observations

This first contact with Baran's book and the discussions we've had in class this week made me connect different fields of study in an attempt for all of the information I was absorbing to make sense. Last semester I was still going to college in Brazil, where I was double majoring in Journalism and in Anthropology. One of the greatest anthropologist of our times, Clifford Geertz, who is in fact cited in Baran's text, makes the perfect connection when defining culture as "a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life" (1973:89). Here we can see how the ability of communicate is intimately connected with the development of culture. Every action we perform is a way to communicate something, a symbol with a specific meaning inside our culture. 

Now this is really interesting: as I was looking at the figures and schemes in the book, I realized that Geertz's famous example of the out of context wink could be applied to the mass communications theory. Basically if instead of the wink you take as an example a TV advertisement, it's possible to draw the parallel by saying that if that exact same ad is shown in many countries with different cultures - or contexts -, the ad will be assimilated differently in each one. Sometimes, even with the cultural differences, the ads work - like Coca Cola's Christmas ads. Sometimes, they don't. A good example of this failure is Dove's "Real Beauty"campaign. Average-looking, but pretty women in bikinis, to prove that true beauty isn't what Hollywood dictates. In Brazil, it was a big sales success; in Germany, women took as an offense. It happens.

That's why mass communicators should know their target, their interlocutor.  Unlike Geertz's wink, mass communication is, according to Baran, "constrained by virtually every aspect of the communication situation", not flexible and experimental - millions of people are deconding the message, interpreting - then judging.