Whether one is watching television, driving down the highway and seeing billboards, reading magazines in a waiting room, listening to music on the radio, or searching the web, there is no way to escape these methods of mass communication. Many profit based companies use advertising is the most popular way to get the public’s attention. According to Jean Kilbourne, an award-winning director of films about advertising, an average American will spend a total of one and a half years in his or her lifetime watching commercials on television (Kilbourne). ADVERTISING PARAGRAPHAccording to Kilbourne, by lacking social experience, children and young adults are more vulnerable to advertisements. One does not become an experienced consumer overnight. Young adults have not fully developed their own concepts of the media and how it affects their mental status. And even if they understand consumerism, he or she may not understand that the companies are trying to sell more than physical products. Kilbourne states that advertisers are selling “values, images, and concepts of success and worth, love and sexuality, popularity and normalcy” …show more content…
The Journal of Mass Media published a research study on how images in magazines affect young women (Hitchon et. al). Four graduates from Oxford University, performed the preceding study. Eighty-nine women from a well-known college in the Midwest, ranging between nineteen and twenty-eight years old were were presented with two magazine photos (61). The photos were images of the same model. The only difference between the two is that one of the images was the original and the other image was manipulated digitally to cause the model to resemble the standard magazine beauty ideal (62). The standard ideal beauty in today’s society is a curvy body with a long and thin neck, big breasts, and evenly colored, smooth skin. Some of the women were shown the original first, while others were first presented with the manipulated version. After seeing both photos, many women expressed “feeling betrayed, being treated in a manner that is distrustful, unethical, and unfair” (63). These feelings were validated by the trickery the magazine was