The talk that Professor Sheehan gave on \u201cthe visual culture of plastic surgery\u201d was fascinating. It was an interesting topic in the \u2018human\/nature\u2019 theme, as she compared the \u2018natural\u2019 versus the \u2018artificial\u2019 rather than making comparing between the physical world that usually includes plants and animals, and human beings like most previous lectures have.<\/p>\n
It was very interesting to notice the prominence of medical concepts in digital manipulation. For instance, many of the tools are medicalized (e.g. \u201chealing brush,\u201d \u201cslimming effect\u201d), and the idea of \u2018fixing\u2019 something to become closer to the \u2018ideal\u2019 is an idea that is identical to that of plastic surgery. I like how Professor Sheehan alluded to the fact that plastic surgery (permanent physical manipulation), make up (temporary physical manipulation) and Photoshop (digital manipulation of the external appearance) all come from the same ideas and motivations, through the mockery commercial, \u201cFotoshop by Adob\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n
During the discussion session after the lecture, Professor Fleming brought up an interesting point: plastic surgery, or all these other manipulations that we make to our physical appearances are do not just come from the motivation to \u2018be seen,\u2019 but often times could come from the motivation to \u2018not be seen\u2019 (i.e. blend in, not stand out, or become invisible). The increase in latter motivation could be a more dangerous one\u2014the need to change your physical appearance in order to become \u2018normal\u2019 (vs. wanting to stand out) and fit into the crowd seems more destructive to the society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The talk that Professor Sheehan gave on \u201cthe visual culture of plastic surgery\u201d was fascinating. It was an interesting topic in the \u2018human\/nature\u2019 theme, as she compared the \u2018natural\u2019 versus the \u2018artificial\u2019 rather than making comparing between the physical world… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5925,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[250950],"tags":[120869,619,258919],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5925"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1150"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1156,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150\/revisions\/1156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}