In today’s world, aging is changing. While older generations stick around for longer, children are being born at an unprecedented and still growing rate. Therefore, this creates a dissonance between the thoughts and ideals of the two end of the generational spectrum. As such, this leads to a wide array of differing viewpoints in the world’s media
In Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, all three generations of men, young, adult, and eldery, all break the glass ceiling together with support from one another
In Lord of The Rings, Gandalf is seen as necessary to the adventure as he is not only full of knowledge, but full of power as well
Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, the old woman who runs the home is not frail and weak, rather she is vivacious and full of energy. Countering the stereotype of pratically immobile elderly
In this 21st Century remake, Wonka’s character goes from an older gentlemen to a young adult-middle aged man
In The Fifth Element, the old man here represents the old ways of society and he is getting punished for that by the younger generation in power
In recent years, kids have access to the internet earlier than their parent’s gerneation did. This creates a dissonace between what the parents view what childhood should entail and what their kids believe it should. The desires of both gerneations are incongruent with each other
From my childhood, I recall loving the creativity involved in making your own customized Mii character for the Nintendo Wii interface. The Mii Creation tool allowed users to edit their digital appearance and choose exactly what they’d like to look like. Even if that’s not what they actually look like in real life. This tool allowed kids at a young age to explore different identities and interact with others online as their chosen identity.
For a more recent example, the Snapchat Bitmoji system expands upon earlier ideas and made a digital avatar maker for your social media profile. While Snapchat was created to instantly send self-deleting photos, the addition of Bitmoji adds another layer to the social network. Even though the user can send photos of themselves, the first digital impression of the user is through the Bitmoji avatar. These themselves being created from a picture of the user. Although, the Bitmoji can be made to look nothing like the user at all, which would give others a different impression of the person who created the Bitmoji compared to what they would think if the Bitmoji actually looks like the person it’s representing.
User created digital avatars are a cornerstone in today’s communications. They not only give us a large amount of information about a person at a glance, they also enable the user to be more creative and in touch with their desired attributes.
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