This project is on how to reduce a community's carbon footprint by shwoing examples of what our communities can do. The people who were in my group were Bernice and Alesha. This is the older version of the flash project. The new could not be uploaded.

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The members in my podcast group are Bernice and Alesha. Our topic is on how sleep deprivation affects a person’s daily functioning.  Sleep-deprivation is a huge issue in the SMASH community, since it affects all the scholars.

My group for assignment #3 is Bernice, Alesha, and me. Our topic will be on sleep (how the amount of time we sleep affects the amount of energy we have during the day).

This is my PSA poster on the effects of alcohol for people under the age of 21. This is important to me because a lot of people have died so easily from getting drunk or have affected their brain’s development.

*importance, imagery associated, target audience

Possible ideas for PSA poster:

1.)Maintaining Health (Call to action: Get some sleep)

This is one of  my possible options and I think it is important because it can affect your body and cause it to not function as well during the day as it should. The imagery  I plan to use is by using a dead battery symbolizing a person or a person who looks like a zombie doing their homework at two in the morning. The target audience would be high school students and college students.

2.) Take care of your brain (eat breakfast)

This topic is important to me because people think that it is ok to skip breakfast without realizing that they are hurting their ability to think for the rest of the day. The imagery I would use would probably be an unhealthy brain or a delicious breakfast.The intended audience would be students.

3.) Prioritize ( School Before Partying)

This is my third option because students would rather party and have fun over schoolwork, which can seriously hurt their lives in the long-run. The imagery I would use would be a balloon with glasses or an unbalanced scale with both options on either side or placing a clock that indicates that time is running out to show this idea. The intended audience would be students.

4.) Alcohol

-How does the popular media influence the way teens think of themselves?

Everywhere an American turns, the media is looming over them. Music, television, and the internet have created a huge impact especially on the way teens’ self-images are supposed to be in our society. Teen girls  have been strongly affected by the American media-imposed image. According to the National Mental Health Information Center, girls are 3 times as more likely than boys to have a negative body image. Girls with a minority ethnicity have an even more difficult time fitting the ideal self-image, causing them to be disgusted with their bodies and unsure of who they are overall.

“Thin is Beautiful”?

In America,”beautiful” girls are represented as very skinny white people. Stores especially targeted for teen girls, such as American Apparel, portray their models being super-skinny. From beauty pageants and fashion shows to simple advertisements, the models shown on tv are (no surprise) super skinny.

Since all the media shows is that the ideal American girl is skinny and white, then how can colored girls possibly fit this ideal self-image? Most girls do not have the same body frame as that of caucasians and do not have the skin light enough to ever reach that image. If it’s physically impossible to reach that ideal self-image that the media is constantly shooting out, then how does that affect teen girls?

Lowered Self-Esteem and Eating Disorders

When teenage girls feel that they cannot get that amazing self-image, their self-esteems drop at a drastic pace. 75% of teenage girls feel ‘depressed, guilty and shameful’ after spending just three minutes leafing through a fashion magazine. They do not value their bodies because they do not fit the ideal image. As a result of that, a lot of teenage girls do not think they are beautiful. Out of 100 women, only 2 would actually say that they are beautiful in a survey conducted by universities . Self-esteem is very low due to the ongoing influence of popular media.

Not only do teenage girls just lose their self-esteem; some end up disliking themselves so much that they end up doing anything to reach the ideal image. These desperate measures end up sometimes becoming eating disorders. Anorexia and bulimia have greatly been taken as an easy way to get skinny faster. One percent (1%) of female adolescents suffer from anorexia. In other words, 1 out of every 100 young women between 10-20 years old is starving herself, sometimes to death. Teenage girls are pressured so much to meet the media’s standards of what is beautiful that they decide to take these deadly measures as a way to reach their superficial goal.

Is There the Same Amount of Peer Pressure on Self-Image for a Certain Image Around the World?

Media does not only place pressure on teenage girls in America. The media’s influence on teenage girls around the world varies, but generally pushes the girls to meet their country’s ideal self-image. In a study conducted by the department of psychology at Goteborg University, they focused on how teens from Argentina and Sweden viewed body image. (Body image: Cross-Cultural Differences) The results concluded that the views on body image were very different culturally: Argentinians who thought that they were too skinny seemed more satisfied with themselves than the Swedes were with their own bodies. Body image in every country is increasingly influenced by the media by stating exactly what is popular and what is considered “beautiful“.Europe and other Western cultures, hold being skinny as an ideal image of how women should be. In Thailand, the ideal self-image is to be skinny and light-skinned, since having dark skin is considered very low class. in any place in the world, several teenage girls have low self-esteem and eating disorders due to not being able to “fit into the mold” that is being bombarded to them constantly by their local popular media. It is a problem that is greatly affecting humankind.

Media greatly affects teenage girls on how their bodies should be like. If they cannot achieve that perfect image, some turn to harmful behaviors such as eating disorders or experience a loss of self-esteem. On every continent, there are girls who feel inadequate due to the messages sent through advertisements and also by their country’s models’ appearance. The media has caused several teenage girls to feel worthless and not pretty enough to fit that ideal image.

Resources:

http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/index.cfm

http://www.annecollins.com/eating-disorders/statistics.htm

http://www.respectrx.com/archives/girl_stats_studies/

http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/0/8/0/8/p108086_index.html

http://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/mental-image1.htm