Notes on usefull videos on representation

Notes on: Collective Identity - Stuart Hall on Representation and the Media

• Visual Representations
  
• Kind of cliche - our culture is saturated by the image
• A still is transimitted in a variety of media
• Late Modern Culture - advanced industrial society
• The saturating idiom of communication world wide
• Cultural studies - pays attention to centrology of representation
• Variety of different texts, visual texts transmitted by media
• Double meaning - To present, to image, to depict
• Representation - connote soemthing is there already, through media it is re-presented
• Represents a meaning that is already there - common idea
• Another understanding - e.g. political figures who represent
  
• Notion of images and depictions
• Representation is the way in which meaning is given to the things depicted

Notes on: Collective Identity: Women

• Advert about birth control - works the way a woman thinks
• The boxes represent a day of a week e.g. Monday a washing day, tuesdayis ironing day [stereotypical image of a "woman's job"]
• Beauty, image -> power...BUT short living and unfulfilling
• Advertising has increased from $20 bn a year (1979) to $180 bn a year (1999)
• Average American exposed to approx. 3000 per day, and will spend 3 years of his/her's life watching TV commercials
  
• Everyone in America feels personally exempt from influence from advertising
• Advertising is the foundation of mass media
• Used to sell value, image, concepts and the product
• Advertising tells us who we are and who we should be
• Advertising tells women the most important thing is how they look (and hasbeen telling them for 30 years)
• Surrounding us with images of ideal women, trying to make people reach this flawless image of a woman
• Computers retouch images of women and create idea women
• Gives people false hope that 'we can look like this' one day, we're just not trying hard enough
• Research clear that ideal image influences women's self-esteem
• Women's bodies turned into objects, creates a climate, creates violence against women
• Turning women into 'things' lead to violence and abuse
• Women of colour, dressed as animals e.g. animal prints - looking as if they are not fully human
• Women's bodies continue to be dismembered in advertising over and over again - one part of the body is used to sell a product - dehumanising
  
• Focus on breasts, American culture obsessed with breasts
• Women are told to increase breast size, advertising makes it look like women's breasts are not perfect if natural