October post

The most important thing that stood to me during the month of October was the lesson and video about Disney.  It really made me reflect on the movies and shows I grew up watching. I personally never noticed the racism that was portrayed in Disney movies, but after it was pointed out in the film I knew what they were talking about.  The point in the film that stuck out to me the most was the little boy who was scared by children because their voices sounded like the monkeys from a movie. I do not remember exactly what the situation was. I was surprised that a child picked up on that because it was is not something that ever crossed my mind as a child.  I think it is important to know that these movies can shape the way kids view people. With that said, I think Disney has done a great job with their newer movies. For one, not all their movies revolve around princesses. They have other plots other than falling in love. Also, Princess Tiana made a change in the media. She was the first princess to not be white, which made a huge statement.  Moana was also a princess of color, and she did not fall in love in the end. Instead, she got to be the hero and save her whole tribe. Another newer movie is Frozen. This is the only Disney movie to state that you can not fall in love with a man you just met and it is about sisterly love. These movies have helped children be more educated and accepting of other races. Disney is headed in a good direction to become more inclusive.  

October Blog Post

            The concept I have chosen for this month is related to chapter 11, Mediated Culture(s). I wanted to focus more specifically on advertisements and the messages they contain. The reason I chose this is because of the vast number of ads that every person in our culture is inundated with daily. Advertisements are everywhere and we are so used to seeing them everywhere we look that we sometimes don’t consider the social context behind the product. People unconsciously absorb ads and they in turn have an influence on our worldly perspective. They impact what we consider societal norms, they help shape our ideas about gender roles, body image, they often reinforce stereotypes and inadvertently promote things like sexual violence. Often ads are run that just shouldn’t be and while this issue is starting to gain more attention than it has had in the past, it still widely goes unnoticed. 

            I had a professor at a community college years ago who had us do an exercise where she brought hundreds of magazines to class. The magazines were all diverse in type from fashion, to outdoors, to gardening and homecare. She told us to pick 10 out and cut out any articles that we think may have a social message that goes deeper than the product the company was selling. This exercise stuck with me because we found all kinds of crazy ads, particularly in the fashion magazines that pretty clearly promoted things like sexual violence. There was a great example in a 2015 Bloomingdales Christmas ad, where there is a man creepily staring at a woman while she is looking in a different direction smiling and laughing with a caption between them that says, “SPIKE YOUR BESTFRIEND’S EGGNOG WHEN THEY’RE NOT LOOKING”. http://www.bandt.com.au/media/bloomingdales-christmas-ad-accused-of-promoting-date-rape . The ad was withdrawn and an apology statement was issued by the company for unintentionally promoting date rape. This is one of many examples that can be found, and unlike this one that was so obvious, many of these ads get overlooked.

            With ads being so prevalent an unavoidable in our society, it is important that we are aware of the impact they have and the messages they convey. With better understanding we can hold companies more accountable for the content they put out, and we can even use these ads as a learning tool of what not to do. I believe it is important to teach people about the impact media has on our culture because we live in a diverse culture and we should be putting out the right kind of messages to all.

Fallon Falore

Christina Ivey

COMM 160

6 November 2018

“The Most Important Sentence”

The focus for my blog post this month is going to revolve around media and its effects on society. Specifically, through Disney movies and their effect on children as they grow up. When you are young, you don’t realize that these movies are teaching us lessons of all kinds. Although not all lessons in Disney movies are necessarily bad, there is definitely an imbalance of positive to negative lessons that children grow up learning. This is due to the overwhelming amount of discrimination throughout each one of Disney’s movies. A few of the discriminatory aspects that the movies cover are racism in Dumbo and sexism within Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid.

According to Dictionary.com, Racism is when “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior”. As much as we hate to see it, Disney movies are covered in racist themes in the characters that easily go over any child's head. According to ScreenRant, a youtube film, the 1941 film Dumbo showed racist themes in the characters. The black crows resembled members of the African American culture and the stereotypes around the culture. They resembled the stereotypes in this culture by giving the crows heavy accents, making them jazz singers, and having them smoke. Moreover, the main crow was named “Jim Crow,” after the state and local laws that reinforce segregation. As you start watching disney movies when you get older or looking back on them, these motifs were hidden behind the joy and song. Often times media gets a reaction from the people, but you wouldn’t expect such negative reactions from a children's movies that made us so happy growing up. Since, children are unaware of these life lessons, they see them as normal.

One aspect of Disney movies that has become a completely normal thought within children's minds are they sexist remarks and values. Girls and boys grow up seeing how they should act through the media that they watch. In movies like Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid, gender roles are shown in a completely harsh way. In Beauty and the Beast we see Gaston as they ideal man. We see girls flaunting at him and he is expected to be the strongest, smartest, manliest man there is. This is teaching young boys that they cannot be vulnerable or weak, they have to be one way in order to be wanted by the ladies. This is reinforced again in the music, as well as through his sidekick, Lefou, who wants to be just like him. Lefou is also short, chunky, ugly, and just the assistant to the man. In The Little Mermaid we see Ariel giving up her voice in exchange for legs, so that she will be able to fall in love with this guy. This is teaching young girls that they should give up everything for a guy and do what it takes to get the guy. This is reinforced in a majority of the songs that play throughout The Little Mermaid. This teaches our children to grow up stressing over how they should act and what gender roles they should follow. However our children should not be thinking of these things, they should be living life to the fullest and wondering who their next play date is going to be with.

This is the most important concept to me because I find it insanely crazy that we can have adults making movies and tv shows for children and not realizing the pressure they are putting on them or the thoughts they are putting in their heads. Where kids see lessons of love, adults see racism and sexism. These aspects easily go over the children's head, but they don’t realize that the constant viewing of these stereotypes is being normalized in their brain. With that kind of power, I would hope that directors of all kind would use it to spread lessons on compassion, kindness, respect, and all the other amazing qualities that the human race has to offer.

October Blog Post

One aspect of this month that stood out and intrigued me, was the idea that highlights the role media plays in society and varying cultures. Many aspects of the way media influences the younger generation and how they act out, is due to easy access to technology and online media at an early age.
When the children see these "internet stars" & figures on twitter, Instagram, etc., they are seeing this as inspiration to fuel their actions online, as well as in real life. For example, the "Catch me Outside girl," Danielle Bregoli, was first seen on the show, Dr. Phil, in which she disrespected the host, as well as the audience, and her mother. She stormed out of the show after having a negative reaction given to her, and quickly found herself rising to fame, through twitter retweets, and many shares on the internet. Due to this, she maintained her figure and attitude in which she constantly shared on the internet with new found successes, such as song deals and more. The children seeing her disrespectful attitude and actions constantly being practiced, quickly followed in them repeating the same actions day after day online and in real life. They think that this is okay for them to do, because they are given the access to the online world very easily.

October post

For this blog post, I chose advocacy as my concept and more specifically advocacy through alliance building. Advocacy itself means supporting something or someone. Advocacy through alliance building means building a connection in between different groups, which will help getting to the objective in a faster and easier way.  

One of the examples in which I feel this concept is very clear is in politics. When it comes to this topic, there is always going to be people with similar ideas and people with entirely opposite ideas. When elections are close, you can see how groups of people who think in the same way, and want to make the same or at least a similar decision, become really close. It is almost like if  their objective is to proof that their group is right and that everyone should vote for the one person that they think is the best. Another example can be protests, when people are doing this type of activities is because they have the same ideology and want to show it to everyone else. I am sure most of the protests start with different groups of people who have a topic in common and who want to make a change regarding that. The concept can be reflected like this: different people with the same ideas gather together, then different groups with some ideas in common gather together, and by means of doing that, they can obtain whatever they are hoping for in a faster way. Finally, I have experienced this concept myself, it is very hard for me to be close to people who have ideologies that are extremely different than mine, and even more if I have to make a decision regarding that matter. When I was in High School, every year we had a debate to discuss international matter (more specific wars in Asia). I was always against the intervention of the United States in those wars. While having the debates, I would always try to find people who felt the same way and then we created sort of a group in order to make our idea be the right one. This examples for me shows that I liked building connections and supporting ideas because they were similar to the ones I had.

This concept is important because it shows how groups act when they find others who have similar ideas. It is also important because I feel that nowadays we only try to find people who have ideas that are close to the ones we have and based on that a bigger decisions is made and different plans are created in order to make that happen. For me, we still are in a society that is scared of the unknown so it is easier just to get closer to the things that are common to the person and then creating groups that follow the same beliefs. I just think this is a concept everyone has experimented at least once in their lives.

November Post

Recently we talked about family and the structures, values, and behaviors. We talked in class about the typical American family with two parents and 2.5 children. When we think about a typical family we think about dinners together, celebrating holidays, middle class and white picket fence. The difference is that not all families are like this but we still see a typical family as so. Throughout the years we have been told that strong families of the foundation of a society and that bad parents are to blame for social ills. How else are we supposed to think about a family? We’re told time and time again that we need to have a strong family in order to be emotionally mature. Therefore of course we believe that a typical family should be this way. Step parents and same sex parents are not talked about as much because it wasn’t traditional and it is modern. It is crazy to believe that these are not considered typical families. Even those couples without kids are putting up an argument cause people say they are not considered a family.

This topic took my interest because from my experience I have not seen a perfect typical family almost ever. I just think that it is so interesting that I still believe the same of a typical family. Another thing I found interesting was the culture of different families. For example a girl in our class said she was of the Hawaiian culture and her family is huge. Also my best friend is Mexican and her family is also huge and always together. From family to family it can be so different and that’s what I loved learning about.

October blog

October:

       

         This month, one of the most prominent subjects of discussion within class was food culture and its connection to identity. Amongst American culture, it is common for our culture to combine different country’s food with American food and label it “authentic” despite our own take on the other country’s food culture. In this blog post, I will be describing the discussion that was held about food and culture from class, as well as connecting advocacy through education and distinction of taste within two countries. 

As an artifact for this subject we watched an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” series which exhibited an American’s take on exotic/foreign food. Through his perspective, it become more apparent that American society sometimes has the wrong idea of authentic food, as well as opposing views on delicacy and customs used to serve/sell/cook food.

Within the episode we see a variation of ways that authentic Chinese food differs from American’s version of Chinese food. In China, they do not have strict health codes and standards that they have to meet like American restaurants do. Rarely do we ever see food lying around in the open-air containers being sold to people who pick it up with their bare hands and call it “fresh.” China on the other hand (no pun intended), as we saw in the episode, sold pickled goods by the barrel with little to no worry or constraint to keep them fresh and stowed away for only the employees to hand to the customer. 

Another idea we discussed was the way that food is cooked within Chinese culture and how different it is from our culture. We can trace this back to ancient customs that belong to Chinese culture and their definition of good taste and tradition. Hannah Park, a lifestyle writer for Spoon University, wrote about the distinction of flavors and preferences within Chinese and American cultures. Park describes why we choose to create our own versions of Chinese food that caters to the definition of delicious in America by comparing tastes of both cultures. “Take one bite of shrimp Shumai in Shanghai, and you’ll be floored by an entirely different flavor than the sweet and sour dish that you're used to. American-Chinese food tends to take on sweeter, heavier tones (sweet and sour pork, anyone?) than traditional Chinese food, such as Pào mó (otherwise known as mutton stew), which opt for lighter, more savory flavors. This distinction in flavor can be traced back to the fact that American-Chinese food had to cater to a different audience, and as a result the flavors that we see in fusion dishes today say a lot about our food palate as a country.” Separating one’s view or opinion, while expanding their knowledge of food culture can really open the eyes of individuals who are too afraid to try different or new types of cuisine. That is exactly why I enjoyed watching Bourdain explore a country he had never been to yet still having an open mind about a traditional Chinese delicacy that can be compared to pig slop. (Which of course he enjoyed thoroughly.)

Living in America, diversity of cultures is increasing within our population. Luckily for us, we can experience great differences in taste and culture while still carrying an identity of our own favorite local dishes that remind us of where we originate. Being aware of our differences in taste as well as what is “Americanized” and what is truly “authentic” is a great example of advocacy through education. The more we know about American food along with what our taste preferences are, the more we can learn as a population about the difference in other country’s taste and history. This is so important to teach within a population that might not be as diverse or carry a negative view about a specific country’s food because it is different than our own. Education can open the eyes of those individuals more easily than traveling could. 

Work Cited:

Park, Hannah. “6 Ways American-Chinese Food Differs From Authentic Chinese Food.” Spoon   

      University, Spoon Media Inc., 28 Apr. 2017, spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/6-ways-american-  

      chinese-food-differs-from-authentic-chinese-food.