This quote from Erich Fromm perfectly illustrates my thoughts after reading the book, Ways of Seeing by John Berger. In the course of studying the anthropology of the mass media during this past semester, I learned to examine, scrutinize, and basically rethink everything I have come to know about the mass media and how it affects all people including myself. I do not think that I could have found a more appropriate piece to conclude my studies in this course. This book, Ways of Seeing, is actually a collection of seven essays, three of which contain nothing but pictures and images. From this alone, we can gather that the author puts a heavy emphasis on the powers of images and sight. The mass media is a format whose primary medium seems to be visual, namely images in our television, print, and now in the 21st century on our computer monitors. In studying this topic, we learned the close integration of culture, the image of the body, the construction of identity, representation, art, and commercialization within the mass media. Ways of Seeing examines all these ideas and how we "see" these thoughts represented visually. This book also teaches a reader to process these ideas and in a sense not to be fooled by what the mass media may be trying to "sell" them. I chose Fromm's quote to begin my paper because in essence we are all the people in the fairy tale who do not want to see the truth behind the emperor's new clothes. After reading Ways of Seeing I am now beginning to feel like the little boy who wants to shout to the world that the emperor has NO clothes! How we see the images in the mass media and what we think about them is likely not what is really being shown but what they want us to see and feel. How all these aspects of mass media are expressed through visualization will therefore be the primary focus of my paper.

Although John Berger stresses in his introduction that the seven essays in this collection may be read in any order or separately or in conjunction with the rest, for simplicity I will begin with the first essay. After reading the first essay my first feelings were that the ideas were glaringly familiar. This should have come as no surprise to me since the last page of this essay contains a note stating that many of the ideas within the essay had been taken from one written over forty years ago by a German philosopher, Walter Benjamin, entitled, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". This very same essay was one of our own readings for the course!! Nevertheless, the key topic of this essay seems to be the mystification of the past that is seen not only in art but in virtually everything around us today, namely the mass media. Clearly there are parallels to this idea of mystification seen in Horkheimer and Adorno's essay, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception". In their essay, these two authors dissect the use of culture as a marketing ploy to entice the consumers who seem to be buying into the images projected by this "culture industry". "Even today the culture industry dresses works of art like political slogans and forces them upon a resistant public at reduced prices; they are as accessible for public enjoyment as a park. But the disappearance of their genuine commodity character does not mean that they have been abolished in the life of a free society, but that the last defense of against their reduction to culture goods has fallen." (Horkheimer and Adorno 160) What they are stressing is the also the key point of Berger's first essay. The mystification of the past has become a powerful marketing tool for the culture industries such as the museums who now spend nearly as much on producing mass-market reprints of Van Gogh's Starry Night as they do on advertising the acquisition of another marquee artist's work. The business of culture is booming and it is largely due in part to the mystification of the past.

The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. Its function is nostalgic. It is the final empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture. If the image is no longer unique and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so. Berger 23

Another example of how Berger's idea of the mystification of the past is expressed in the mass media is through the ideas of popular culture discussed in Stuart Hall's "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular". In this essay, the idea of popular culture is revealed to be the result of "tradition" becoming the mystification that attracts the masses. The resulting effect is to create class distinctions that keep the masses at bay. In essence these are very Marxist views of mass media yet the use of the images representing the past are again examined quite effectively. It is his belief that the creation of popular culture creates a sense of nostalgia within the lower classes and the recognition of this mystification of traditions becomes essential in the struggle to free themselves from this prison specifically designed to attract them and lull them into complacency.

Hall's ideas are very similar to Raymond Williams' ideas expressed in his interview with Heath and Skirrow. In their essay, Williams also feels that the element of nostalgia is purposely utilized in the media, specifically television to help the masses more readily identify with their programming.

What strikes me, what I want to emphasize most without hostility to the people but with frankness, is that this retrospective mode was not an accident. This endless nostalgic reconstitution. And it exists partly because the left for reasons of its own believed that somewhere if it could be tapped there was an essence of the popular world which had somehow been lost but could be reconstituted by reconnecting it with its past. Heath and Skirrow 10

All these articles are concerned with the mystification of the past and how it is represented in the various forms of the mass media. The next two essays in Ways of Seeing are a pictorial essay and a second essay that focus on the objectification of women's bodies as well as the imagery used to portray women in the mass media.

From the beginning of art and culture, men have continually used women as the subjects of there work. As technology advanced and the invention of the camera, the subject matter as well as the imagery and symbolism for women has still remained fairly unchanged. A perfect of example of this as shown in the book, is to examine an oil painting of a woman, particularly nudes, and then to compare it to the posturing and expression of any woman posed in the advertisement of virtually any magazine or television commercial. The expression of either woman will most likely be almost identical. The role of women in art and advertisement is virtually indistinguishable because the audience for each is targeted at men. Therefore the women used in these images are catered to the desires of men. "Women are depicted in a quite different way from men-not because the feminine is different from the masculine-but because the 'ideal' spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him." Berger 64. Many of our readings seemed to have the same idea of the objectification of women to suit the needs and wishes of men, yet two seemed to stand our in this respect, not surprisingly both are written by bell hooks, a prominent feminist writer. In the first article we read by her, "Selling Hot Pussy", hooks concentrates on the imagery of black women in our mass media today, particularly the focus on the anatomy of the buttocks.

When calling attention to the body in a manner inviting the gaze to mutilate black female bodies yet again, to focus solely on the "butt", contemporary celebrations of this part of the anatomy do not successfully subvert sexist/racist representations. Just as 19th century representations of black female bodies were constructed to emphasize that these bodies were expendable, contemporary images (even those created in black cultural productions) give a similar message. Hooks 64

Similarly, bell hooks calls attention to the singer/actor Madonna and her use of female imagery, particularly her use of the black woman, in her "image" that she creates to cater to her audience. Not unlike the use of women in the oil paintings of the past, Madonna uses the created image of a white girl playing black to sell her exoticness. "Yet when the chips are down, the image Madonna most exploits is that of the quintessential 'white girl.' To maintain that image she must always position herself as an outsider in relation to black culture. It is that position that enables her to colonize and appropriate black experience for her own opportunistic ends even as she attempts to mask her acts of racist aggression as affirmation." Hooks 159 Although, hooks at times seems to be stretching her views of Madonna to fit her idea of the exploitation of black women in her work, her point is still well taken. The powerful imagery of women and the exploitation of women as subject matter in the mass media are clearly evident, to anyone who really chooses to see them.

The next two essays in Berger's book are concerned with the materialism and representation of identities in the imagery of art and culture. He focuses on the purpose of oil painting at its zenith and how the material possessions and goods created in these images were specifically targeted at making the spectator aware of what they should want to possess. Berger also exposes how many affluent people who commissioned these works of art were essentially creating their own identities through the images that they were having put on canvas. As Berger quotes from Levi Strauss,

For Renaissance artists, painting was perhaps an instrument of knowledge, but it was also an instrument of possession, and we must not forget, when we are dealing with Renaissance painting, that it was only possible because of the immense fortunes which were being amassed in Florence and elsewhere, and that rich Italian merchants looked upon painters as agents, who allowed them to confirm their possession of all that was beautiful and desirable in the world. Berger 86

In many ways, the ideas and motives behind advertising and programming of the mass media have not strayed very far from these same ideas. Search for identity and the identification of oneself through images seen in the mass media seem to be themes that are pervasive throughout many of the articles we read during the course of this semester. Hamid Naficy makes a clear connection between the fetishization of the imagery from the past used in Iranian television in L.A. to allow the exile cultures he describes in his book to create a new identity for themselves. In many ways this is closely linked to the ideas of mystification of the past as seen in the first essay by Berger only now it is expressly targeted at creating a new identity for a culture or group that feels an affiliation to none. Naficy sums up his views of the effects used within Iranian television through the idea of "invented tradition", employed by E.J. Hobsbawn, a historian.

"Invented tradition" is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seeks to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition [and] automatically [imply] continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past. (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983:1) Naficy 165

Similarly, Steven Kemper describes the use of powerful imagery in Sri Lankan advertising to assist the people in creating identities for themselves. One of his examples of this is a small advertisement he describes the imagery used within it. "One day as I was eating a paper dosai, I looked up from my meal and saw a decal on a water cooler in front of me. It stood just below five life-size lithographs of Siva, Krishna, Sri Venkateswara, Lord Buddha, and Jesus Christ. The decal had a familiar ring, here couched in local terms: 'We honor Visa cards-a Visa for the People from the Bankers to the Nation.' A wonderful confusion of figures-Visa cards, 'visas', 'the people,' 'the nation,' as well as five images of older sources of power and identity." Kemper 382 Were the people within Sri Lanka, one of the twenty poorest nations in the world suppose to create a connection with these symbols buy obtaining a Visa card? Kemper most assuredly would agree with Berger in describing the imagery as being targeted specifically at identification. James Boon describes this type of juxtaposition between indentity, imagery, mass media, and popular culture as a Cosmopolitan moment or Cosmome for short in his essay, "Cosmopolitan Moments: As-if Confessions of an Ethnographer-Tourist (Echoey 'Cosmomes')". Boon's work traverses a wide array of topics and situations but his central concern is the mixing of the modern world with opposing yet appropriate imagery and sounds from popular culture to create a strange juxtaposition that strikes him in its very weirdness. In many ways Cosmomes are merely mini slices of life as identities become blurred by the surrealness of pop culture additions, yet these situations make a strange sort of sense. As Boon relates in an excerpt from his notes: "I have capitulated, purchasing Puccini placemats, Ring Cycle glossies, a cut-rate Rosenkavalier, and other high culture gift suggestions. Appropriately, a Pioneer Laser Video Disc Player punctuates this Lincoln Center scene with strains of-guess who?-'Hello Dolly!' (exclamation point theirs)." Boon 122 His greatest disappointment with Cosmomes seems to be here the commercialization of everything, and the way people today identify experience with as many "souvenirs" and "high culture gift suggestions" that their knap sack will hold. In today's society we are taught to acquire as many material goods as possible as these are what define us. Just as the wealthy persons of the past chose to display their worldly possessions through the oil paintings they hung upon their walls, society today chooses to drape themselves in material possessions that they feel define their identity to everyone around them. And the key to all this is the powerful imagery within the media that creates the desire within us all to possess everything.

The final two essays in Berger's book are concerned with the images seen in advertising today, and the idea of publicity being the source for these persuasive, relentless imagery that is always around us. In many ways Berger is espousing the ideas of Noam Chomsky, a philosopher/activist whose work is notable in the fields of linguistics and social commentary. Chomsky clearly makes his view of the mass media known in his text, Manufacturing Consent. In the following quote he describes what he thinks it truly is:

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda. - Noam Chomsky

Essentially, Chomsky is espousing the same views of mass media as Berger feels that publicity serves, a control. Through the use of powerful imagery, the mass media tries to control the people, making them desire and want to create themselves in imitation of the images they see paraded before them, in a sense defining themselves and holding their own lives up in comparison to the impossible fantasy world that they see everyday in the media.

The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it. It suggests that if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better. It offers him an improved alternative to what he is. Berger 142

So what can we as individuals do to not allow the mass media to do this to us. Well, admittedly it would not be an easy task. To choose to close oneself off from any and all forms of mass media, is an option that may be possible but in the same way that would be admitting defeat rather than fighting to change what is wrong with the mass media. The methods and ideologies used in the preparation of the imagery in this form are not accidental but carefully selected and primed with the information available in psychoanalysis and many scientific disciplines. Using even the most basic of imagery described by Freud, advertisers can create an image that will make you believe and think any way they want you to. What we see is processed by our brains and although we may not think they are influencing us and changing us, they probably are. So in effect our best defense is to not trust our eyes and instead rely on our minds to think about what is really being presented to us.

From reading this book, Ways of Seeing, I found myself considering everything we had read this past semester. I could have found examples of how this book emphasized the ideas in virtually every article we have read, yet this would not even begin to do justice to the comprehensive way that it served me in summarizing and encapsulating all that we have learned about the mass media this semester. So, I decided that the perfect conclusion to this paper would be a small pictorial essay I composed that is a composite of all the ideas and images that have stayed with me from this class. So, for the conclusion to this paper please visit the web address listed below: