Best of the Week: Nike video

The Nike video we watched in class I found very interesting and thought-provoking, but the reason why I choose it as the 'Best of the Week' was because it confused me. Even now, I cannot fully wrap my mind around it, but that's exactly the reason why I found it so compelling. An underlying message of the Nike video was the idea of 'the system', which revolves around capitalism, big business, monopolies, and extreme manipulation.
I recently came across a term called 'frame analysis', and for those of you who don't know, it refers to a social scientist group that studies how people understand situations and activities in their surroundings. A man named Jim Kuypers used frame analysis to look at trends of media during history, and the public response to it. As he conducted research, he concluded that these 'frames' force the human mind to filter we think as reality and prioritize it. Thus, some of these 'perceptions of reality' are made more noticeable than others.
Thus, what I’ve gathered from this, is that the media has manipulated our perceptions of reality and the ‘frames’ in our mind, that we have been forced to prioritize their messages as superior. And how? How does media have the power to do that? I believe it’s through their use of the system. Every big business, every corporation has gotten it down to a routine. They’ve used every trick in the book to finally produce a formula so manipulative and sneaky, that has the ability to force our minds to think a certain way. Wow.
In addition, the Nike commercial showed me just how hard it is to escape ‘the system’, even if we tried, everything ‘the system’ has taught us is so engrained, it seems almost impossible to resist. Just like in the poem “A Work of Artifice” the last line reads, “…the hand you love to touch,” suggesting that every man is manipulating his wife, even if he loves her. It’s subconscious, just the way the media is.
In conclusion, I choose the best of the week as the Nike video because of its thought-provoking content and beautiful, yet eerie substance. The media has been something that has always fascinated me, and encountering this unit, the whole idea of ‘the system’ has caused me to think on a whole different level, and make me look at the numerous perspectives of it.