Well this weekend was pretty much a 180 from our last weekend. Zainah came down with possibly the worst bug ever. We tried everything: I made her chicken soup from scratch, put tiger balm on her forehead, gave her vicks to inhale. She took tylenol cold & flu, advil and paracetamol. Nothing worked! She couldn't sleep for two days because she was so stuffed up, feverish and in pain.
Then last night her tonsils got really swollen and at 6 this morning, we took a taxi to the infirmary. I felt so bad for her. But God bless the UK health system. They didn't ask for any i.d., all they took was her name and contact information and within 10 minutes we were seen by a doctor. Not a great doctor though. Infact, he was actually quite dodgy. First of all he was just wearing a knitted sweater with the words: Ghana in red on the front and a pair of khakis. No white coat, no name tag, nothing. He could barely speak any English, and he was afraid of catching whatever Z had. He would stand as far away from her as he could to take her temperature and check her throat. Then he just left the room, and came back in with two boxes of medicines. We had to ask him what was wrong with her.
He said she had tonsilitis and she needed to take a course of antibiotics to get rid of the infection. He also gave her some extra-strength ibuprofen for the pain. When we got back home she was finally able to get some rest. And now she's slowly recovering...and I am dosing up on echinacea and vitamins as well as disinfecting the house to make sure I don't catch her tonsilitis!
It's been a slow week otherwise. The weather is finally starting to cool down now. November is supposed to be the worst month in terms of rain and climate. So we're bundling up and doing our best to keep warm and dry :)
Oh, we have this new professor for our "Processes and Structures in Mass Media" class. He's really interesting. This week we were learning about how large corporations buy the rights to all sorts of images, and then sell them to advertisers or newspapers who need them. So for example if the Toronto Star had an article about the war in Iraq and they need an image of 'war' they'd pay one of these businesses like www.gettyimages.com to use one of their pictures. But the problem is these pictures aren't real. For the most part, they're models that are posing and they've been made very ambiguous so that one picture can be used in a variety of contexts (you make more money that way).
Another really interesting aspect to these companies is that when you search for let's say, images of Women and Freedom the pictures that show up are for the most part of women doing yoga on a beach or jumping in the air with their hands to the sky. So the question becomes: what does this do to our perception of these concepts? Why aren't there more political images of women trying to attain freedom? And what happens when our reality is constantly being symbolized as this perfect, symmetrical world, rather than documented as images that are true to real life? I found it all so fascinating because it builds on the stuff we learned about in semiotics - this idea of signs connoting other metaphorical meanings.
It also relates to advertising because a lot of advertisers use these image banks to associate their company with certain values portrayed in the image (which is what branding is all about). T-Mobile for example has these pictures of people doing yoga on the beach on their phone cards (yoga on the beach is a very popular image for some reason)...now what does that have to do with the services they're offering? Nothing. Except that I guess those values of peacefulness and freedom somehow become part of T-Mobile's values. So that when you realize you can only use the phone card once and then all your minutes are gone, you don't get as upset because the card has this tranquil person on it!
My next essay is going to be based on this topic as well. I'm hoping to examine how images in our newspapers, magazines and advertisements have changed over time and what role these image bank corporations have played in this transition. So it's much more interesting than my last essay, and I'm really looking forward to starting it.
Hopefully I'll have something more interesting to blog about next week! Hope you're all doing well back home - miss you lots!
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