Chapter 23 The Meanings of Images Across Cultures The Meanings of Images Across Cultures Chantal Cornuejols Kathryn A. Murphy- Judy Center for the Design of Educational Computing Carnegie Mellon University Abstract In this paper we present our videodisc project (a videodisc of multinational print advertisements) asking the question, "Who will be the audience?" Inorder to answer it we engage in a comparative analysis of the construction of the readerlconsumer (audience) in French and American advertisements. Our first comparison takes into considerationthe imaging of men and women in perfume and cosmetic ads. Next, we look at Americans and French looking at each other across the ocean: stereotyping constructions by the foreign 'other' help us to destabilize our most cherished notions of ourselves and at the same time allow us to open ourselves to new ways of being in the world. It might appear redundant, inane, perhaps a bit suicidal, to propose to produce a videodisc that houses some 54,000 advertising images from the print media given the ubi- quity of advertising in our world. It is estimated that the average American is subjected to between 1000 and1500 ads per day. Advertising, moreover,pays to make itself seen and heard, or at least pretends to give itself away free. Who, then, especially in a logic of supply and demand, would be a willing and benefiting audience for yet more commercial ex- posure? It is precisely the pervasiveness of advertising in today's world that has led us to collect and analyze these quotidien texts of consumer society banality. However much one tries to ignore or avoid advertising, it continually infiltrates deeper and more broadly into almost every facet of communications in the world. It has been said that advertising serves the func- tion of artistic cultural production in the twentieth century: as such, it follows the "making strange" of the familiar that characterizes aesthetic production and consumption. We have found, however, that advertising's "foreignness" operates more on a surface level and that specific social attitudes and practices are meant to be preserved at all costs. Copyright by Archives & Museum Informatics, 1991