Reading exercise:
popular culture
• Almost 20 years ago, Procter &
Gamble made consumers aware
of an innovative design in snack
packaging when it launched
Pringles potato crisps in
rounded canisters. Now, a
number of other snack food
marketers are seeing the
wisdom of the Pringles canister
concept, one that is especially
advantageous for the chain drug
channel.
• Pringles has a major
merchandising advantage
for drug stores over FritoLay, because drug stores
don't have the floor space to
display towers of potato
chips. "But when we put
Pringles on sale in the nice
canister, we can place them
on the end cap and they go
deep and long, and we sell a
ton of them," the buyer said.
• Humans have the unique
ability to form abstract
conceptions about
themselves and to gaze at
themselves as both the seer
and the object being seen.
This can cause conflict
when the seer places
unrealistic demands on
him- or herself, especially
on his or her own body.
• As the advertising and film
industries bombard the
industrialized world with
images of idealized beauty,
more and more adolescents
are forming negative body
images and engaging in
self-destructive behaviors to
fit an unrealistic ideal.
• Children begin to recognize
themselves in mirrors in
meaningful ways at about 18
months and begin perceiving
themselves as physical
beings in toddlerhood.
School-age children are
aware of how their bodies
look, though relatively few
focus an inappropriate
amount of attention on them.
• Ideally, children learn that their
physical appearance is in many ways
beyond their control and learn to
accept their bodies without judgment.
However, children living in the
industrialized world are immersed in a
culture that creates standards of
idealized beauty and then connects
those standards to personal worth.
Consequently, school-age children can
become convinced that they are only
worthwhile if they live up to an
idealized standard of physical
appearance.
• As puberty nears, children
become increasingly focused
on the appearance of their
bodies. An adolescent may
mature too quickly, too slowly,
in a way that is unattractive,
or in a way that makes the
adolescent stand out in the
crowd. Any deviation from
the ideal can result in a
negative body image, and
adolescents may diet or use
steroids to counter their own
negative self concept.
• Distorted body images in
adolescence can lead to a
number of disorders, such as
anorexia nervosa, bulimia
nervosa or dysmorphic
disorder (a severe, clinically
recognized illusory body
image). These disorders are
accompanied by
psychological problems,
such as depression or
anxiety, as the victim
magnifies a slight flaw to
such a degree that all other
aspects of personality and
appearance are ignored.
• Body odor is the unpleasant
smell caused by the mixing of
perspiration, or sweat, and
bacteria on the skin. Sweat is
generally an odorless body
secretion. When bacteria multiply
on the skin and break down these
secretions, however, the resulting
by-products may have a strong
and disagreeable odor. This odor
is often due to poor personal
hygiene, but excessive
perspiration or some other
underlying disease are sometimes
involved.
• They seem to be
everywhere these days-rings or metal studs or
barbells in the nose,
lips, tongues, eyebrows,
navels, and ears. And
you know there are
rings in places you can't
readily see.
• Many kids appear to be turning
to branding and scarification as
the newest symbols of teenage
rebellion. Scarification involves
cutting a design into the skin
and placing sand or another
agent in the wound. It's an
ancient form of body decoration
still practiced by primitive
cultures. Branding is
performed using a branding
iron with initials or some other
design on a tip heated with an
acetylene torch.
• The soap opera form first developed on US
radio in the 1920s, and expanded into
television starting in the 1940s, and is
normally shown during the daytime, hence
the alternative name, daytime drama. The
first concerted effort to air continuing drama
occurred in 1946 on the DuMont television
series Faraway Hill. Soap operas, in their
present format, were introduced to television
in 1949. Two long-running soaps, Search
for Tomorrow and Love of Life, first started
broadcasts in 1951.
• The term "soap opera" originated from the
fact that when these serial dramas were aired
on daytime radio, the commercials aired
during the shows were largely aimed at
housewives. Many of the products sold
during these commercials were laundry and
cleaning items. This specific type of radio
drama came to be associated with these
particular commercials, and this gave rise to
the term "soap opera" -- a melodramatic story
that aired commercials for soap products.
• Most soaps follow the lives of a group of
characters who live or work in a particular
place. The storylines follow the day-to-day
lives of these characters, who seem similar to
ordinary people on the street — except that
soap opera characters are usually more
handsome, beautiful, seductive, and rich than
the typical person watching the TV show.
Soap operas take everyday, ordinary lives and
exaggerate them to a degree where they are
still plausible, yet are more dramatic.
• Romances, secret relationships, extramarital affairs, and genuine love has been
the basis for the vast majority of soap
operas. The most memorable soap opera
characters, and the most compelling and
popular storylines, have usually involved
a romance between two characters, of the
sort often presented in paperback
romance novels.
• Soap opera storylines weave intricate,
convoluted, sometimes confusing tales of
characters who have affairs, meet
mysterious strangers and fall in love, are
swept off their feet by dashing (yet
treacherous) lovers, sneak behind their
lovers' backs, and engage in other forms of
adultery that keep their audiences returning
to find out who is sleeping with whom, who
has betrayed whom, who is having a baby,
who is related to each other, and so on.
• Remarkable (sometimes unbelievable)
coincidences are used to enhance the
drama in most soap operas. For example,
if a young woman in a soap secretly has a
single sexual encounter with her
boyfriend back in high school, this
forbidden affair will certainly come back
to haunt her several years later...usually at
the very moment that it would cause the
most harm (such as on the day of her
wedding).
• Previously-unknown (and often evil) twins
regularly emerge, and unexpected
calamities disrupt weddings with unusual
frequency. Much like comic books—
another popular form of linear
storytelling—a character's death is not
guaranteed to be permanent without an oncamera corpse, and sometimes not even
then.
• A selfie is a self-portrait taken by a
camera within a mobile phone or a
tablet, held at an arm's length or in a
mirror. It refers to the incredible
explosion of images of the self that have
not only populated the social web but
also inspired multi-million dollar
applications like Instagram that offer
quick-fix solutions to badly taken
pictures.
• Whether it is the duck-faced pout, the tilted
face with a smirk, the glowering eyes in a
dimly lit room, or the full-length strut
captured in a mirror, selfies are everywhere.
Your profile picture on the social web or
your avatar on your chat room or the last
picture you uploaded on Twitter is most
probably a selfie.
• Many visual scientists and professionals
have looked with disdain at the selfie. The
critics have suggested that it feeds into the
extraordinarily narcissistic cultures that the
individualism and customisation of the
internet offers. The selfie is a vanity
shot — morphed, filtered, glossed and
changed so that it comes close to our ideal
of what we look like in our own heads.
• If the original function of the camera was
to capture an exterior reality and
document the world around us, the selfie
is a perversion because it only focuses on
the person with the camera rather than the
contexts within which they might be
located.
• Many complain that the selfie with its
unimaginative visual vocabulary — if you
look at one selfie, you have seen them
all — also destroys the richness and
creativity of visual language that has been
established. The point-and-click cultures of
the selfie encourage randomness and
thoughtlessness, reducing the visual image
to nothing more than a rehearsed act of
serendipity.
• Jealousy is a combination of emotional
reactions, including fear, anger, and
anxiety. Studies have shown that men
and women tend to feel jealous for
different reasons; for instance, physical
attractiveness in a perceived rival is more
likely to incite jealousy in a woman than
in a man.
• Everyone occasionally experiences normal
jealousy; caring about anyone or anything
means that one will become uncomfortable
and anxious at the prospect of losing the
desired person or object to another. An
unhealthy degree of apathy would be
required for an individual never to
experience jealousy.
• I'm 26 and have never wanted children. Last
year, however, two lines appeared on a
pregnancy test, and 41 weeks later the girl
was born. I pleaded and begged my husband
throughout the pregnancy to sign adoption
papers with me. He refused. He is in the
military and was gone through most of the
last seven months. We now live thousands
of miles from my family, and I am
miserable, stuck with a colicky baby who
still doesn't sleep through the night.
• I find no joy, no pleasure and no love being a
mother. I can't sleep knowing I must wake up to
a crying baby and the same routine of feeding,
diapers, baths and bottles. I have become more
and more detached from the girl and have
nothing to enjoy. Showers are short. Dinners are
rushed and usually cold. I can't even enjoy a cup
of coffee without looking over my shoulder to
see where the girl is. I don't want her to touch
me, and I can barely hide my revulsion when I
have to pick her up.
• I am exhausted beyond belief, and my thoughts
are turning darker every day. It's not the girl's
fault she was born, but I can't help feeling
resentment and anger toward this little person
who more and more resembles a block of
concrete on my feet. We can't afford day care,
and we have no friends or relatives remotely
close by. I can't stand to wake up much longer,
and these long stretches of crying have my
nerves shot and my hands itching to shake the
girl until she shuts up. (I have never shaken
her.)
• You may be suffering from postpartum
depression, a hormonal condition that is
treatable, and you may need a respite from
motherhood. Once your chemistry is balanced
again, consider making a trip to visit your
family for a few weeks. If you leave the baby
with your husband, and he must assume
responsibility for her care in your absence, he
may begin to see the wisdom of placing her
with a family who really wants her and is
willing to accept the responsibility that goes
along with having a baby. Please don't wait.