The One Life Campaign is a series
of photographs created in 2009 by the Bleublancrouge Advertising Agency in
Canada. The ad exemplifies the need for HIV/AIDS awareness and testing, so the
number of newly infected victims decreases in the coming years. This artifact
is important because the number of new cases each year is remaining the same
with 55,000 infections every year in North America. People are not
acknowledging the prominence and consequences the disease can cause. More
awareness needs to be created for this preventable serious disease, and that is
why I chose this artifact.
Three major analysis arguments:
1. The One Life campaign constructs a stereotypical
victim of HIV/AIDS by not adding a variety of different races, gender,
sexualities, and socio-economic statuses in the photographs. The artifact pigeonholes
the victim as being a white, middle class, homosexual male. With the creation
of this stereotype, the ad minimizes the audiences being reached. Certain
highly susceptible potential victims are being eliminated from the target
audience because they cannot relate to the artifact. Thus, assisting in the construction
of a sense of invincibility from HIV/AIDS. With this stereotype, the campaign
is diminishing the number of individuals who experience the need of getting
tested.
2. Governmentality is evident in the artifact
because of the call to action statement stamped on the photograph. The ad is
attempting to make testing for HIV/AIDS the norm. Individuals need to get
tested to help prevent the spread of this disease, which essentially is aiding
society. The responsibility and control lies with the individual to act
accordingly for society. Getting tested is equivalent to good citizenship. It
is their duty.
3. The final topic of discussion is the
entrepreneurial rationale. By receiving testing for HIV/AIDS, the individual is
adding to their health. If the results are negative, then the individual knows
to maintain their current actions with sexual encounters. If positive,
medication can be taken to help prolong their immune system. With the
knowledge, the individual can better themselves against HIV/AIDS.
Discussion questions:
1. What terministic screen is this campaign
creating (reflect, select, deflect)? How are the photographs labeling and
making the audience perceive HIV/AIDS?
2. Through this artifact, do individuals experience
social responsibility to get tested for HIV/AIDS?
3. Do these photographs utilize persuasion to entice
you to get tested for HIV/AIDS? Do the photographs make you recollect on your
past sexual encounters?
I definitely believe that these ads are placing responsibility on the individual. It is each person's responsibility to get tested for HIV/AIDS. In addition to being responsible for getting tested, the ad also encourages responsibility for knowing about your partners' past experiences and also prevention methods. This duty to be well is not only for the benefit of their own health, but also for the health of society. With all of these factors, each individual plays a role in the quest to lower the incident rate of HIV/AIDS.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, I think this ad embodies Segal's metaphor that "health is diagnosis." By urging viewers to get tested, the ad is suggesting that knowing your status is healthy. Not knowing whether or not you have a disease puts you at a larger risk and is ultimately irresponsible when it comes to your health. Seeking a doctor, tests, and answers is how society believes health is attained.
One thing that I find interesting (and confusing) is your claim that OneLife is only portraying HIV/AIDS as a white, homosexual male's disease, even though in each picture there is both a different sex and race(1 woman, one African-American male, and one white male). OneLife actually seems to be doing a fairly good job of conveying the idea that AIDS can affect anyone, regardless of race, sexual preference, or gender.
ReplyDeleteThese advertisements stress the idea of individual prevention as the only way of stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS. This concept of prevention is, in a sense, a way for the medical industry to gain money from a highly medicalized audience; by calling us into a state of incipient patienthood(eg. someone who could/might develop HIV/AIDS), they are calling us to come and spend money on a wide variety of tests and other preventative measures, enforcing the metaphor of medicine as business.
These ads do seem to place a heavy emphasis on men as being responsible for transferring HIV/AIDS, while placing little responsibility on heterosexual women. Despite a woman being present in one of the photos, the captions continue to use 'his' and never actually refer to 'her'. They seem to select men (mainly homosexual men), reflect a common stereotype that particular group, and deselect the facts about HIV/AIDS in reality as being very prevalent among impoverished minorities instead of white, heterosexual males. I see how the ads seek to place the importance of self-optimization on the individuals seeing the ads by making them question their sexual history, but the governmentality of the ads seems to be out of the ballpark. I am not fully aware of how patriotic Canada really is, but from what I have heard, they seem to be very liberal in personal choices to the point where the government remains separate from the private lives of their citizens. If this were an ad in the United States instead, I believe you would be on target with that idea. The ads do an excellent job with the visualization of all the hands in the picture, but this could also viewed as an unnecessary incitement of panic in the actual transmission statistics of HIV/AIDS. However, the persuasive appeal seems very similar to the Pink Ribbon campaign for breast cancer in terms of advocating for diagnosis, rather than prevention.
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