Author: lal19205@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg

Texts are all around us and we take in information from them all time. Texts can affect our thoughts and opinions on whatever they are about and as a result may give us a sense of a topic or a group of people that is not entirely true. In my opinion, I believe that texts cannot truly represent a group of people or the culture as there is just not enough time or space to encompass the depth and complexity that a group of people may have. Furthermore, texts may also have bias and stereotypes within them without people even noticing, resulting in the portrayal of the group of people not being as accurate as it can be. These stereotypes may also be included intentionally based on what the target audience is of the the text and what they may know about the group of people that the text is referring to.

With the example of the movie ‘Crazy Rich Asians’, we see that it does not accurately represent the group of people ‘Asians’. By definition, ‘Asians’, would refer to anybody that was from a country located in Asia. This could include places such as India, Singapore, China, Malaysia and so on, however in the movie, the character were played by actors that were all light skinned asians. This then poses the question of why all types of Asians were not represented within the movie. As it is based in Singapore, a country with a lot of diversity, for the movie to accurately describe the set of people ‘Asians’ they should have included all types of people within the main cast, however darker coloured Asians were only portrayed as smaller, insignificant characters. This suggests that the text wasn’t able to truly represent the group of people it was trying to.

While texts may not represent some groups of people accurately, the fact the texts can be interpreted in many different ways also affects how we may view them. Our identity is one of the key aspects that plays a role in how we understand texts. If we see parts of our identity represented in texts we feel like it represents our culture at least a little and that people from our culture are important. However, when people from our culture are not represented such as darker skinned Asians in the movie, we feel that our culture may be neglected and that people do not really think about us. In this way we can see that our interpretations of texts are affected by our identity and culture.

Single texts can have multiple different meanings and I think that this is quite significant so that people can interpret them in their own way. Different people may see the same text and pull different meanings out of it based on their cultural backgrounds, prior knowledge and exposure to different ideas regarding that particular topic. This sense of ambiguity in texts is also applicable to symbols such as flags. Each nation has a different flag, and one particular flag can mean completely different things to different people. People around the world have all different sorts of ideas and opinions about other countries and this affects the meaning that they interpret from the flag. It is important that a flag has no fixed meaning because otherwise people will always associate that country with the one fixed meaning even if that they believe that the nation has a different meaning to them.

Since texts usually have unstable meanings that are open to interpretation, the significance of reading both literary and non-literary texts to be overlooked. Reading such texts can help us develop ways to think about not only our initial impressions of certain texts but also allows us to think more deeply about possible meanings of the text and look at it from other ways that we initially didn’t see. These texts can also reflect ideas that the author wants readers to think about, and thinking about different interpretations of the text can help with our understanding of them.

The photo above shows an ad for coca cola in Bangkok, Thailand. We can see the culture of Thailand come across more in the location of the advertisement as it has been placed next to Buddhist building. As Buddhism is the most common religion in Thailand with around 95% of the country’s population, the coke ad is aiming toward their intended audience by drawing on peoples religious beliefs to increase the amount of people that will see it. This ad would only work as well as it does in a Buddhist country because of its location.

Unlike the previous ad, this one doesn’t have any connection to religion and focuses on showing a laid back, relaxed scene with people carpooling and a girl holding a bottle of coke. This ad originally came from the US and draws attention to what people would think a typical American girl would look like, in a sort of flashy car. This ad seems to be targeted at young people in the US who are having kind of a relaxed life, acting like they are on summer vacation. This ad would be far more ineffective in Thailand compared to the other one, this is because that utilises the main religion of the country to draw attention to it, whereas this is showing a scene which all people in Thailand may not be as familiar with compared to people in the US. Similarly if the Thai ad were to be put in the US it would not attract much attention as the US doesn’t have such a high percentage of Buddhist people.