Date: January 7, 2014
ELA
Sr. Huda Fahmy Media is a vast form of communication that pervades nearly every aspect of our modern culture. Us teenagers are exposed to all sorts of media outlets, from television, movies and advertising to social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Media isn't fundamentally positive or negative; however, us teens should have a healthy balance between exposure to media and other, intellectually and physically stimulating activities.
What are the images that ads present? Everywhere we turn, advertisements tell us how to act, speak, and dress and what makes us an attractive man or women.
Ads paint limited images of what men and women can be, and according to the media, should be. Since ads are everywhere in our society,-from the ads on the games on our phones, to ads you end up looking at on billboards during the heavy Houston traffic- these limited images sink into our conscious as well as unconscious minds. And in a way, ads are one of the main factors to why our understanding of our worth and our full potential is so limited.
Undeniably, all cultures have their own ideas about the qualities that make a person desirable. Often these ideas are very, very different than our own. Rather, it is the level of concern with external appearance that makes contemporary Americans unique. The deep concern with ‘our look’ that is so common in our culture has not been the standard in most cultures. It is an artificial concern that we have acquired from living absorbed in a society ruled by commercialism.
Personally, having not been exposed to most forms of media, I can see the negative effects that the media has more clearly on people, especially those of my age group. It's no secret that media has had an increasingly negative impact on the way teenage girls measure their personal image and beauty standards. The sizes of supermodels and actresses often influence girls in my age group - who are actively seeking to