How Can We Change the Media?

I have found that personally, my self esteem issues started in school, and I think this is perhaps due to the newness of it. Gok Wan has recently created a documentary series trying to raise awareness of how we can improve body confidence, through things such as school lessons on it. After doing research for my project, and based on my own experiences, I feel this would be hugely beneficial in helping young people, through things such as showing them how photographs are edited in post-production. I have decided to include a paragraph in my essay report which talks about this.
 Here is a link to watch the documentaries:
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/goks-teens-the-naked-truth/articles/goks-lesson

Here are two general websites I used whilst writing my essay, in order to get quick facts or images:

http://www.imgspark.com/image/view/all/1069534/

http://www.fourandsix.com/photo-tampering-history/

Body Image Questionnaire

The last bit of research I did was to gather real peoples opinions on the effect of media on body image. To do this I created a questionnaire, asking various things about both the way people viewed themselves and how they felt the media affected them. I spread this questionnaire through 2 ways, a blog, and on facebook. Overall, I found that people did tend to be affected in some way by the media, with only a small minority claiming that they were not affected at all.
Here is the link to the questionnaire blog:
http://alexhayterextendedproject.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=9

Influencing and Conditoning Body Image views

For my essay, I thought I would look into how things such as Barbie dolls start affecting children at a young age, creating body ideals that stick with them throughout life (the idea that attractive is to have blonde hair, blue eyes, and a small but curvy figure). Here are the websites I used whilst looking into this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7920962.stm
http://www.teen-beauty-tips.com/barbie-body-image.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-1158948/Things-don-8217-t-know---Barbie.html

I also used my AQA A2 psychology textbook to look into the way things such as television influence peoples perceptions. Through this, as well as what we learned about advertising in class, I found that television typically portrays women as younger than they actually are supposed to be, and so this can lead to an unrealstic ideal of what a women in her 40's for example should look like.