Group 2C
Carley Bartlett, Ryan Powell, Antoniya Petkova, Jordan Muckley, Bashir Yusuf, Katherine Tysoe and Sarah Myers.
This week we started the feedback session with a discussion, related to our individual tasks, for which Beth had picked to analyse celebrity and fashion magazines. We really expanded on that topic, considering how media is shaping the image of beautiful women, for instance, portrayed by the models in those magazines. Then that discussion took to a conversation about fashion clothes and mass produced cheap clothes and stores like Primark and H&M. Nowadays, there is a rise of the "Primark" industry, which is people buying really cheap and massively produced goods, without even asking themselves why they are so cheap and where might have they been produced. A few points brought up for that apathy was that firstly, perhaps we don't have enough money to buy expensive clothing or we just don't want to spend so much on a piece of clothing which is bound not to last (because this is the way they are produced these days). Secondly, many people believed that if we start worrying about everyone else in the world, we can't really live our lives or that if we start boycotting every industry that uses cheap labour, we're going to end up with no clothes/cosmetics/etc.
Spencer's point on the matter was that people don't really believe they can change things, until disaster "knocks on their doors". Like before the whole bank collapse, people never actually thought it would happen. Which proves the point that we are just accepting things and taking them for "normal" and "natural", without really thinking about them as much as we probably need to. And in the age of mass communication and internet, we feel and believe that we are really active and interconnected, we can receive news from everywhere and have a global say, but we are in fact still passive, taking certain cultural images without questioning them. Then we discussed Rares's individual pick, which was a print campaign against human slavery (from domestic violence to children in Africa), which brought up again the same thesis - that there are certain stereotypes of what's acceptable and what's not and whatever is not might get banned (like that print advert might have been banned in some places, some newspapers might not publish it or like, for instance, the Keira Knightley advert against domestic violence was also banned in the UK).
Then Spencer introduced a character very familiar to me - Walter Benjamin and his work called "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)", where he talks about the loss of authenticity of the works of art, due to the invention of photography. In Walter's work (whose name is actually pronounced as Valter, given that he is German), he outlines his beliefs on technology as a "destroyer" of authenticity and that through technology we actually lose the actual experience of things and places, the feeling of something, and all we get is just a visual reception of the place, for instance.
Then we spent some time discussing "the individual" and the strive against massive production, which is based upon the idea of post modernity and the recreation of the individual as a person with specific taste, not just an ordinary person from the masses.
We finished with the conclusion that "normality" was an ideological concept, that rules and manipulates society and in general each and every one of our point of views about the world. There are those ideological concepts in the media that control our perception of the world, which are (besides what's normal) also what's acceptably violent or graphic, what's disgusting, and also on a bigger scale the ideology of capitalism as a driving force of all media production and consumption.Labels: tasks |
