic concepts, such as the inherent risk of stock trading. Not only does this undermine the implication of safety, but it highlights the absurdity of trying to gain customers through such means by demonstrating why it's bad to get someone who is clearly ill-prepared for such activities (with the baby as the perfect stand-in) into trading.

Also, this video is hilarious. Just saying.

Second Observation - Photographic Analysis

Here we have a photo of Hillary Clinton as seen in a New York Times article titled "Backstage Glimpses of Clinton as Dogged Diplomat, Win or Lose." At a cursory glance, the image depicts Hillary Clinton in the process of some task; however, the use of this particular picture offers an example of the ideas discussed by Roland Barthes. The article's heading demonstrates that the site is trying to build a narrative about the Secretary of State. With that information, a viewer can surmise that this image was chosen for its emotive impact as opposed to its more literal content.

The studium in this instance would just be Ms. Clinton sitting in the assembly jotting down notes. For the site's purposes, however, the image can be construed to depict her as tired or exhausted. This serves to reinforce the article's initial narrative set-up, an example of selective an image for its punctum. Image selection can often be done for these purposes in political or editorial media.