Air-brushing at Ralph Lauren

Hmm, I don't even know what to say about this. It appears that Ralph Lauren models have waists smaller than their heads lol. Just kidding, okay, so this picture caused a controversy over digital retouching and airbrushing. Her waist is obviously not smaller than her head, if that were the case, she would probably fall over because she wouldn't be able to support the weight of it. This brings up the topic of popular debate: is airbrushing okay in advertisements? Does this spawn body issues for young girls in our society? It's because of images like this that girls are dieting and developing eating disorders at earlier ages. What's sad is that it is for nothing. These images are not even real- these women are not that skinny. Girls see these fake images and try to attain the unattainable. They develop dangerous, sometimes fatal eating disorders to be like this fake girl. The girl in the image doesn't even look like a woman- she looks like a little girl- her hips look like the hips of a 10 year old, and her legs are the same size as her arms. That is neither healthy, nor normal.

"Meaning"--I mean Chapter 5

So basically this is about how we give meaning to things...I think. I guess what the chapter basically says is that meaning is all relative, depending on how we interpret things, and the things that we choose as representatives for those meanings. It all sounds like a lot of technological words that go around in a circle.

• Interpretation is one thing that comes naturally to human beings; interpretation of messages from each other, oneself, and the media. Media makes things hard to interpret because when there is confusion from the media, we can't ask them to explain further.
• Communication differentiates us from other beings in the way that we use language to give meaning to things in the world, and things in the world help us give meaning to ourselves.:
  
• Meaning is also not set in stone- it can always change depending on our interpretations; for example: "Born in the U.S.A." by Bruce Springsteen can be construed in different ways. On one hand, the song represents patriotism, and all that is good in serving your country, but on the other hand, it is a satirical and sarcastic song about how awful the Vietnam War was.
• Meaning as a concept: we have words that represent objects, that word gives meaning to the concept. If we have all have concepts of what things are, and we all conceptualize things differently, we each have a different concept for common things. Ex: My concept of a cat, is a fat, black, house cat that does nothing but sleep and eat. This is my concept because that is what my cat is like. Others have different concepts of cats because maybe they have an orange cat, or super energetic one.
  
• Trying to derive meaning from everything that communicates to us is hard because of the overwhelming amount of messages that are conveyed to us in a single day. As I said before, its hard to derive true meaning from mass media/pop culture because there is no to ask what is true and what is not. We must rely on our own systems to derive meaning from codes presented by society because these codes define our meaning of the world.