Response "The Bluest Eye" & "Lipstck Jihad"

There are many ways in which a persons outward appearance affects their inward understanding of self and identity. Even though everyone is an individual in society, society also shapes the individual.

In "The Bluest Eye" Pecola Breedlove represents the lowest status a person can have in society. Her family was black, poor, uneducated, and ugly. "You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized it came from their conviction" (39). Since Pecola was taught from the day she was born by society that she was ugly, she believed it. And because she truly believed she was ugly, this caused her to have very low self esteem. She believed that if only she could have blue eyes she would be beautiful and would be accepted by society. She envied and longed to look like Maureen Peals, a blond haired rich girl who had blue eyes, just like the baby dolls she would get for Christmas from her family. At the end of the book, Pecola copes with her low self esteem, caused by her rejection from society, by making up a best friend who tells her she is beautiful and has beautiful blue eyes. But even this does not help her out of the blackness. "But suppose my eyes aren't blue enough....for you!" (203).

In "Lipstick Jihad" Moaveni watches as the government tries to make women feel as though they are lesser in society then men after the revolution, by telling them they had to wear a veil in public and that they could not be seen with someone of the opposite sex unless they were family. If they didn't obey these rules, there were horrible consequences such as public beatings and hangings. "The general stressors of Tehran life -toxic smog, traffic jams, fundamentalist theocracy, inflation, unemployment- together with the special burden of the veil made Iranian life particularly wearisome for women, who were depressed in large numbers. The depression had a major physical component, in that it was compounded by the clothing regulations of the regime" (156). So what choice did these women have? Society told them they were at a lower status then men, which hurt their individual identities. When they went out in public, the only skin they could show was their face. Since this was the only way they could express their individuality, women in Iran became obsessed with having the perfect face, so they resorted to plastic surgery. "It assuaged so many urges at once -to look better, to self-express, to show off you could afford it, to appear Westernized. The compulsion to work these interior issues out through one's apperance was a curious phenomenon unique to revolutionary Iran" (164).

Respons to Sontag "Regarding the Pain of Others"

I believe the main point Sontag is trying to make in Ch.5 is that we as humans have an innate attraction to look at the pain and suffering of others, and the more exposure we have to such images leads us to become numb to what they really are showing. The easiest pictures of pain to look at are ones in which the person suffering is not close to you. Sontag describes a Sarajevo women who was watching the news of war a couple hundred miles away from where she lived. She thought to herself "Oh, how horrible," and switched the channel. Sontag makes the point that, "Whenever people feel safe, they will be indifferent" (100). So when people in the U.S. are watching news on the war in Iraq, many people do just as this women did; they think "oh, how horrible, " and switch the channel. Here Sontag is showing that "People can turn off [t.v.] not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but because they are afraid" (100). This women was a couple hundred miles away from the war and couldn't deal with this fact. And like this women, every day normal citizens around the world accept the fact that a war "doesn't seem as if it can be stopped- so people become less responsive to the horrors" (101). When people believe there is no hope, that is when there is more pain and suffering is happening, because no one will take the time to put in any effort to stop these horrible events for occurring.

In Ch.8 Sontag states that the vital function of war photographs are to say: "This is what human beings are capable of doing- may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don't forget" (115). To often we forget all of the fighting going on in the world in our everyday lives. Sontag urges that "To make peace is to forget" (115). She is arguing that in order for us to feel peace, we must forget the horrible images of war. As humans we need to feel peace in our lives, so "it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited" (115).

The last statement Sontag argues is that "We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying is; and how normal it becomes" (125-126). Her last point here is that no matter how many photographs a person sees of war, they will never be truly be able to understand or feel what happened in the picture. A picture is still just a just a memory and representation of a past event. One looking at the photo cannot truly experience what happened just by looking at a photo. They would have had to be there.

Research Paper

I am going to write my research paper on how far corporations will go to make money. My main focus will be on the IBM computers in the Nazi concentration camps. I will also talk about how massively organizing information on people today could lead to the same horrible consequences that happened sixty years ago. Today IBM is funding one of the newest technologies Verichip, which could lead to a national identification system.

Some main points of my argument will be as follows: IBM knew what the Dehomag Hollerith punch card machines where being used for, but kept their months shut because Germany was their second largest profit. The machines took a census of all the people living in the Third Reich, which labeled them as being Jewish or of a Jewish blood line. Not only did the machines tell Hitler who was a "Jew", it also kept track of the prisoners in the concentration camps. The famous tattoo on the arms of concentration camp survivors was the Hollerith number of the prisoners punch card. Even after the war was over, IBM used its machines to put Germany back together, even though they where the ones who tore it apart. They did anything to make a profit.

I will be using the book "IBM and The Holocaust" written by Edwin Black as my main source of information. I also found a few scholarly journal book reviews and a review essay on his book I will be using. Lastly, I will be using some some magazine and journal articles I found on Verichip to show how this horrible event could happen again today if we are not careful.

Response to Sontag "On Photography"

According to Sontag, the purpose of cameras are to take photos which "democratize all experiences by translating them into images"(pg.7). So when you look at a photo, you are not just looking at an image, you are looking at an experience. The experience a person sees in a photo is a "narrowly selective transparency"(pg.6). Sontag explains a photo this way because even though a photo shows reality, it is still an interpretation of the world. The photographer puts their own mark on a photo by deciding how they take the photo, in what light they take the photo, the time of the photo, and what exposure they use. All of these aspects affect how the photo will be interpreted by later generations.
Sontag views photographs as an expression of "a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical," and sees them as "attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality"(pg.16). When an speculator looks at a photo, they get a certain feeling and attitude form the photo. It can make a person fell happy or sad, angry or grateful.
Sontag explains how a photo only "show[s] shock insofar as they show something novel"(pg.19). Her point is that the more times a person is exposed to a certain type of image, the less "surprise" there is in seeing that type of image, and the less real the photo becomes. The main example of this which she bases her book on is on the pain and suffering of others. I agree with her view that the more we are exposed to the horrible truths of the world, the more "normal" they become, making the real reality of the events seem less shocking and more ordinary and immanent. An example of this today would be the war in Iraq. Photos of the war are still seen all over the news, but because it has been going on for so many years and we have been exposed to so many photos, the shameful truth has become less atrocious.

The Corporation and No Logo Response

Advertisers and marketers today are not just targeting consumers, but the consumers children. As discussed in the film "The Corporation", toy ads are made to sell toys directly to the child. They make the child believe they need the toy because "all the cool kids have one", so that the child will nag their parents until they buy them the toy. But what these children, and even some of their parents, don't realize is that there are children their own age half way across the world in Third World countries making the toy, for two or three cents an hour, under horrible working conditions. This point is also pointed out by Klein in her book "No Logo". Klein talks about the billboards that are placed in poor neighborhoods that give children of the ghetto the idea that if they buy their product they will be buying an escape from there lives. So even before a child can do simple math problems, they are being brainwashed by the adverting industry into thinking they need their product to be happy.

Another idea discussed both in the movie and the book is that advertisements are everywhere. As stated in the movie, it is a fact that every person sees eight to nine undercover advertisements a day. This could include people just walking down the street talking loudly about a certain product. As a passerby, you don't know they are being paid to do this. Klein points out that in the late nineties, advertisements were even added into one of our most private places, the bathroom. So no matter where you go, corporations are always one step ahead of you, trying to sell you there product, and sometimes you may not even realize it.

Both "No Logo" and "The Corporation" also show how far corporations like IBM will go to make a profit. Klein talks about a seventeen-year-old girl she met in Manila who assembles CD-ROM drives for IBM, who is probably only paid a few cents an hour. IBM also made the machines that kept track of concentration camp prisoners, as shown in the movie. And instead of IBM standing up for the young children workers or the concentration camp prisoners, they just collect their profits and keep their mouths shut. It is like the movie points out: a corporation can be given the rights of a moral person, but they have no conscience, no soul to save and no body to incinerate.

Response to "No Logo" By Naomi Klein

In the introduction chapter of "No Logo", Naomi Klein states that she wrote this book "on a simple hypothesis: that as more people discover the brand-name secrets of the global logo web, their outrage will fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high name-brand recognition". So is her hypothesis right? If the general public was better informed by people like "the student activists identifying themselves as "Spiders"" , who "are now free to swing off this web of logos like spy/spiders- trading information about the labor practices, chemical spills, animal cruelty and unethical marketing around the world", would people stop buying "brand name" items and instead buy "bargain/no-name brands"?

I believe that if people were better informed about all the horrible consequences of their "brand name" buying, they might consider changing their ways, and look beyond the "branding" of a product . Instead of buying "Nike sneakers [that] have been traced back to abusive sweatshops of Vietnam", they would buy a private label brand that was made in the U.S., which probably actually costs less, are better quality, and were made under strict laws that protect workers from unsafe and unethical working conditions. This isn't such a far fetched idea as some might think. It has happened before and will happen again.

April 2, 1993, became known in marketing circles as "Marlboro Friday". On that day was when Philip Morris made the announcement that he he "would slash the price of Marlboro cigarettes by 20 percent in an attempt to compete with bargain brands that were eating into the market". This proves that there is an alternative to "brand name" living; it is called the "value generation" where people suffer form "brand blindness". But if everyone stopped buying brand names and went back to "the proverbial shopkeeper dishing out generic goods form the barrel in the prebranded era", what would happen to capitalism? I believe this could lead to the end of capitalism, because as Graham H. Phillips said, "a commodity marketplace in which one competed solely on price, promotion and trade deals, all of which can easily be duplicated by competition, leading to ever-decreasing profits, decay and eventually bankruptcy".

In order for this not to happen, many companies have gone beyond just "branding" a product, and into "lifestyle marketing". They give the consumer an experience through their product. Consumers know that there is no real difference between a Starbucks coffee and the coffee you can make at home. They are not buying the product, they are buying the experience. As CEO of Starbucks Howard Shultz explains, people "aren't just there for the coffee. It's the romance of the coffee experience, the feeling of warmth and community people get in Starbucks stores", that the consumer is looking for.

I believe as long as producers keep "branding" and "lifestyle marketing" their products, consumers will be continually brainwashed into buying brand-name over value-brand products. So for now, it looks like capitalism will survive.

Ohman vs. Adorno and Horkheimer

Both Ohman and Adorno and Horkheimer agree that our country has become a contemporary mass "culture industry", sustained by advertising, and run through capitalism.The way our country gains capital (wealth) is by consumers buying products that cost more money than it takes to produce them. But in order for consumers to buy these products, they have to believe they "need" them, so producers came up with a plan to make consumers believe they "need" to buy their product. In Ohman's Selling Culture, he says that "companies could divide customers up into "shares" of the market, and develop brand loyalties among them". Agreeing with him, Adorno and Horkheimer in The Culture Industry wrote, "The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everyone must behave in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type". So consumers are put into categories depending on their income, are told what "type" they are through marketing and advertising of products, and are then expected to buy products that fit their type.
Now these products are not just cheap or generic brand products that are advertised; they are "Brand Name" products. Consumers are brainwashed by the "culture industry" into thinking they "need" these "Brand Name" products that cost twice as much as the generic product, even though the only difference between the two products is the "Brand Name" stamped on the product. So how do producers do this? They brainwash consumers into thinking their product is better, even though as Adorno and Horkheimer state in The Culture Industry, that the "mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end". Many producers used the idea of convenience products, such as canned soup and processed foods that could be ready in minutes just by adding water and heating, to sell their product. They also promote the ideas of efficiency and modernity to sell their products.
In Adorno and Horkeimer's The Culture Industry they say, "The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them". But why do consumers continue to buy "Brand Name" products that they know they don't really need? They do this because they want to "fit in". If a person decides to be an individual, they will become an outsider. In Adorno and Horkheimer's The Culture Industry, they reference an analysis of Tocueville which says, "You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us".
So how can we overcome our contemporary culture? I believe we have a few options. We can choose not to conform. We can start to think for ourselves, and not let advertisements sway our product decisions. It would be easier to do this if all products were affordable to everyone. An example would be making tickets to plays, musicals, or concerts affordable for everyone and not just the upper class. I don't believe we will ever get away from a capitalist culture industry society, but we can try to make it better.