TOK presentation

[jess1012]

My possible TOK presentation topics are standards on beauty(maybe how it depend on culture)or...

How has the media and modern culture change the way young girls in our current society view their self image?

Which on is better?

Some of the real life examples that I thought about are plastic surgeries, child beauty pagents, barbies and eating disorders.

I am so confused on how to set my presentation.

I searched some video on youtube & there are plenty of videos on child beauty pagents.

I have no idea what to do for the presentation.

Please help!

Edited April 11, 2010 by jess1012

[Green]

This is almost exactly like my presentation, I can surely help you out here.

It would be best that you stick to the second topic, simply because the first topic "Standards of beauty, with cultural reference" doesn't seem to bring up things/ideas for you to argue about.

However the second topic seems widely open for discussion on the effects of media and modern culture on young girls, whether it is good or bad, etc.

My group and I produced a structured presentation which I briefly discussed in this topic

You can use that structure as well.

For a start, try looking at what Media is, or what the modern culture is to narrow the topic. Perhaps use some real-life examples which you've suggested, and try to use History and Human Sciences (Psychology) as an area of knowledge.

[mara.kaouzova]

I've started to think about doing my presentation on the standards of beauty through the ages and how our perception of beauty has changed....

How what one was beautiful is now ugly,how and why has this changed....

Art can be an area of knowledge (magazines and fashion and to compare it to renaissance art)

[Slex13]

I dont know if you did this in TOK, but basically we saw "ways of knowing" as: Reason, Emotion, Language and Perception.

In this case you would want to look at Emotion and Perception methinks.

With perceptions you might want to go go down the route of looking at Plato's theory of "The Forms" (although i cant remember this idea 100%, i do remember doing a mini presentation on Beauty and the forms myself, so im sure if you give it a look at you'll find some useful information)

With Emotion and Perception, you might want to consider how in different cultures beauty is seen through different terminology. For example, in western society you might consider a super model beautiful, but a girl in a beauty pagent pretty etc, etc.

A useful quote "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" - again you'll need to do some background reading, but in Psychology we looked at a study done on men in a bar, and where they look at a female most when meeting them (measured through a bizarre contraption on the mans head). The most viewed area was the breasts. However, women spent most time preparing thier faces before going out. You could also look at what beauty means for men and women.

A final thought on TOK presentations is not to make them too centred around a powerpoint presentation - try and use some props, acting, videos or, in our case, we had a large audience interaction part where we made the audience the Jury of a mock up court room.