False Consciousness and Unattainable Goal

     Whether they react or not, almost unconsciously, the audience are controlled and brainwashed by advertising  and clever advertisers' strategies. The advertisers' purpose is pretty simple ;  to sell products. To reach the goal, they use strategies from several directions to get people's attention and persuade and motivate to buy products. All the strategies are conducted based on psychology. Apparently advertising does more than sell products; they provide false consciousness. "First, it should raise your anxiety level. It should persuade you that you need something; it should make you feel guilty, inferior, or somehow 'less than'. Second, an ad must provide the solution." (Cortese 63) This process is a well-planned strategy to motivate people to buy products; advertising companies set up the ideas of what is valuable. As well as they set up the values, they do not fail to provide comfort to targeted demographic and segmented audience. "'points of purchase' or points of identification that allow readers to make sense of cultural forms in ways that are meaningful or pleasurable to them". (Clark145)

     Consequently, those strategies encourage women to create artificiality. They are controlled by values set up by advertisers; women are bombarded with so many stereotypical ideals such as young, beautiful, thin and seductive are valuable. We should be careful that these ideals are designed as an unattainable goal, which never satisfy people's feelings, promoting to keep consumers buy products in their whole life."A woman is conditioned to view her face as a mask and her body as an object, as things separate from and more important than her real self, constantly in need of alteration, improvement and disguise". (Kilbourne122) This is exactly the advertisers' scheme to make profits.

Never Satisfy Their Appearance

Excess Reach of  Thinness

     As discussed in class, the primary reason of advertising is to sell product. However, the advertising often is replaced as portrayals of society, which people unconsciously take for granted; the ads conveys the normalcy in society rather sell product. The interpretation of advertising is individual base but advertising has power to construct consensus, which lead constructing norms. "advertising becomes an important and overlooked mechanism of socialization as well a manager of consumer demand". (Kellner 127) I believe it is an interactive relationship between audience and advertising.

     As opposed to main stream images, showing negative aspects of excess desire for reaching the ideals is an effective method to make people aware of its danger. For example, dieting is never ending woman's goal and the idea of thiness is valuable could cause the serious health issues, such as eating disorder, anorexia nervosa, which can lead people to death.  In addition, there is a possibility that the obsession for reaching the ideals cause "body dysmorphic disorder"; people believe they are ugly and repeat plastic surgeries. The video is about a woman in South Korea, who suffered from the body dysmorphic disorder.

The solution to avoid those addiction disorder, is to put out the same portion of advertising which indicates the negative aspects to attain the ideal figures. However, it is really hard and unlikely will happen, because it does not satisfy the advertisers' main purpose - those ads become just propaganda advertising.

   Through the readings and class discussion, I feel everything is relevant to media literacy ; how people interpret the advertising. As previous readings indicates that teenagers are vulnerable because they are sensitive with how people think about them, and how valuable they are. Also, they do not have enough experience to see the representations through media objectively. But we learn how we should see ads as we grow up; it is designed to promote and sell products. Since we are bombarded with extreme numbers of advertising everyday, we are sort of educated to observe those advertising objectively; after puberty, we become less vulnerable. At the same time, I believe that the lack of media literacy is part of the reason that audience are affected profoundly - consciously and unconsciously. Therefore, media literacy has possibilities to diminish the negative effects of consuming tons of advertising.