The Magic of Photoshop

Today in class, our teacher assigned us to look through some ads or articles from the Internet and magazines and point out some negative attacks on people, especially females. We see it all the time: weight loss diet ads, supermodels, hyper-sexualized images, and so on. We may not realize it at a first glance, but it is still there, silently torturing us. And yet, we fall for it, trying to compete with it or living up to it, the ideals, the visuals. It discriminates and kills. So as an assignment, we found one of these ads and wrote out a complaint letter. Our teacher gave us an option to send off the letter. One source we used was the website about-face.com, a site used to help females of all ages to see how the media distorts in ads to make the visuals extremely, in a way, unrealistic. Photoshop tends to make the unrealistic-ness appear to look realistic. Images, such as the one you see here, start off with a very normal looking person, posed in the “Vogue” way, with make-up and what not. With a little help from the magical Photoshop touch up kit, she now looks flawless: smaller waist and belly, even complexion, no stretch marks or cellulite is visible, thinner legs, and, of course, perfect hair with no fly-away’s. If magazines showed what she really looks like, then maybe women won’t have to go to drastic measure to compete with the images. Note: Not even the women in the magazines look like those images in real life. Food for thought!

Evolution of the Looking-Glass Self

Earlier this week we learned a bit about the social construction of ‘self’. One theorist was Charles Horton Cooley and his “looking-glass self” theory. It states that we view the self we think we see in the behaviors of others toward us. This means we think what we think how they think of you”. People worry and think of how others think of you. We constantly manage our image to appear friendly, socially desired, competent and skilled, principled, attractive, not conceited, etc. The most modern way we manage our images is through the Internet. We continuously update our Facebook statuses and profile pictures, we check if we posted anything considered “bad” or risqué, trying not to give wrong impressions, for example, seeming as if you’re online all the time to show you have no life, etc. This is known as the online looking-glass. We are shaped by expectations and influences of a strict society. How far will this go and to what extremes? What will the outcomes be? Food for thought!