What we see and how we look

In the book Practices of Looking by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright they draw a difference between "seeing," the casual observance in passing by, and "looking," the act of interpreting the things around us. Looking involves the relaionship of power and the meaning of an image.
There is a common fallacy that an image is unquestionably truthful. Which is fair to say and yet misleading at the same time. In a denotative way, yes, an image shows that X was happening at Z point in time in Y space. The truth of what X, Y and Z really means is the connotative way of "looking" at an image.
The connotation can, of course, be different for different people depending on the ideology they have been a part of for so long. Ideologies change over time and location, so our interpretations of an image are different than they would have been 50 years ago and are far different from the interpretations one might find abroad.
It is curious how a culture develops an ideology.
Marx and Engels (chapter 3, The German Ideology) say, "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas."
Quick examples: Starbucks, who but a man with money can afford a four dollar cup of coffee every day - yet it has become the paradigm of quality coffee. SUVs and McMansions, again the wealthy can afford these things - America's addiction to oil and credit?
Though these things seem like staples in our lives (even I am victim to the connotation of the Starbucks image) they have not always been, and it seems that the average person with limited means would not decide that expensive coffee and cars are important.
The wealthy, which typically translates into the ruling class, deemed these objects important and normal.
The desire to be normal is a question that must be faced. Where do our ideologies, which shape what our definition of "normal," come from? Why do we follow them and how do we brake away from them?

-the colonel