Johnny Gaspar's Post 1

Power is the ability to objectify and manipulate. When an entity has power over another it is because the entity has found a way to have its victims silently agree to whatever force it has pushed onto them. The idea of one entity having force over another is called hegemony. Gustave LeBon refers to hegemony when he talks about crowds. His argument is that by learning to manipulate crowds that order can be maintained. In this form of hegemony, the victim has become an object, a "thing" that can be grouped or categorized to fit conveniently under that power. 

Barbara Kruger talks about objects and categorizing them when she refers to popular culture. She argues that one's experiences are objectified into what is now popular culture in an attempt to manipulate them. Popular culture is a reference to a particular time and value system that is shared among the majority of the population. Members of popular culture become objects when another entity push them them towards a particular pedagogy. For example, advertisers find ways to manipulate members of popular culture into making purchases, also known as consumerism (consumer/consumption). 

This taco bell commercial exemplifies using popular culture to motivate consumption.

The other aspect of having power occurs when the entity has found a way to have its victim play the role of a puppet and follow anything that it says. Bell Hook touches upon this theme when she discusses white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy, where all three of these entities exude a force over their respective victims and have them follow that power, whether it be racism, labor politics or sexism. 

Sexism is a form of sexual politics in which it is thought that one sex is better than the other, usually in reference to women being the inferior sex. Sexism is present in media when women become the object of the gaze. The gaze is when one particular group is the object of attention. This gaze can often be used to interpret the politics surrounding an issue, such as examining women's roles in society and sexism. This gaze can be used to produce spectacles. A spectacle is an attention-grabbing image that pushes a particular pedagogy and is used to get people on board with that pedagogy.

This advertisement for Victoria Secret demonstrates how women become the gaze while pushing the pedagogy that women have to dress like this to be sexy.

The act of teaching this new act that feeds into an entity's manipulation is pedagogy. John Berger discusses pedagogy when he talks about how advertisers give the illusion that an object of pleasure is attainable when it really is not. By using a pedagogy, the entity can manipulate people by using media as a form of its representation. Representation is using images to symbolize ideas relating to a pedagogy. Lucy Lippard talks about representation when she observes the photo of the Indian tribe and breaks down the different ways that the photo can be interpreted. For example, it could be a statement about sex politics, a caste system, or it could have been created to represent neither one. This idea of looking at images to interpret the different messages that it is conveying is called ways of looking.