The Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture Pages 401-413

        In these sections of chapter ten the book talks about global brands, globalization and media flow. Everyone knows what a brand is and everyone seems to have a favorite when it comes to a certain product. There will always be one you like more than another, but global brands make this a lot easier for everyone to decide. Global brands can be seen as homogenizing forces, bad consumption habits, symbols of capitalism and even result in the emergence of specific cultural and national identities under the sign of the brand. Certain brands can even become symbols of modernity or cultural imperialism. Before reading this I didn't even realize that global brands so closely related to globalization. Everyone identifies to a specific nation, region and culture, but the aspects of having a global and local identity are not contradictory, but interdependent. Each and every definition of globalization varies from person to persona and topic to topic, but because each and every person is different, each and every view of the world is going to be different. So understanding every form of visual media or image is essentially necessary to understand visual culture today. The ways in which popular culture is produced and travels the world has a great impact on each and every person, no matter how different. Television, cinema, the Internet, almost anything technological that can transmit a message is going to affect each person differently, but how we react to these messages is what ultimately defines our world, and what is going to be left of it after we are gone.