Practices of looking and evidence of being ( ooh wat a lovely plastic bag that is blowing in the wind !)

We've been taught about the difference between seeing and  looking and how that theory is interpreted in cinema and other forms of art/ media, after attending these lectures i could'nt help but realise how much we are bombarded by images, muisc, advertisments every day, the journey to college in the morning is filled with enough stimulants to make you want to spend your birthday in an sensory deprivation tank on your birthday!.
What do we make of of all these things?, well it's up to us to ignore them , it's up to us to interpret them as we will.  Our contextual lecturer asked , when you see a picture of a dog you think dog but you say "chein", you don't know what to think, In fact the word dog is both a verb and a noun and has many different expressions such as " he's such a dog!", which i imagine means ugly, which means seeing as many people have shouted this at me in the street before, i may need a makeover. If you want to get desperately serious think about the idea  about have different cultures see the character of father christmas?, every culture feeds their personal identity into this icon therefore our idea of santa is  different to Spain . the point being that every individual sees the world differently.

How do we feel when we are being  looked at , when we are the ones being watched. I always think it is interesting consideing that we are monitored by CCTV evryday  in all areas, yet the idea of us being spied on through a wall whilst we're in the shower  makes us very uncomfortable, i still can't pee in front of people in public toilets, unless i'm really desperate. George Orwell warned us about the horror of surviellance, the trappings of a social order closing in on you, for example, we are being monitored all the time, we're assured it's for our safety for our comfort, but how much safer are we truely, with everything that we touch generating some kind of fingerprint are we actually ever turely safe?
The Anthropologist Marc Auge stated

“If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity,

then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned

with identity will be a non-place . . . supermodernity produces non-places".

What he was saying  is that as the world is getting smaller and smaller as cities and civilisation gets bigger, CCTV and barcodes have made our lives more confined in a sense, we can never truely escape, yet we all live our lives being watched by something we cannot put a face to, even though  we, as people have conditioned our selves to not look at each other for too long  just in case we make each other uncomfortable. Many films  and writers have written about watching and being watched the difference between the two, filmakers look at the meaning of looking, the discourse if you will and how our perceptions govern our world, in essence, the power of the watcher is like anything, it has good and bad applications, it depends who's controlling. To finish off this post, lets talk about something more positive My Girlfriend made a very good observation about the theory of "seeing " is different than "looking" and she used the film American Beauty ( 1999. Dir. S. Mendes) as a good example
.Ricky Fitts: I was filming this dead bird.
Angela Hayes: Why?
Ricky Fitts: Because it's beautiful.
Seeing is a function, Looking is an ability which implies a greater sense of purpose, this film strives to show that we, as people, rarely actually "look" at anything.