Rawlinson, Kevin. “19 out of 20 young women ‘would change bodies’” The Independent. Independent News and Media Limited, 3 Nov. 2009. Web. 5 Dec. 2009. <http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/19-out-of-20-young-women-would-change-bodies-1813551.html>.

Melago, Carrie. “Ralph Lauren model Filippa Hamilton: I was fired because I was too fat!” NYDailyNews.com. Daily News, 14 Oct. 2009. Web. 5 Dec. 2009. <http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/fashion/2009/10/14/2009-10-14_model_fired_for_being_too_fat.html>.

Prince, Rosa. “Airbrushing of photos should be banned, Liberal Democrats say.” Telegraph.co.uk. Telegraph, 7 Aug. 2009. Web. 5 Dec. 2009. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/liberaldemocrats/5962358/Airbrushing-of-photos-should-be-banned-Liberal-Democrats-say.html>.

The Advertising Standards Agency opposes these claims saying it would be hard to control the extent of airbrushing. “All ads are altered or enhanced, whether it’s food that has steam added at a later date to lighting techniques to airbrushing,” a spokeswoman said. The Independent just published results from a report by Girlguiding UK which found that a shocking 95% of women between the ages 16 and 21 want to change their bodies in some way. This research comes during a push in the UK and France for advertisements portraying perfect-looking models to have clear labeling stating that the images have been airbrushed and retouched.

The movement in the UK is lead by Jo Swinson, a Liberal Democrat in the Parliament, who talked to The Independent up on hearing the Girlguiding UK results. “This report highlights the worrying number of teenage girls who are going on extreme diets or even considering cosmetic surgery because they are unhappy with the way they look,” she told the paper. Swinson went on to explain her theory that unrealistic advertisements are compelling girls’ dissatisfaction with their own bodies. “Girls shouldn’t constantly feel the need to measure up to a very narrow range of digitally manipulated images,” she said. “Airbrushing means that adverts now contain completely unattainable images that no-one can live up to in real life.” So, are pictures of super-skinny airbrushed models to blame for these results or is being dissatisfied with your looks and body a natural part of growing up?

Following in the footsteps of Liberal Democrats in the UK, a group of 50 power-wielding politicians in France are also aiming to clearly label all photographs that have been retouched, according to WWD. The proposed French law would require all advertising, press, political campaign, photography and packaging images to be marked with some kind of warning if they are anything but the natural image. These are some possible examples of how the warnings may appear: “This woman is actually larger than she appears,” “We took away some laugh lines,” “That’s not her real head.” Similar to the UK campaign, the French politicians say that the heavy use of airbrushing and retouching creates unattainable and unrealistic photos that can result in warped body images among young women and cause eating disorders, reports the site.

                One specific example of how airbrushing greatly affects young women today is the now infamous Ralph Lauren Blue Label advertisement.  Filippa Hamilton was the model who was airbrushed to the point of emaciation in the Ralph Lauren advertisement. Filippa claims she was fired from the fashion company for “being too fat”.  This advertisement morphs the naturally beautiful and healthy model into a creepy distortion of what the fashion industry deems perfection. Images, such as the one below can cause great damage to young, impressionable teens.

The misuse of new technology like the ability to airbrush already near perfect models has dangerous potentials in the lives of teenager’s self esteem. Promotional materials, especially in the fashion industry, put unrealistic ideas of how young women should look. Although I realize a complete ban on airbrushing images is not a realistic goal with today’s ever-changing technology, there needs to be an understanding in how much work is done to each model to make them look like the perfect beings they are portraying on the covers of magazines. I believe the self esteem of young teens would positively benefit from a set of standards that regulate how much advertisers edit their images, or in the least, reveal how significantly their images have been airbrushed.

Jessica Cote

Informatics Paper

Topic:  The affects of airbrushing advertisements on the public.

Start:  I will start my paper with the background context of why this is a controversial topic.

Thesis:  The grave affects airbrushing advertisements has on young women today.

Counter Argument:  Airbrushing has no affect on young women.

Three Points:  Setting too high of expectations, Celebrities negative views on retouching, Political action

Conclusion: I will sum up the benefits of minimizing retouching for consumers.

Sources:

Girlguiding UK: http://www.stylelist.com/2009/11/04/teens-want-to-lose-weight-consider-plastic-surgery/

WWD: http://www.stylelist.com/2009/09/24/french-politicians-try-to-crack-down-on-photo-retouching/

People: http://www.stylelist.com/2007/08/21/keira-knightley-they-airbrush-the-f-out-of-me/

Dan Saffer is an experienced design director for Adaptive Path in San Francisco who has designed and built websites, applications and devices since 1995. Dan leads projects for a wide variety of clients from large organizations like Green Peace, Time Warner, as well as some start-ups like Ninch and Foxmarx. Dan is a well-traveled man as he has taught workshops on interactive design on three different continents. He received his Masters of Design in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

The beginning of the lecture brought in my focus immediately, as he mentioned the Wii console and the iPhone. He made it very clear that Videoplace and Simon were the first sensory interaction game consoles and touch screen phones, respectively.  Sensors are becoming very common and very cheap, which are two reasons we experience them so often.  The Wii remote, taken apart, is “really accelerated gestural systems” that use multiple sensors.

Dan says designers need to start paying more attention to designing digital objects with more consideration to the physical body, specifically our hands. Designers are creating things that are used by our hands. Touch targets, as Dan described, is the spot on a touch-screen that a user can actually touch. The tip of the adult finger is about 8-10mm, which is the part of the finger that tells the electronic what to do. Fingernails could be a potential problem, seeing that designers can’t take into consideration how long the average length people keep their nails.

Another interactive gesture that designers use to document is animation and movies. Timing is always a key factor when you are doing interactive gestures and cannot easily be captured on paper.  Dan says the easiest and simplest way to understand timing is to animate stills and to show how long it takes to do certain things.  A really good rule of thumb, according to Dan Saffer, is the more complicated the gesture, the fewer people who will be able to perform it.

Code is Law

Chapter 1

                The first chapter brings us back to 1989, the fall of Communism in Europe and the rise of a new political society. In this new society, Americans were selling their advice of how the former Communist leaders should govern. The advice was silly and endless, often in the form of the translated American Constitution. Although these Americans seem to intentionally direct Central and Eastern Europe’s future, the true purpose was to understand the change and transition between governments. After generations of communism, it is understandable that the people had no interest in state regulation. Because of this, the government and markets were crippled. It took until about the mid-1990s for the post-communist euphoria to subside and a “new society” again came about. This time, the society was the Internet and “cyberspace.” With cyberspace, we found the ideal libertarian society.

Four Puzzles from Cyberspace

Chapter 2

                The second chapter opens with the difference between the Internet and “cyberspace”. He claims “cyberspace” is something more than the Internet; although it is built on top of the internet, “cyberspace” is a richer experience, something you are pulled into.  The author says “cyberspace” is often seen as a community of people with a “Second Life.” That real space is the space you live in, and the second life environment is a “massively multiple online game.”

Is-Ism

Chapter 3

                The chapter opens with a statement about control over cyberspace, “if cyberspace exists, so first-generation thinking goes, government’s power over behavior there is quite limited. In its essence, cyberspace is a space of no control.” The chapter says if there is anywhere that nature has doesn’t have control, it is cyberspace. There the author leads into the idea of “is-ism,” the mistake of confusing how something is with how something must be. Because most of us do not know how the internet works, we don’t know how something could be different. The main idea of this chapter is that we must learn at least enough to know that “technology is plastic” so that we know we can find resolutions to do things differently.

 Architectures of Control

Chapter 4

                With the original Internet, everyone was an invisible man, unable to regulate. In this chapter, the author argues that if the Net was designed so, it could be the most “regulable space man has ever known.” In this chapter, he explains all of the changes that are making the Internet completely able to regulate.

Regulating Code

Chapter 5

                In this chapter, the author explains commerce and government’s role in technology. “Technologies that make commerce more efficient are also technologies that make regulation simpler.” The one supports the other. There are a host of technologies now that make it easier to know who someone is on the Internet; what they’re doing, and where they’re doing it. These technologies were built to make business work better. They make life on the Internet safer. But the by-product of these technologies is to make the Net more regulable.

Some interesting new concept phones made an appearance this week at CEATEC, the Japanese equivalent of the Consumer Electronics Show. The “Origami” like cell phone may be where our future cell phone are heading. 

Personally, I cannot imagine anyone besides those people that are really interested in having the new “it” electronic because it certainly looks difficult to manuver. I do understand, however, that phones with flashy, attention grabbing features are typically easy to sell. I’m sure the average Joe didn’t expect to be using a cell phone with only one physical button on the device.

Another phone that was featured in this article was a “Chamelephone,” a phone that camaflauges itself with the color and texture of the surface it is sitting on. I know what it feels like to misplace my phone (and keys for that matter) and I would strongly dislike a phone that hid from me. I cannot imagine a phone that blends in with the surface it is on as being a selling feature for the device.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/10/concept-phones-ceatec/

IU Bloomington is in the top 7 percent of collegiate Twitter users. In a September survey by UniversitiesandColleges.org, “IU ranked sixth for its number of university-affiliated Twitter accounts, fourth for the number of Twitter ollowers and eighth for total ‘tweets,’ or text-based messages sent per day.”

IU’s administration uses Twitter to post news updates and offical announcements for its sports team and various departments.

The article also mentions IU’s men’s basketball coach Tom Crean, a Twitter user with nearly 13,000 Twitter followers.

Twitter is not something I have become a memeber of, I simply don’t feel like I have time to keep up two social networking sites while still holding down a job and classwork, however I understand the appeal.

I found an article about using Skype on the iPhone. I regularly use Skype on my family’s computer to communicate more personally with my sister that is a freshman at Ball State. We really enjoy being able to visually chat with one another.  

Although there isn’t a direct connection between Skype and the iPhone, there is a workaround that enables many of Skype’s features to be available to users.

“Essentially, the workaround is to install SoonR Talk, a AJAX-enabled application. SoonR’s AJAX-enabled interface is available now for any mobile phone that can run the Opera Mobile browser version 8.6 and above, as well as Safari, which includes the Apple iPhone.”

Once you are logged in and connected, you can view your Skype buddies using the AJAX client and then click on the buddy you want to talk to. SoonR Talk will tell your PC to call your mobile phone using SkypeOut. Then SoonR Talk will instruct Skype to call your buddy over the Skype IP network, placing you in a conference. If your buddy is not online, you can still call their mobile phone or landline.

http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/skype/skype-on-iphone.asp

Adobe is launching this new version of Flash at its MAX conference this week in Los Angeles. Flash 10.1 will support mobile capabilities like multi-touch and accelerometers. Adobe says software depiction performance on mobile has improved by more than 87 percent, memory consumption has dropped 55 percent, and Flash 10.1 also conserves battery life. Many of smartphone partners, BlackBerry’s maker Research in Motion, are already on board. The iPhone, however, will not be compatible with the Flash Player 10.1 edition.

 Adobe says Flash already powers 75 percent of web video and 70 percent of online games, and in April 2008 it announced an initiative called the Open Screen Project to try for similar dominance on mobile phones. Development on Flash Player 10, which was released a year ago, was already nearing completion, so 10.1 is the first version developed with Adobe’s new mobile focus in mind. The company says this is the first full version of that works on both mobile devices and PCs.

This news could put pressure one Apple in a couple ways. First, if every smartphone but the iPhone can support Flash content, the iPhone is going to look comparatively inadequate. This might give Apple the incentive to work with Adobe to resolve whatever problems linger.

It seems to me that if the two power companies could work together, both Adobe and Apple would benefit.

http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/10/04/adobe-pushing-new-flash-technology-for-pretty-much-every-mobile-device-except-iphones/

A strong Pro for Google’s strategy is for mobile developers. Mobile developers who create mobile applications and content for smartphones get an additional motive to do so; the new AdSense ads are likely to perform better. This, in turn, will be pumping more Google advertising dollars into the smartphone developer ecosystem, now dominated by Apple.

http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/10/05/google-launches-adsense-for-mobile-phone-content/