Labels! Labels! Labels!

Did you know?? We label everything? Believe it or not, we are always categorizing. Always. What keeps us sane every moment of the day is being able to cassify people, things, anything! into categories. Is this a problem? Of course it is. When we put a label on someone, it means that other factors or attributes come along with this label. For example, there are children born with ambiguous genitals. Doctors and parents get really confused because the child does not have one or the other if you know what I mean. Therefore, doctors think they are Gods and try to fix the problem. If it looks more like one, then that's what the child will grow up to be. The problem with this? The child ends up getting confuses about who or what they are? They've been mutilated into this other sex that they don't feel comfortable with. That's the problem with labels. it kind of makes people look at things in black or white, but really, everything is gray! I learnt this in a sociology class, it was great and extremely interesting. This website has an article that explains it better. http://www.isna.org/articles/ambivalent_medicine Thus, as health communicators, we need to really think about how we target our audience and what labels we choose, if we choose to use labels at all...

Get to Know your Audience

This week in class we dicussed audience segmentation. This topic is so important because there are lots of people out there with different personalities, interests, backgrounds, and experience. You have to really be carefully about how you approach a certain types of people. One health communication strategy could work for set of individuals, but not for another. How do you where to direct your campaign? It comes back to formative research. You have to gain knowledge about your audience. Even put yourself into their shoes. Then when you know more about them, pick which type of audience you'd like to target. Can you guest which audiences these ads are targeting?

We have learnt so much already about health communication as we wrap up the first module. The class started with everyone's own perception of health communication. To me, it is a method used to provide information to individuals or groups of people about aspects related to health improvement behaviors through speech, pictures, and words. In essence, the purpose of health communication would also be to evoke change within individuals.

Then we went on to discuss theories about how to shape health campaigns. Theories such asthe rational based theory, which tells us that people actively precontemplate without emotion. Then there is how people sort out messages in their heads, systematically or heuristicly. Personal, I think people do both at the same time.

Next, we learnt about formative research. A lot of work goes into creating commercials and health campaigns. For any type of commercial to get their message across, it should be very well designed and well researched. The best way for messages to get throug usually is through story telling. It puts an image into people's heads and allows them to remember it better.

The following link, I feel is very useful. It has many commericals about being anti-drug. The commercials are very creative and gets people feeling emotional. Well, I don't know about everyone else, but I got emotional. I like the dog talking one.

http://www.mediacampaign.org/mg/television.html

Spiritual Health

So, it is week three already of school! Feels like we just started school. Anyways...we've been talking about about how messages can create, change, and reinforce. Well, what I want to do with my message today is to create and maybe reinforce. I want to create awareness about spiritual health. I do not impose any type of religion on people, but I want you to understand that if we have some type of spiritual belief in our lives, it can help us alot. It can helps us deal with life maybe, feel more up lifted, or just more hopefull. I am a Buddhist and have grown up my entire life as one because of my family. However, it has only been these last few years that I really understand want being spiritual is all about. Being healthy means being well in every aspect of life. Well, I believe that people need to be well spiritually as well. It does not have to be Buddhism or any type of religion. You can believe in fairies for all I care. The point is, have some type of inner feelings and beliefs of higher beings than ourselves. You'll find that it helps you get through life easier, and have some sense of meaning, if that makes any sense. Hope all is well!

Please visit this site: http://www.buddhanet.net/