Soap Powder And Detergents In Mythologies, By Ronald Barthes

Mythologies is written by Ronald barthes, who was a semiotician and structuralist. semiotician interpret human action and language as a series of signs that produced meanings. In his essay soap powder and detergents in “‘Mythologies’ Barthes describes about the myths of French daily life and explain how the media contributed to form the myths. According to barthers the advertisement and media repackage the popular idea so that it become selling. Barthes introduces the subject of soap-powders and detergents by identifying the benefits and the aim. For instance, the detergents have the possibility to save miners from silicosis. Then he gave the main point of the essay that media play with the psychology and persuades the audience to purchase
It’s oversimplified into a physical organ which can produce incredible formula. So what’s wrong with objectifying, reducing people? Its wrongness lies in that people leave out the most important ethics, the spirit, the soul of this human being, and focus on some of his concrete yet virtual properties. Few people cares about the characteristics attached to him when he’s thinking, most people try to figure out what to build a brain as powerful as Einstein’s and get as smart as him. It’s unrealistic but it’s worth practicing. So don’t talk about virtual and abstract conceptions like Einstein’s mentality, or his psychological status. Nobody knows exactly what Einstein was thinking when he was alive, it’s no use to consider the mental state of his since he’s been dead. Instead, make Einstein’s brain an object, an experimental material, and conduct experiments upon the brain to determine the factors that influence his intelligence level. People try hard to figure out what does that equation mean, and they are being through a paradox, during the process they blindly and happily accepted the formula without getting what the equation means. They know that the equation means a lot to human beings, but they don’t know how this equation can make a difference, and they don’t bother that. The paradox is that people try to make Einstein and his brain less mysterious, so they are happy to see that Einstein
Photography offers not just the cultural context that the candidate is trying to capture, photography offers this context in a “pure” way, “a photograph is a mirror, what we are asked to read is the familiar, the known; it offers to the voter his own likeness, but clarified, exalted, superbly elevated into a type” (1320). The photograph offers up a mirror of ourselves as we wish to be, and shows us the candidate to us as ourselves–how many times do we hear during an election, “He is the sort of person you can sit and have a beer with”