Pure Irony?
Leanne and I stayed after class tonight to work on our final project. Together we are working on developing a social network through Ning. We discovered that our website about self-esteem had a ridiculous amount of advertisements concerning weight loss and changing one’s outwards appearance. How encouraging are these ads? They say things like, “10 Rules for Stomach Fat” and “Teen Slim Natural Remedy.”
We were trying to find a way to rid our site of these ads since they go against the very purpose of our project. We’ve contacted the site’s administrators and requested to have an ad-free website as it is primarily an educational tool. Hopefully within three days we should see a difference as we want this to be a comfortable and safe place for women and girls of all ages to feel beautiful and discuss issues related to self-image and self-esteem.
Is it pure irony that our pure beauty project is being bombarded with advertisements encouraging women and girls to indulge in the latest “Chinese weight loss secrets” and follow the “idiot rules” of dieting? What do you think?
Also, feel free to have a look at our project in progress. JOIN, give us feedback, and enjoy!
June 3rd, 2008 at 5:22 pm
The advertising schemes through some of these services are ridiculous. Ning does release ad-free groups as long as the group is created for education. Good luck on building this group it sounds like a fun project.
June 4th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Alright, I’m just going to put in 2 cents. I don’t know if I agree with this point but it did cross my mind and I thought it might be an interesting idea to discuss. Where do we draw the line between loving ourselves no matter what we look like, being healthy, and being unhealtily skinny. Can people who read those ads and buy into them have a good body self image or can they only think negatively about themselves. Can they love themselves but think that if they were a bit lighter they might be healtier. Could they see those ads as a way to an exercise and diet routine.
I know that those ads, and all ads usually put negative thoughts about ourselves but do they never do anything positive?
Can you love yourself and still want to improve upon yourself or to love yourself can you think that improvement is unnessesary?
anyway just trying to get a good convo going.
PS I LOVE YOUR PROJECT AND SITE AS YOU ALREADY KNOW! and if you can get those ads off the site. I think that in itself would be a great discussion. Monitoring and having control of your own internet site. I was unaware!
June 8th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Hope you got this ad-free figured out. Thanks for bringing up this irony!
June 9th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
[...] get whiter teeth, build obscenely large muscles, and wear the “coolest” clothes. Leanne and Rachelle ran into this problem- even a site intended to promote self-esteem and real beauty was not safe [...]