The photo above is taken from Vice Magazine Volume 9 Number 12.
On the bottom of the left page we have a boy with his arms folded above his head clutching a gun, the article it supports is entitled Trivial Pursuit: Terrorism Edition. The article is about a local radio station in Elasha Biyaha, a suburb of Mogadishu, that held a children's competition based around reciting the Koran in which the 1st place prize was 'an AK-47 and £450', the runner up would receive also receive an AK-47 and £300 and 3rd place "two live hand grenades and £250'. The article continues to explain that the competition was "sponsored by Al Qaeda affiliate Al-Shebaab, which is basically Somalia's version of the Taliban' which is followed by a quote from himself reading 'Youths should use one hand for education and the other for a gun to defend Islam'.
In contrast with this on the right we have an advert for the Sonos wireless hifi system, a system that apparently allows you to play 'all the music on the earth wirelessly in every room,' this is the point at which the concept of othering or 'the other' comes in. In one case we have audible media being used to encourage violent activity and almost as a sort of enrolment in contrast with a leisure time activity of listening to music as a form of relaxation. For most people listening to the radio is relatively stress free whereas on the left it is presented as a much more sinister scenario, furthermore the point is driven home by the previously mentioned image of a child wielding a gun, a image that most of us would find very surreal but is being presented as somewhat normal. It is here that we subconsciously create 'the other' as a person, or persons, whose ideals and past times are different to that of our own. Buying a new hifi and/or sound system is not necessarily an everyday task but something much more normal or down to earth to the readers and target audience of this magazine which are likely to be student and adult consumers.
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