Persuasions: Identities, Stereotypes, & Fights

Most people might not even realize it but media plays an enormous role in their everyday lives. Every single time you walk out onto the street, you are bombarded by over a thousand examples of media in the form of advertising.  There is advertising on everything, and everywhere. The posters stuck to the poles, the labels on purses, the walls on buildings, even the tag on the bag of your shirt. Whether or not a person is conscious of it, media is what affects the way a person makes their decisions. Another way of putting it is: monkey see, monkey do. Public figures in media on ads and commercials are idolized for the way they behave, and for the way they dress. Public figures are sometimes sponsored by companies to wear their product because of this.

Walking down the street as a normal pedestrian, I take notice of my surroundings. I see the iPod ad, the Dunkin’ Donuts poster, the 7Eleven flyer, the huge billboard for treating hemorrhoids. Walking down the street as a normal girl, I take notice of the apparel of many. I see the Burberry rainboots that girl is sporting, the Gucci tote the woman is carrying, the Urban Outfitters jacket that girl is wearing, and the Uggs that dude is rocking in 70 degree weather. But what I also see without recognizing it is the colors of the ad, the wording and the style which makes the clothes and posters so appealing. There is a clear influence on ads on our society but the point I want to make in my paper is that sometimes the influence isn’t always that clear. What makes you chose one product over the other? Just as fans of celebrities scrutinize the celebrity, every single aspect of an ad, no matter how simple it appears to be is scrutinized to the tiniest detail, and even the smallest error can make or break the ad.

Media:

We all have our own definition of beauty. What one person might find beautiful another person might not. Whether we realize this or not we also have our own definition of health. What does being healthy really mean? According to most people being healthy is having a good blood pressure rate, not having any types of disease and not being restricted from a particular type of activity. However according to others being healthy is simply being skinny or being underweight.

My parents are from China and most Chinese people are very skinny and the celebrities are even skinner. My mom’s definition of being healthy was not having any disease and such and also being very skinny. Starting from a young age my mom would tell me that I was fat and that I needed to lose weight compared to my older cousin who lived in China. When she watched Chinese movies on tv she would tell how skinny and pretty the movie stars were and when she took me shopping she would hand me clothes that were at least a size bigger than I was. This made me really insecure about my weight and I became obsessed with it. I became anemic and I would always go on diets every few months or so.

The topic that I chose to do is the media’s influence on our health. Everywhere we look we see beautiful models and celebrities on ads, magazine covers, side of public transportation, televisions and just about everywhere else. The majority of models on runways and in magazines are skinny, underweight and what most people might describe, perfect. When we see these people many of us will stare, comment and wish that we look like that person. Some of us might even go to great lengths like starving ourselves and going on extreme diets just to look like the model/celebrity we saw.

In my actual paper I plan to write about how girls (not all) are raised to believe that being underweight and really skinny is healthy; also the great lengths that many of us might go through to achieve that. I also plan to educate my readers on the different eating disorders that many young people have today.

media artifact:







I would like my topic to be about the way the media promotes consumerism amongst young children. From such a young age, children are being showed through numerous commercials to buy, almost worthless products to endorse there hedonistic nature. Not that this is a bad thing, because biologically speak, humans, let alone, animals in general are hedonistic being. The fact that the media industry epitomizes commercials like “Hot wheels”, and “Barbie Play House” as a source of happiness leads me to the conclusion that this can hinder a child’s ability to control him/herself. I consider this to be a successful topic because this is not I problem I feel commonly address in society. Surveys from institutions like A.C. Nielsen Co, a company that measures trends in the media industry, predicts that out of a 65 year old person’s life, 9 years are spend watching Television. This is quiet troubling because this means that advertisers, the same ones responsible to get as many people enticed by a particular product, are responsible for a great portion of the 9 years of an individual’s life spent watching Television. Three examples of sources I will be using are; Social Forces Academic Journal, American Academy of Pediatrics, and The Cambridge Handbook of Psychology and Economic Behavior. In my paper I plan to address how advertisements foster a growing dependability for material items which indirectly endorses narcissism. For example, “Sketchers” the shoe brand, has commercials using the power of aesthetics to draw the attention of kids in, after this, they go on talking about why you need sketchers.

In today’s world, the media plays a large role in everyone’s life. People can be loved or shunned from society based on one single thing they do. This may not be the fairest thing, but it’s how things work in our times. People who are consistently in the eye of the public are even more vulnerable to have to deal with the effects of their actions. One of the biggest examples of how the media could affect how a person lives is Kanye West.

Kanye has been through pretty much everything you can go through as a public figure. He did so much in the rap industry and was considered one of the best of our time. He gained support and recognition all over the world. He sold millions of albums, had sold out tours, and everything anyone could want. People looked up to him and respected him. Then at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009, he changed the way most people looked at him with one action, interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech. With this, he instantly lost thousands of fans. People couldn’t believe what they saw and how someone could do such a thing. The media portrayed West as a bad person. It was replayed over and over, there was no way he could change what had happened. It even made him leave the country for a while just to get away from all the negative attention. This is how the media and society can change a person’s life in literally seconds. All it took was one wrong action to change all the positive things Kanye did in his career leading up to this. Some still feel negative towards him and will never regain their respect for the rapper ever again.

For most of this year, Kanye has been back making more music and getting more in touch with the public and his fans. He’s put a lot out to the media to help salvage his image and people’s perception of him. He’s even issued a public apology to Swift acknowledging he was wrong. In my paper, I plan to show the whole rise, fall, and now rise again for Kanye West and how the media has played such a major role in it. After being put down and made out to be some type of monster by the media’s focus on one action of his, Kanye West is now using various forms of media to get his message out to society that he is a good person and deserves to be given another chance by all.

media artifact

Media Artifact

I’m a very complex guy and I’m very picky when it comes to the girls I like. I’ve come to find that I like girls that are well spoken, smart, funny, sarcastic, caring, and talkative. I like girls that I could have a conversation with about anything, the type that I can take out to dinner and not be worried that I’ll get embarrassed because of her behavior. But the sad truth is that none of these things are what I see at first. When I’m walking down the street the first thing I do is look at a girls face and if I don’t find her pretty I usually walk away, not bothering to take a second glance.
I was raised with a sister who is three years older than me and when I was a child I would sit and watch as she would take her Barbie and Ken and have them make out, and this stuck with me for quite a few years. I believed that only girls with curves, straight teeth, and long hair were attractive. Not only would I see my sister play with these dolls, I would see her sit these dolls on her bureau and fix her hair so that her and Barbie had the same exact hairstyle, and I thought to myself “If my sister looks like Barbie, then every girl should look like Barbie!”. It was not until years later that I discovered that some of the most attractive and interesting females I’ve come to encounter look nothing like Barbie.
Along with Danielle Minch and Vicky Vien I am going to make a still motion film demonstrating how people who waste their lives looking for perfection will end up alone. Our media artifact is an advertisement for a line of Barbie’s called ‘Barbie Basics’, where there are 12 Barbie’s, all of different races. The sad truth is that no real women looks like any of these twelve, so going after a human look alike is a waste of time.
In my actual paper I will write about how men are raised in a society where women are presented as meat and we are raised to believe that only certain women are attractive. I will also make it clear that there is no real Barbie out there, and that we as men ought not focus on looks only, but what lies underneath the surface. The truth of the matter is that I need a REAL woman in my life.

My Point Exactly.

At some point in every girl’s life, they have owned a Barbie. They now come in every color, with every haircut, wardrobe and career that one could imagine. If Barbie were real, her measurements would be 39-18-33. She would stand about 6′ tall and weigh roughly 100 lbs. Realistically, this is not possible. Her body would actually topple over. What kind of idea is this giving off to girls of all ages that struggle with their body image? At such young ages, we’re conditioned to believe that this is the ideal girl; Barbie is the perfect woman and this is how all girls should look like. Is Mattel sending out subliminal messages?

Eating disorders are so common nowadays because girls are trying to be something that isn’t possible or achievable; perfect. There is no such thing as perfection when it comes to physical beauty because it differs from person to person as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Who is anyone to tell another person what they should strive to be and how is Mattel any different?

Walk into any drug store and you will find concealer, blush, eyeshadow, lipstick, foundation and mascara in every color and shade imaginable. Turn on the television and nearly every commercial is advertising a product that would help you improve yourself. Walk down the street and every advertisement features a “beautiful” girl.

Personally, I also weigh about 100 lbs and only measure up to 5′ tall and for so many years, I’ve struggled with my own issues of body image. If I could, I would make it my life goal to make every girl see that they are beautiful in their own way. Our digital essay will portray two girls; one that is perfectly comfortable in her own skin and another who is constantly struggling to be perfect in the eyes of the media. Being so absorbed in her outer self, she doesn’t realize that she will never be perfect and is instead wasting her time on trying to be. With that, she ends up alone while the other girl finds love because she is not caught up with superficial things.

My paper will be about our generation of females of all ages, struggling every day to be achieve this ridiculous notion of what beauty should be, doing everything possible to achieve the impossible. We try so hard to become this new person that we completely lose ourselves in the process. I want my paper to leave readers with a new and different perspective of what being beautiful really means.

What is love? Love is something that cannot be defined; it has so many shapes, forms and variations that there is no one definition for the word.  So how can we begin to define it? What makes something an act of love and not something else? We base our answers to these questions based on our experiences and largely the society surrounding us.  I feel that in our society, media and works of literature portray love as an ideal perfect romance, paired with intimacy, understanding, and a “happy ever after”.  We are influenced to believe that love is supposed to be everlasting and close to perfection, that one person can fulfill our needs and desires.

Films and works of literature that portray this so called “love” are Romeo and Juliet, The Twilight Series,  Titanic , etc. However, it’s not just limited to films and books. Music, commercials, and ads all bomb us with this ideal love. There’s even an entire holiday dedicated to romanticism, which we call Valentine’s Day. With all these media sources constantly pushing the idea of love into us, is there any wonder why we are so influenced by all of it?

So knowing the influence the media has on our ideas about love, I want to examine it in detail in a paper. I want to dissect popular preconceptions about love and examine in detail just how realistic they are. The ideal love is something that is pushed on us by countless sources, and isn’t something that can be realistically pursued. I will use this as the driving thesis of my research paper, and prove it through examples and my media.My media artifact is a music video of titanic which I believe is a classic example how media influences us on love.

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, better known for her stage name, Lady Gaga has repeatedly slapped our faces with her outrageous outfits, awkward music videos, and catchy music. Her influence on the media has led her to be nominated as the 4th most influential woman by Forbes Magazine.

As I struggled to think of “What role does media play in our society?” I immediately thought of Lady Gaga and started to find out how she influences her followers. I came across Lady Gaga\’s Attempt to Repeal DADT. I was not surprised to find Lady Gaga in support of anti-discrimination reforms/laws but then i came across Gaga followers who don\’t know anything about DADT. They were simply under the influence of Lady Gaga’s view and hardly knew anything but they were able to get the support of their senator as seen here. The effect that Lady Gaga has on society with a simple video is simply “speechless”.

In comparison to the article we read in the beginning of the semester, Bieber for President(?), I’m thinking, Gaga for President for this research paper. With her blunt views, fashion sense, and relatable music, Lady Gaga has used the media as a tool to influence her fans and alter society’s monotonous view on topics such as politics and fashion by acting as a role model.

What would our world be like if everyone was comfortable in their own skin? If relationships were based purely on personality as opposed to materialism and physical beauty? These questions are only a few that Americans face every day. Little girls are tormented from the moment they are introduced to their first Barbie; the epitome of perfection. Standards of beauty are created in their minds that haunt them for the rest of their lives.

We chose a ‘Barbie Basics’ advertisement as our media artifact; a new line of Barbie’s that just came out. Not only are they more beautiful than ever but they are also clad in the most elegant of little black dresses with matching heels. Each Barbie has different facial characteristics and contrasting skin colors which is an improvement from the original blonde Barbie. Nonetheless, they are all emaciatingly skinny and far from proportionate. Some things never change.

Our digital essay will consist of a still motion film set to the music “Dreamers” by Them Terribles; a perfectly haunting yet upbeat tune. In this film, there will be two females and two males. One of the girl’s is comfortable in her skin whereas the other is obsessed with her surface appearance, constantly reapplying pounds of makeup and checking herself in the mirror several times an hour. This girl ends up alone, never measuring up to the impossible standards of the boy who is looking for perfection as well. He ends up alone too. The other girl, who is less concerned with her surface, finds love with the male counterpart who is also not out for perfection. This goes to show that the false idea of perfection influenced by the media, specifically Barbie products, will only lead to disappointment.

My paper will take a slightly different turn than that of my group mates. I plan to write specifically about the state of uncertainty in people characterized by opposite extremes using quotes and ideas from “Reading Lolita in Tehran” by Azar Nafisi as back up.  Women are expected to be physically attractive; thin and flawless. Furthermore, they are encouraged to show off these physical traits if they are lucky enough to be in this category. You are then left with a girl who is struggling to maintain this body image and appear happy when she is really a complete mess on the inside.

For those of you that don’t know, I have a big interest in photography. I have the Nikon D3000 and just got my hands on a miniature polaroid camera. I’ve been planning a series for a while and I finally have the resources I need to make it complete. I’m calling it, “The Gender Division.” In these photos, I will be using polaroids as an artifact to depict what the male is thinking versus what the female is thinking in the same situation. I tried to start today but I don’t think I’ll be the female model. My boyfriend wasn’t capturing me the way I wanted and it ended in unpleasant banter. I ended up putting the attempts I took today together to make a cover which I will attach. It’s a scenario where the boy is thinking lustfully versus the girl who is thinking about love. Well, I’m going to figure this out as I go and hopefully not waste too many polaroids along the way!

Click the picture to access my flickr.