Rebecca Gagne
11/30/2014 01:47:36 am
Rebecca Gagne
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Shannon Olenick
11/30/2014 02:09:19 am
“Age transcended: A semiotic and rhetorical analysis of the discourse of agelessness in North American anti-aging skin care advertisements” by Kirsten L. Ellison brings up some very interesting points about aging and North America’s view’s of age and body image.
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Kailey Brennan
11/30/2014 04:19:23 am
I found "Age Transcended: A Semiotic and Rhetorical Analysis of Discourse of Agelessness in North American Anti-Aging Skin Care Advertisements" to be extremely eye opening. By taking individual advertisements targeting woman about anti aging products and breaking them down, I really got to see just how far our society is willing to go to reverse the "effects" of the natural aging process. I have always noticed that our society values youthful looks over all. People are only considering attractive if they "look good for their age," which of course implys that they look younger than they are suppose to. It is rather stange when you think about it because there is no way to reverse time and everyone has to get older, it's just the way the world works. Why fight so strongly against something you have no control over, something that is natural?
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Nicole Doniger
11/30/2014 06:13:44 am
Nicole Doniger
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Amy Pistone
11/30/2014 01:35:22 pm
Amy Pistone
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Jessica St. George
12/1/2014 01:23:24 am
This article on agelessness was very interesting. Especially how they started off talking about an organizationthat wants to get rid of aging because they don't want the world to become a wrinkled diseased mess of people. It sounds almost like they want everyone to be immortal and live forever. But that would definitely mess up the balance of nature. The earth is already overpopulated with people as it is and I doubt that everyone is just going to stop having children. It was just a strange concept. Now I know that i have seen all these ads for antiaging cream and whatnot but I have never really paid that much attention to any of them. I don't necessarily care that much about that kind of thing. If we were meant to look young our how lives then we would. Just let nature take its course And try to be graceful about it. I know my mom has already started telling me to use this cream or that cream to keep myself looking younger for longer but I'm not really that worried. I mean I use creams and stuff but that has more to do with my skin being dry sometimes due to allergies and things. I have no idea whether they have these supposed anti aging ingredients in them. They could and they couldn't. Wouldn't really make a difference to me. What I also thought was interesting were the ads. The only actual natural looking one that I saw was avenno. The biotherm skin vivo ad looked futuristic in the way that It pixelized part of the image. It makes it look unrealistic and I am not sure why people would want that. The chanel ad had the woman half in dark. You can barely even see any of her skin. How is this helpful in showing that she looks ageless? The prevage day ad had a cool message saying that being beautiful is difficult and is like a war. But they also have basically her whole face covered with a mask. You can barely tell what she looks like let alone if she looks ageless or not. I just feel like if they have ads where they are trying to show people looking ageless then they should actually let people see the women in their ads instead of trying to hide them behind all of these different things. I think that the avenno ad has the right idea because the woman looks completely natural and there is nothing to distract you or block you from looking at her. It also does not look as touched up as the other ads which I think is a good thing. People should be able to see what they are paying for. It Is just kind of upsetting that society is so focused on looking so young and attractive all the time. I personally think that older people and people with wrinkles can quite often still be beautiful. I know that I have always thought that my grandma was one of the most beautiful people in the world and she didn't even do anything to try and hide the fact that she was old.
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Rebecca Gagne
12/2/2014 07:21:02 am
Rebecca Gagne
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Shannon Olenick
12/2/2014 09:35:53 am
“The Body and Technology” covers numerous topics throughout its length, and makes some very interesting points. I was particularly intrigued by the portion that discusses latino bodies. The statistics about the increase in income amongst whites, blacks, and latinos was shocking. There was hardly and difference between whites and blacks, but latinos were staggeringly behind. There is also debate as to what exactly qualifies one as Hispanic or latino.
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Sarah Machado
12/2/2014 11:32:20 pm
Sarah Machado
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Amy Pistone
12/2/2014 11:48:10 pm
Amy Pistone
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Nicole Doniger
12/2/2014 11:56:38 pm
Nicole Doniger
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Allison Stratton
12/3/2014 12:56:33 am
Allison Stratton
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Jessica St. George
12/3/2014 01:12:24 am
I really like how this article had little blurbs from a bunch of different authors but they all still had to do with technology. It is interesting to think about the relationship between the body and technology especially nowadays when technology is so prevalent in society. I liked at the beginning when it talked about the fact that the utopian ideal has basically collapsed since the eruption of enhancements in technology. With all of the new military technology it just doesn’t seem like society can go back to the dream of a utopian world. A utopian world would have no need of weapons for wars because there would be no need for wars at all. I also liked in the second part where it talked about the relationship between bodies and photography. It talks about the shift between the photographic to electronic media. Actual photographs seem to create physicality while electronic media does not. Since you can actually hold a photograph in your hand it seems to make it all the more real. Just viewing photographs in electronic media is just not the same. It does not have quite the same impact as a physical photograph. In the next part I like how they compared race and gender to the idea of cyborgs. It mentions at the beginning that cyborgs are technological evolved monsters made of wholes and parts. They compare this to the fact that people fear Latinos as monsters. They talk about the huge discrepancy between what the average person makes compared to Latinos and I thought it was interesting to see what a big discrepancy there was. They mentioned Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez as Latinos that are in the spotlight but they also mentioned the fact that they are sporting buff bodies and blonde highlights which suggests that they had to change themselves in some way to be as big a part of technology as they are. I personally never would have thought to compare the idea of race and gender to the idea of a cyborg. They talk about cyborgs a lot throughout the whole article and I find that quite interesting. I have never really thought much about cyborgs but I guess in a way most people are kind of like cyborgs. People use technology to help them do all kinds of things. People use technology to hear and see better when without it they would not be able to. People who can’t walk are able to get around with the use of wheelchairs and such. It is actually kind of disconcerting to think about just how much people nowadays rely on technology to do pretty much everything. It makes me wonder about what would happen if technology just suddenly vanished. What would people do? The world certainly would not be the same as it is now. In the last part of the article I thought it was interesting that they had a radio show where that had Latinos as cyborgs who embodied everything that people are afraid of. They brought about a lot of interesting points within the interview. Like when they wanted people to call in and confess their views on Latinos. Some people’s responses were not what I expected them to be at all. I mean I expected there to be negative views and I am sure that is what the radio hosts had been looking for but I wasn’t quite expecting the things that they said. It is interesting to see just how much technology effects the body though.
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