Another commercial
This one sort of upsetting. Butterfinger has a spot where a detatched professor archetype with a German accent drones on and on at the podium, eyes focussed at infinity. A student in the class looks very bored until she opens her candy bar and is led to imagine (hallucinate) various scrawlings in Butterfinger-orange on the otherwise-bare background. Oh, and what was the professor droning about? Math.
The subtext of this ad annoys me to no end. First of all, the clear implication is that mathematics is boring. Of course it’s being presented in the most boring manner possible. Beyond that though, mathematics is white, and male, and foreign. The bored student is a girl, because as Barbie tells us, “math class is tough”. I could rant further, but I’m reaching the limits of my coherence and it’s tough to type any more through this odd reddish tint the world has taken on…
Too often that’s the standard popular view of math.
I once pointed out to people that math was the real science fiction, since in math you could create a world (a universe of discourse) and imaginary objects — a world of the possible — that had scientific rigor. Also I’ve shown my children and grand children that there is much more to math than numbers — although you can have fun fooling around with numbers.
What is more cliche then “Math is boring” is your complaint against this ad. Wow.. it is a TV spot. TV is entertainment and ads reflect that. Don’t post frivolous stuff for google to pick up when I search “butterfinger”.
I absolutely despise that same commercial, for the same reason.
I can’t believe I need to point this out but what’s wrong with the commercial, very simply, is that it perpetuates the idea that learning is dull, while of course candy is so very exciting. The stupidity reflected in that is just mind-boggling. And whoever posted the last comment is an idiot, because ads reflect what a culture believes to be true, otherwise they would have no appeal.
See if you can figure out what the textbook is.
It sounds to me like the world of analyzing every little detail of everything is not a very happy place
Sounds to me like the above poster simply validates John’s original criticism.
And without even knowing it!
Bah.