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Punt Rumination: CH 5

So this chapter basically sums up Critical Cultural Theory, and how the media influences society and has an effect on various cultures around the world. This can be said for various countries around the world, in Japan, and various other eastern Asian countries, Anime is enormous and has affected the culture tremendously, with its propaganda and the effect it has on it’s viewers, and how they bring it into their every day lives. It’s made its way all over the world, you can see it happening here, with the whole “Pokemon GO” craze over the past couple of years. But for a more specific example, media can can affect society and people by just putting out content that attracts their attention. What they put out doesn’t necessarily even have to be true, and it will still have the same effect. The media, and the viewers, have an equal share into what goes viral. For example, a video trends on Tik-Tok, it gains millions of views, and now people all over are imitating the dance or whatever from that video and making their own similar content.

Also, back to the Anime point, due to how the media portrays these characters and lifestyles in these shows, and how the shows themselves portray them, it gives a lot of falsehoods and stereotypes towards the cultures where the cities/countries in the shows are based in. When in reality, it’s just giving this fantasy fairy-tale idea of what life and people are like in these places where the viewers in the U.S and other countries, have never been to. This happens with all sorts of shows though, I can’t think of the name right now, but for example, these shows where there’s 2 roommates living together in the middle of new york city, where they both work jobs that usually don’t pay very well, but they can afford to live in a super nice apartment or condo in one of the most expensive places in the whole country.

Anyways, the media has its positives and negatives, like everything in life. Most of the time, it gives us plenty of joy and laughter and the ability to have information 24/7, whenever we need it. Other times, it lies and feeds us false information that gives us unrealistic perspectives and views that we end up believing anyways. It’s up to the audience to be able to see through the BS, because the media isn’t going to change anytime soon, especially with it’s focus being mostly on profit nowadays.

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Week 12 Rumination

Well this week’s topic was based on several different readings ranging from various different topics. We talked about things relating to how we view images in media, to racial capitalism, to how trash Christopher Columbus was and how the holiday should be changed to Indigenous people’s day. Now with regards to racial capitalism, and how the hiring process works nowadays. Considering the MANY terrible issues going on with women making less than men, hiring managers racially profiling and rejecting a super-qualified potential employee for someone less qualified but that “fits” their motive. Personally, I’ve been lucky to never have experienced any form of that. My father on the other hand, as he moved up in his field and reached a position with power, and he should’ve gotten even higher but due to the fact that he is Latino, they chose a less qualified and less experienced Caucasian person for the position.  And he continued to notice it more and more, and it got to a point where he had to leave the company he was with for a different one. Due to the blatant racism that went on from higher executives. Racism is alive and well in our society. It’s disgusting. Hopefully as time continues to move on, we get continue to improve as a human race and our core beliefs.

Now with regards to images and how we perceive them, like the disturbing image showed in class “The Terror of War”, of the children fleeing a napalm bombing in Vietnam during the Vietnamese war. It brings to mind the atrocities of war, the pain caused and the pain suffered by those stuck in between those horrible acts. There are other ways of spinning the image but I’m not even gonna bother. I’ll use an actual example, plenty of photos of Colin Kaepernick kneeling during national anthems, and the whole “I’m with Kap” and “I’d rather kneel with Kap than stand with Trump”, and so on. There’s a picture of Kap kneeling with one of his teammates next to him. Now, people will either view that as A. He’s kneeling for various reasons, the injustice that minorities/African-americans face on a daily basis, the problems with police brutality, change, and so on. Or the dumbass way of viewing it, he’s kneeling because he doesn’t respect our country or support our troops, and he isn’t a true American. Or whatever BS those people spew out. But yeah, just goes to show how images can be perceived by people. 

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Nov. 6 Rumination

This weeks’ chapter covered quite a few subjects. Mostly focused on the future of media theory, and media in general. It goes over the older generation struggling to keep up with innovations and changes in media, as well as how the current generation struggles with their attention span and with internet addiction, along with various other sub-topics. I’m going to focus mostly on internet addiction throughout this post, which is obviously a huge phenomenon around the world. Video games are a huge culprit here, they are able to help you escape the real world and bring you peace and tranquility and make you forget all your troubles. Gee, you could make a case that that description could fit a drug or 2. Too much of a good thing always leads to trouble. We saw in class how video game addiction was going on in Korea, with those affected spending 20 to 24-hour days playing games nonstop, without eating or taking any breaks. Yes, extreme on all levels, but just because you aren’t on that level doesn’t mean you aren’t addicted. 

You spend 4-6 hours a day playing games or scrolling through twitter and social media? Have a look in the mirror, you have to work some stuff out. The fact that technology has advanced so quickly, and continues to just improve year by year, makes it harder and harder to resist. Especially for the younger generation. Look at the whole Fortnite trend the past 3 years, every kid from the age of 6 all the way to adults over the age of 30 were hooked on that game, and would spend hours a day playing it, or watching streamers (Ninja) play it on Twitch for hours on end. It’s calmed down quite a bit recently, but it feels like we’re just waiting for the next new game to trend and have everyone jump on the bandwagon again. Which leads me to talk about FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Everything is in the palm of our hands, we have the world, all of its history and information with the push of a button. We could be at one place, but thanks to social media, be in multiple places at the same time. We receive breaking news before it even makes it so TV news stations. Take all of that away, take it way for 4 days, most of us will go crazy and won’t know what to do. We’ll eventually adjust, but that shock value will be tremendous. But it’s not the end of the world, we survived just fine before any of this was even dreamt of. We need to learn that moderation is key and find a balance. 

We need to work on improving our focus, being able to actually multitask, not just say we can multitask when in reality we are just texting and half listening to someone actually speak to us. We need to make sure we can read a whole book, stay interested in it rather than give up after the first 3 paragraphs of the first chapter. Technology continues to advance and this is the greatest time to be alive, but lets take all the positives that we can gain from these advancements, without losing everything we learned about when we didn’t have these technologies at hand. Combine the best of both worlds, don’t go over board on either one, like I previously said, find the balance. It’ll be worth it.

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Week 10

This week’s chapter focuses on media framing and the use of symbols in social media and our society. I’ll go ahead and start with symbolism, the way they are used and the various ways that people can interpret then. We went over in class as an example, how there are “technically” two ways to view the confederate flag, either as a racist symbol of oppression and a horrible time in American history, with people who own a confederate flag supporting those previous statements, or as a symbol of southern tradition. Personally, I think the latter is pure BS but hey, whatever. The thing with symbols, if they are related to some sort of terrible event or meaning, even if the majority of the time there’s nothing wrong with it, that small part where something terrible happened with that certain symbol representing it at the time, people will mostly think about those terrible things when they see said symbol, rather than see the whole history. I’ve met people who see a Russian flag and the first thing they say is “Those commie bastards”, well yeah, and we know Russia has plenty of issues they got to work out with some of their cultural beliefs and equality issues and so on. But, Russia is a beautiful country (in some parts lol), it has a very long and interesting history, with many great minds emerging from there. The people are very respectful and proud, anddddd they were a pretty BIG help in winning WW2 for the U.S. Another example could be how Che Guevara is basically viewed as a hero and praised in various South American/Caribbean countries, and seen as a terrible war criminal in the U.S and other places.

Alright, maybe not the best examples. I could be talking out of my ass because I was raised in Cuba and lived in Moscow for 2 years. But you get my point. Not everything is black and white, and some symbols do mean more than what people mainly think of them. Not the Confederate flag though. Here’s a fun one, most people see the “verified check” on someone’s twitter handle and take whatever they say as fact. While you can have someone who isn’t verified completely outsmart a verified person, prove them wrong, and people still won’t believe them or care. That little blue check works wonders.

 Now, onto media framing. Yes, very popular in today’s world, especially with the big News outlets like Fox News and CNN and so on. There’s a peaceful protest going on regarding equal rights, and one news outlet frames it as “Violent riots breaking out in downtown”. It’s basically people framing stories toward an audience whom they know already think a certain way, so it will attract their attention, and make them money. News outlets do it, social media influences and stars do it, big companies and organizations do it. Either to try to save their own asses from trouble, or to make them seem better than they are, or that a certain product is better than it is. I mean, it’s taught in PR classes. Pro Athletes get into trouble all the damn time, and their PR team works like crazy to spin a negative story into a not so negative and keep the athletes image clean and safe. Which again leads to money, from ads/sponsors/etc.

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Week 9 - Agenda Setting

This week’s chapter focused mostly on media effect theories, agenda-setting, and the media priming by drawing attention to topics they want us to listen to (politics, international news, etc.), and ignore certain topics that are just as important. I’ll focus mostly on the agenda-setting aspect, simply because it just interests me the most. We’ll start with the statement, “The media doesn’t necessarily tell the audience what to think, but rather what to think about”. I’m 50/50 on this, because many media outlets and news sources do tell their audience what to think and push forward their opinions on certain topics as the “correct” way of looking at things. But the other half can also be true because the content that they are putting out and we receive, causes us to think about said topics and create our own opinions as well.

              Growing up in Cuba, as a child I vividly remember the hatred towards the U.S government and negative statements that were put out by the Cuban government. Socialism vs. Capitalism. I remember when I was 8 years old and I moved to the U.S, hearing about the war in the middle east, Al-Qaeda, and how Bush was basically a murderer serving as president. Fast forward around 16 years, and now we have Trump, all his BS and now leading up to his Impeachment inquiry. We’ve had the issues with China, Immigration, and so on. Yet there are a vast amount of important issues that aren’t being talked about in the news. From led in the water in Flint, Michigan, to people still not believing in global warming/climate change. And by people, I mean people in high places with power, like in our current government. It’s scary to think about, because while the news cycle remains the same pushing out the same topics over and over again, there are real issues that are threatening people’s lives every day, and issues threatening our humanity as we know it, that aren’t brought up once in a daily news cycle. 

              Agenda-setting is everywhere and is every done by people who have large followings. The point is that they want to create a certain image of themselves, they want the public to believe certain things regarding them and see them they way they want to be seen and talked about. So, the people with money/power and their teams, they put out all the right things to make sure that the person is seen in a positive light. And there is half of the origin statement, because they ARE telling us what to think, AND what to think about. It goes both ways! It’s on us to decide what is really important, whether or not we should dedicate our time and thoughts on these topics they keep pushing out, and to come up with our own original opinions and thoughts if we do end up listening to what they say. Nothing is ever just simply black and white, there are multiple layers to everything in this media-driven world, and it’s up to us to read between the lines, instead of just focusing on the covers.