plished may vary dramatically. These elements are both material and abstract. Primarily through the media these images are where we find references to conjure images of other countries representations. These signs are made common to the masses through the media, which in turn through repetition reinforces the image as common. The media use repetition and consistency of a few stereotypical elements to reinforce the central role of the image, linking it to a specific culture. These stereotypes produce otherness from the dominant culture, by focusing on a few different attributes of another culture. This often gets reduced to easy to digest differences such as food, clothes, appearance and music. Which suggests that culture is based on material things around us, a culture of possessions. However these representations avoid important issues that could be very different between cultures. Advertising perpetuates some of the myths associated with certain cultural groups such as, African American men are good at sports, The French are arrogant and Australians are lazy. As Chiara Giaccardi said in TV Advertising and Social Reality;Advertisements tend to capitalise upon recurrent images and forms of presentation; in so doing they reinforce them, not so much through the individual texts as through the accumulation and repetition of ritualised representation during the entire advertising flow. Advertisements refer not only to things and situations but also a way of seeing and interpreting them. Advertisements constitute a repotoire that viewers can draw upon both for representing and understanding themselves and for making sense of their external reality. Advertising shapes reality to serve capitalism and the post modern position, according to which advertising offers a pleasurable synthetic experience as a surrogate for reality.(Chiara Giaccardi,TV Advertising and Social Reality) Advertising is therefore meaningful as it creates a sense of familia...
