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The Rant Goes On.....

This was encouraged.

So what’s the problem with Pop Culture? This could be a volume of encyclopedia’s worth of information. The problem with pop culture and media starts and the top, with consumerism being the core of the society that we function in. The more you get, the more you have, the happier you will be. So as TV, movies and media has “expanded” a core group of people has decided that they must make it their mission to create dominate and control what we see, hear and buy. They stand by their actions by claiming that they only want to instill family values and the American ideal, but they are sheltered white men who live in luxury mansions and take jet-planes when they have to travel. They don’t know or care about diversity, they make false assumptions and claim to know what the majority of Americans want, but then the internet came along and shook everything up. I think on some level, many Americans realize that they are not represented on TV, in the movies or media. It doesn’t reflect their values, their culture of their belief system. In my generation, we are turning away from this and finding content that appeals to our specific interest. So many of my friends just don’t watch TV, don’t own a TV, or just don’t really care about it. They still engage in content, but we find it from people who share similar values. We find people who have opinions worth respecting, who make engaging content and who value diversity. But this is just on a personal level, so how do we change over all?

While it can be difficult to weed out the “quality” content from the pure non-sense garbage, it is worth the search. People who create this content should be respected and valued and their work should be on display. Vimeo is an excellent example of the better version of Youtube with some true quality content. We don’t have to be stuck consuming things we don’t like or agree with, we just have to learn to say no.

But’s not only what we watch and consume, it’s who we do it with. People claim this type of consumption is isolating, but it doesn’t have to be. For example, I live with my boyfriend and we only have 1 iPad (its mine) and no TV. So we have to share it. Sometimes I watch videos he doesn’t like and sometime he watches videos I don’t like, but we are sharing. We are spending time together and seeing things beyond our scope of interest. Parents who are putting just put on Youtube for their children, no! This is not ensuring that they get quality content that is appropriate and represents the values of your family. You might as well just put on 5 hours of pure uncensored rap. We need to be active participants looking at the quality of content our families are consuming. We need to share and censor and actively question what we are watching and why we are watching it. We need to stop being passive and accepting in an age where we finally had the freedom of choice in what we consumer we should take full advantage of that.

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Social Media + Me!

So my advice for this course? If you have already chosen the righteous path of just staying on the periphery of the social media world, enough that you only have one day of self-deprecation from looking at your facebook page and realizing that all of your friends are having way more fun than you, making more money and going on more trips than you, then you probably don’t need this class. But if you’re a Miley Cyrus wanna be, hooked on old episode of Friends and going to Beyoncé Concerts, then this might be the right course to question your moral choices. After you complete this course, you will never want to participate in social media again as you develop a sense of how much time is truly wasted by sharing your opinion on a website were millions of other people are sharing their exact same mindless garbage and you know what matters at the end of the day? The guy who posted the video of his dog sitting with a hotdog on his noise for 20 mins while he goes to the bathroom. You will leave this course with a greater understanding of how truly beautiful the outdoors is after you’ve spent 6 weeks locked up inside crying in front of your computer because nobody has bothered to read your disability post on your new tumblr account except your grandma. And let’s be honest, grandma likes anything that you post regardless of whether she can see the screen or not. If you don’t come out of this course understanding that what your consuming on TV is pure crap with nothing more than stereo-typical representations from a white-male dominated media culture, then your clearly didn’t do you twitter/tumblr/pinterest/voicethread/vlog/blog/facebook/vimeo/youtube assignment right, but you’ll be a more well-adjusted member of society for participating in as many forms of social media as possible.

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This has nothing to do with disability

Quantitative Analysis 

I compared Fringe and CSI in terms of how women are depicted in terms of being or understanding science in male dominated society. In Fringe Season 1 Episode 13 Olivia Dunham is portrayed as an independent woman, who does not need the reinforcement of the men around her to secure her identity. Her autonomous behavior allows her to pursue leads related to solving cases. Olivia Dunham is very direct when dealing with clients, demanding answers to the many questions she has to answer. In this particular episode, she withholds medical treatment from a man who is part of a medical experiment, until he tells her the name of a criminal preforming the science experiments. Olivia is portrayed as an emotional character, and when her emotions become overwhelming, she often isn’t taken seriously by her fellow coworkers.    

I believe that Olivia Dunham would resonate with women who are working in science or crime related fields that enjoy see strong females pursue career fields that are male dominated. No, there are no intuitions that seem to work in favor of or against her. She is not the norm because if a women was to act similar to her, they would be considered bitchy and controlling and probably lose their job. How dare you speak to a man in that tone of voice! 

The second show I watched was CSI S15 E8 Rubbery Homicide. This was a god-awful show. I don’t know who watches this crap. I only picked it because my boyfriend though I meant CSI when I clearly wanted NCIS. Not the same thing. 

The women portrayed in this cultural object are objectified and turned into cultural objects that are stared at but have little value. When the men cross dress into the rubber suits that make them into women, they instantly become passive victims of violence. This demonstrates that women are seen as weak and in need of protection by the men who surround them.

 This show is easily retrievable, I viewed it on Couchtune for free, CBS subscription website, Hulu and on repeat during general viewing time TV, but please don’t waste your time. It was really bad. 

One of the most striking aspects of viewing CSI is how easily every crime is solved within the course of the 45-minute air time the show is on. It makes crime seem like not as big of an issue as it truly is. The emotion that you feel for the victim is minimized but the crime scenes are neat and tidy, ready for the average American family to view. Little do most viewers know, crimes committed from acts of violence are horrific and not appropriate for even the most veteran crime scene investigators. It makes us accustom to violence and crime.

 It feels familiar in the sense that some the crimes are things I’ve heard of happening in the news. I do think viewing the graphic violence resonates with each of us in some way. Its similar to when we drive by a car accident and we know that we shouldn’t look, but we just can’t help it. We all want to gawk, but we don’t want to be catch gawking. CIS gives us the opportunity to view this without being caught. At the same time, it also appeals to ability to believe that science can solve all of our questions if we just use the right tools and ask the right questions.

After a large uptick in the number of crime scene investigation shows like CIS, I think all of us felt a little like crime scene investigators capable of solving any mystery. I think now, we all know that what kinds of things we should/ should not do when coming across a crime scene investigation. Don’t touch the body, don’t touch anything without finger prints, don’t disturb any evidence. I think the show was so powerful in glamorizing crime scene investigations that many people chose this as a career field for college. From what I’ve heard, crime scene forensics is completely the opposite of anything we see on TV. It’s a really hard profession, it’s terribly slow, and more often then not, the crime is never solved, or if it is, you may never know the outcome of a particular case. I think the show was successful in getting people into forensic fields, especially women, but I think it was grossly inaccurate in what type of work people would actually be doing.

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This has nothing to do with disability

Quantitative Analysis Form  

I watched Orange is the New Black  Season 2 Episode 12 and what I found was that this was actually a show that had quite a bit of diversity of sexuality in terms of the characters. Out of the 34 main characters identified in the show, I found that 17 of them were white, which equaled 50%. I found that out of the 34 main characters 7 of them where black, which equaled 20%..Out of the 34 main characters identified in the show, I found that 8 of the 34 identified as Hispanic or Latino which equaled 23%. Out of the 34 main characters identified in the show, I found that 2 of them where Asian. Even though there were only 2 that were Asian, it was clear from how their characters acted that they were not the same kind of Asian, which is very interesting because Asian has so many stereotypes in the western world, that it would be very surprising to see 2 distinct characters. Out of the 34 characters, 100% of them were characters. I found that out of the 34 characters, 4 of them were male, which is 11%. I found out that 2 of the crew was male, which was 28%. I found out that out of the 34 characters, 30 of them where female, which was 88%. I found out that 5 of the crew where female. In terms of gender, I found out that 1 of the characters was transgender and not just transgender, but a transgender man living in a women’s prison. WHY HAS THIS NEVER OCCURRED TO US BEFORE? We are so busy fighting about bathrooms, what will we do the first time someone who is transgender ends up in prison? So to see thing in this show is mind blowing and really raises a lot of questions about gender identity. Out of the 34 characters, 33 of them were not transgender. Out the 33 characters on the show 67% of them “straight” and 11 of them Lesbian or transgender, but in this show, so many of the women have a diversity of sexual experiences, that I couldn’t accurately what each characters sexual preference was.  

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Solutions of how people with disabilities can be represented better in the media  

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Why its hard for people with disabilities to get auditions 

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Over Protective and Over Righteous

Why can’t they just hire any actor disabled or not? While it should just seem obvious that we should have more disabled actors on TV, I think the reason we don’t see more disabled actors is complicated. While I think it’s a combination on the media industry not wanting to make accommodations and the laws that protect people with disabilities and accessibility, but it comes from our culture itself. We are so afraid of people with disabilities! They are portrayed so fragile and delicate, victims of abuse, repressed by society, that nobody wants to take the risk of actually putting an actor with a real disability on screen. Anytime anyone is different than “the norm” is put on TV, we yell and scream about how offensive it is to represent a person with a disability in this way. How dare you assume that because my child had that disability they act that way! The problem is, we don’t see people with disabilities represented as just people. They get angry, make mistakes, fall in love and do almost everything that everyone else does. Just because one person with a disability appears on TV, does not mean that person represents all people with that specific disability.

One Channel that has gained popularity is TLC. I’m glad that we get the chance to see people with dis-abilities in a somewhat normal environment, but after I watched these shows for a little bit, I found them kind of boring. Guess what? That’s the point of the show! They are doing the same things I do everyday, like grocery shopping or running errands. So maybe TLC is starting to accomplish something bigger than we thought?

So we should just let people with disabilities be cast as normal people and anyone who feels offended at seeing that person can turn the TV off and go hide in a corner. We live in a real world with real people and everyone should have an opportunity to participate whether you like it or not. 

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What the media does and doesn’t want you to know about disability

From:  The Politics of Representing Disability Exploring News Coverage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the National Disability Insurance Scheme Shawn Burns and Beth Haller 

News about disability laws also deals with a social group that had been traditionally marginalized and a social issue that had not received much press attention in the past. Typically, social issues take up less space in newspapers than other types of news. Ryan and Owen (1976) found that only 8.8 per cent of US metropolitan daily newspapers’ news holes were devoted to social issues, such as, health, housing, education, crime–law, poverty–welfare, ecology, mass transit, racism–sexism and drug abuse. With even more unfortunate implications for disability coverage, Ryan and Owen found in a follow-up study in 1977 that coverage of social issues contained more errors than general coverage. The accuracy data indicated that the most common errors were subjective, those in which the news source and the reporter may differ on how the information should have been treated. Although this is older research, it still has implications for the news coverage of disability issues because Clogston in 1990 showed how in the past, the media reported on disability as a medical or welfare problem

Haller’s research on the news media coverage of the ADA confirmed this lacklustre interest in the ‘disability side’ of the story of the legislation. In analyzing news stories about the ADA in the early 1990s, she showed how the perspective of the US business community that made it into the ADA stories may have cast a new stereotype of people with disabilities in US cultural narratives: that people with disabilities cost society money. The voice of the business community reflects the paradigm of capitalism in the United States, and journalists ply their trade in this society. Haller found that a ‘balanced’ style of sourcing stories about disability issues weakened the ‘disability side’ of the story in 1996. On the one hand, the news media’s reliance on federal government sources worked in the favor of the ‘disability side’ of the ADA story because it was the same as the government side of the story. Disability activists and lobbyists basically wrote most of the federal legislation. On the other hand journalists did challenge the federal government’s side of the story by going to business and local government sources in the news stories. The business community and local governments, fearing the financial ramifications of the ADA, supplied information to the media with an alternative frame for the Act—that the ADA would be costly to them (Haller, 1996). For example, although the ADA is a civil rights law dealing with a myriad issues, especially employment discrimination against people with disabilities, the issue of architectural access was cited most often as the reason for the ADA in the media stories. This finding can definitely be tied to the business concerns about the ADA because architectural access had the potential to be the most costly to business and local governments. It should be noted that in the ADA stories, the federal government sources and local government sources were typically on different ‘sides’.

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Dis-Ability in Fantasy Land

I have always been interested in people who have had disabilities. I feel like that sounds weird, but for some reason I have felt drawn to understand them. I guess that’s why I chose to go into psychology in college. 

I went to a public school that had a therapy center attached to it, so I went to school with a lot kids who had various disabilities. Some of them where things that were more apparent like needing a wheel chair or crutches and some of the kids had downs syndrome or intellectual impairment. The school did a really good job of making sure these kids just did what everyone else did. 

I don’t remember seeing a lot of people with disabilities on TV. I do remember a movie Miracle in Lane 2 with Frankie Muniz. Nowadays, that would be considered disability porn, which is new and really confusing term. 

One other show that has a theme of disability was a show called “Joan of Arcadia”, which was one of my favorite shows. The main girl Joan has a brother who recently became paralyzed and has to deal with guilt of his injury and the isolation he feels from his friends. This is probably of the most accurate depictions of someone having to deal with a disability. Joan herself also deals with “mental disability”. While I wont get into the whole plot the show here, Joan can talk to God, who helps her deal with her teenage dilemmas. At one point in the series, Joan is accused of having a mental illness and is put on medication. It made you question if Joan was and imagining talking to God the whole time. The show only ran a couple of seasons, but I think it was really a really excellent show that addressed many issues that we tend to shy away from. So why don’t we see more people with disabilities on TV?

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Pop Culture Bio

I grew up in the 90′s, when Nickelodeon was in it’s prime and Pokemon cards where cool. I wasn’t allowed to listen to a lot of conventional pop music and the internet didn't exist so most of the pop culture I was through TV and movies. Looking back on the programs I watched on Nickelodeon, I was lucky to be part of a generation that had quality TV for kids. Don’t get me wrong, its was definitely biased towards kids, but there where such a diversity of characters in the programs. From all different backgrounds, like the inner city kids in  Hey Arnold! and Doug’s colorful friends to All That and Ken & Kal. More importantly, I don’t remember the shows with real actors portraying the stereotypes we see in adult TV shows. Why was there such a difference from kids shows to adult? 

One of the biggest changes in TV and pop culture came when I was in 5th grade. It was the first year that survivor was on TV and that any show had a reality based theme. I loved watching it every Thursday with my dad. I don’t think TV has been quite the same since Survivor took hold. 

As I transitioned from and kid into an teen, the only thing one specifically for teens was MTV.  I mostly watched 2 shows, MADE and Sweet 16. While I enjoyed them for entertainment value, they always seems distant to me. I never felt like the show reflected girls similar to me. I certainly didn’t get a car for my sweet 16 and there was no way that any TV could truly make me into a cheerleader in less than a week. 

When I moved out at 18, I pretty much stopped watching cable TV altogether. The women I see on TV are not people that I admire, or want to be like. I don’t want to be the unhappy suburban mom or the women who blames all her troubles on her husband. 

It seems crazy all of the options we have to view media now! Netflix, onDemand, Youtube, Amazon ect. I’m lucky to be able to access shows and programs where I can find women that I align with. Now, most of what I watch and see is either recommended by friends and on the internet. But it makes me wonder, do all of the options isolate us from finding other people with the same interest? 

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