Image and society, why is there a link? In a recent survey carried out, 60% of the population use image and not personality of a individual to decide if they like them, and if so how much. Society and image then leads onto categorisation. Generally society use image to place everyone in a group. Reason for this who knows? It may be people want to know what everyone else is like, and if people group others they can decide on thins like who they like or not, and also people could decide on things like who they want to be with. According to another survey in social behaviour, 70% of the people surveyed admitted to grouping people. The most popular group people come up with to categorize people are ‘Townie and Moshers’. This is a classic example of grouping.
‘Townies’, are thought of to listen to dance music or urban music (because they think it’s cool), they wear ‘townie gear’, which is trackies and other things with huge sport labels written on them, and they boast about smoking weed.
Whereas ‘Moshers’ are stereotyped as listening to rock (mosher) music, like the colour black, have long hair, wear baggy clothes, take lots of drugs and only sporting activity they may do is skating.
Image can be a positive influence because it could provide good role models to the public. People may look up to the image an individual may have, and it may influence them, if the role model is good this could be good for individuals, as it may make them better people. This can also have a negative effect on people, if the role model is bad.
Image can also be bad because some may become to conscious about their image that they are presenting, and some people may find it uncomfortable being in public because of this reason. Another reason why image can be bad is that when society categorises, prejudice may be created as people will listen to anything and like or dislike people because of an image they may have, as their obviously will be minority groups, which generally people don’t want to exist. People are different so they may be discriminated against, and people would be prejudice against, because they don’t fit into usual categories.
It is a fact today’s society use image and not personality of someone to rate them. It’s like a the worlds a huge playground, and one child sees other and immediately shouts out “you’re a geek”, and doesn’t become friends with them all because apparently this other child looks like a geek. This point has a negative effect on society. As some people spend too much time worrying about image, also some people are left out, and discriminated because they may have a bad image, but they may still be good people.
