“On television and radio, in print media and on billboards, the consumable life, the buyable fantasy, continually bombards us. Even if we tend to resist a particular message or promise, everywhere the general message is repeated, inescapable”. (Ewen, p.93)

The above passage taken from Stuart Ewen’s chapter entitled Advertising and the Development of Consumer Society suggests that advertising is a powerful medium that is often inescapable. Advertising plays a significant role in society as it surrounds people everywhere they go. People are constantly bombarded with images and these images have contributed to getting people to spend their money.

To some degree, advertising has the potential to be manipulative. From a personal standpoint, i think that my thoughts and feelings have been shaped and strongly influenced by images portrayed in beauty advertisements. I can say that these representations have encouraged my thoughts regarding how an ideal female/male body should look like. I have constructed many of these representations with the help of the many advertisements i’ve been exposed to on television, in magazines, on billboards and on the Internet. Many advertisements result in getting people to believe that there is a hope for a better life. They succeed in getting people to believe that if they eat a certain cereal they will lose weight, or if they use a special moisturizer they won’t get wrinkles.

Over the past semester, I have come to realize that it is practically impossible to escape this powerful medium of advertising. Often without people realizing it, several things are being promoted to them at a given moment.

As a future teacher, one of my goals will be to help my students be less susceptible to believing everything in the media. In order for my students to grow up to be well-informed consumers, I plan on teaching them how to effectively analyze advertisements.


This is a good link to an article concerning how media's representation of men can affect their esteem: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27595678/