Sociology of Advertising and The Stereotyping of Women in the Media: Gender Roles, Personal Dissatisfaction and Issues of Patriarchy- Who Is Really to Blame?
The Stereotyping of Women in the Media: Gender Roles, Personal Dissatisfaction and Issues of Patriarchy- Who Is Really to Blame?
We live in a consumer world. Everything we do and perhaps everything we are is based on consumption and commodity. Daily life has become a constant juggle of products and services - needs verses wants. People and objects become interchangeable. People become identified and classified with material goods.
While advertising and the consequential high levels of consumption are juxtaposed and allied to economic expansion, they are also coupled with personal dissatisfaction, the commoditization of culture, the decline of public and family life, the destruction of true and meaningful human relationships, and the constant fortification of patriarchy.
The first major work of understanding media on a sociologic level was completed by Marshall McLuhan in 1964. In this book, Understanding the Media he wrote:
"After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society." (McLuhan, 1964) He points out that "in the mechanical age, now receding, many actions could be taken without too much concern. Slow movement insured that the reactions were delayed for considerable periods of time. Today the action and the reaction occur almost at the same time. "(McLuhan, 1964)
Thus, we are now linked to every other person in the world, through the media, and this means it is now impossible to be disconnected from what is
We live in a consumer world. Everything we do and perhaps everything we are is based on consumption and commodity. Daily life has become a constant juggle of products and services - needs verses wants. People and objects become interchangeable. People become identified and classified with material goods.
While advertising and the consequential high levels of consumption are juxtaposed and allied to economic expansion, they are also coupled with personal dissatisfaction, the commoditization of culture, the decline of public and family life, the destruction of true and meaningful human relationships, and the constant fortification of patriarchy.
The first major work of understanding media on a sociologic level was completed by Marshall McLuhan in 1964. In this book, Understanding the Media he wrote:
"After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society." (McLuhan, 1964) He points out that "in the mechanical age, now receding, many actions could be taken without too much concern. Slow movement insured that the reactions were delayed for considerable periods of time. Today the action and the reaction occur almost at the same time. "(McLuhan, 1964)
Thus, we are now linked to every other person in the world, through the media, and this means it is now impossible to be disconnected from what is
References: Goffman, Erving.Gender Advertisements, Harper, 1979. Myers, Philip, and Frank Biocca (1992), "The Elastic Body Image: The Effect of Television Advertising and Programming on Body Image Distortions in Young Telecommunications Commission, 1985. William Morrow and Company, Inc. New York, 1991.