Quotes
Advertisements saturate our social lives. We participate, daily, in deciphering advertising images and messages. Our ability to recognize and decipher the advertising images that confront us depends on our photographic literacy and our familiarity with the social logic of advertising and consumerism.
Yet, because ads are so pervasive and our reading of them so routine, we tend to take for granted the deep social assumptions embedded in advertisements. There is a great deal more at stake in reading ads than simply wondering whether or not to buy.
Advertisements have sociocultural consequences and repercussions that go beyond the corporate bottom line, even though it is the bottom line which motivates and shapes the ads.
This critical reading of ads seeks to excavate the social assumptions that are conventionally made (and glossed over) in the split second that it takes us to decipher an ad and move on to the next.
Reading ads in terms of the social knowledge necessary to their interpretation enables us to isolate and detail the ideological codes that animate the ads. Suspending the taken-for-granted attitude that accompanies the reading process can turn the reading of ads from depoliticized diversion into a political act.
–Robert Goldman
