Media, Men and Women…

ECOMP 6016 - Assignment #6A: Watch two movies that make claims about how media influences people, then write a reflection based on the following questions:

• What do you agree or disagree with what they claim? Explain.
• What is your perspective on the media's influence? 
• What evidence or counter-evidence of what they are claiming do you see with your own students?

Video #1: "Touch Guise" by Jackson Katz

Video #2: "Advertising's Image of Women" by Jean Killbourne

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Good golly is this a huge topic, with so many points of views, philosophies and conclusions that is hard to know where to start…

Jackson seems to come right out of the gate attaching the media as the source from which men learn how to commit violence. But later on he points out that the media is not necessarily creating the violent culture but rather is a reflection of the violence that is in our culture.What is so scary is that our society, at least with respect to our opinions of what good “media entertainment” is, seems to be okay with this. As I listened to Jackson talk about how men are getting tips on what it means to be masculine from the media, it makes me wonder how much of the masculinity we see portrayed is an accurate representation of the real world, or is it more what a small group (e.g. the entertainment industry) thinks masculinity is? He also goes on to look at how the media portrays violence by students at school in the vocabulary they use, i.e. using the term children and rarely that of boys or young men. Unfortunately, I think there are times when the news media is less concerned with the facts or being specific then with being politically correct and/or gender neutral.

For Kilbourne, she attempts to take on the huge powerhouse that is the beautification of women. Just like Jackson who says it takes more courage to challenge the ideas of perceived masculinity, Kilbourne points out that challenging the stereotypes that clothing, cosmetics, and even plastic surgery advocates claim as femininity requires great strength and perseverance. Another interesting point she makes is what would happen if the media took their attitude toward the female body and applied them to the male body. 

When I look at my own students there are some that I can see potentially fitting into some of the stereotypical labels, but others do not. I have also seen counter-evidence to claims that it is males that are the primary source for violence; often female teachers tell me that girls are much meaner to each other than boys, and I think we may be beginning to see this surface in the entertainment media via reality TV. And speaking of girls, now that the weather has turned warmer we at the middle school had to address the issue (again) of appropriate school attire. 

As educators and parents and well, adults, I think we need to stress to students the difference between what is “real” and what is entertainment and fiction. Going back to Week #4’s assignment, one of the reasons why I love DVD technology is because it gives us the opportunity to see the “Making Of…” and see the work that it took to create all that drama and action and violence…and how nobody got hurt doing it. Interviews with cast can also show them what it takes to create the image of the characters we see, such as how much weight the actor had to loose in order to “fit into” the role. The point really hit home about how the media has gotten very good at dehumanizing people, creating artificial expectations for women about what it means to be beautiful and for men what it means to be masculine.

Magazine Media Literacy: Step Two

ECOMP 6016 - Assignment #5C: Select ONE magazine that you normally would not read. Post your answers to the following questions:

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1. What is the name of the magazine?  Us Magazine
2. Explain why you  wouldn’t be interested in the magazine you’ve selected.  This magazine is all about celebrities and the exploration of not just the work they do but what goes on in their lives as well. Reading about the lives of such famous people would not be my first choice, not that I haven’t sat down in the break room at work and read a similar magazine, but in those situations it is more out of boredom than interest. If the articles are about what the person is doing for work then that’s fine. It’s when the articles are about what their person is doing in the private life that often times turns me off, especially when the tone of the article comes across as exploitive and intrusive. To read such articles I feel disrespects their right to privacy and encourages the paparazzi to continue to stick their noses/cameras where perhaps they shouldn’t be.
3. Are there offensive stories or ads?  Some of the articles, those that seem intrusive, I would consider offensive because if I were in their shoes I would not appreciate that level of invasion into my private life. What I found truly offensive was the constant notices from my web browser that it had prevented the site from opening a pop-up window. It is bad enough the number of animated ad banners strewn about the webpages, but the pop-up windows cross the line because they are a popular vehicle through which viruses and malware are delivered.
4. Are you simply not the targeted audience?  Based on the ads for female clothing, cosmetics, and other products I would guess that I am not part of their target audience.
5. Are you not amenable to the techniques of persuasion the magazine uses?  The magazine clearly uses the two basic persuasion techniques of beautiful people and celebrities to draw readers in. If you can find the text within the forest of images, many headlines use intensifiers to get the reader to click on the article.
6. Are there images that you object to?  The majority of the images posted throughout the articles are of celebrities at public events, on the set of a television or movie productions, or from photo shoots. Anyway has to be ready for themselves to show up on someone’s camera at such events regardless of who you are, so I don’t find these images offensive. It’s the images taken with telescopic lenses that intrude on the celebrity’s privacy that I have an issue with, but I didn’t see any images like these on Us’s website.
7. Include the URL for the magazine.  http://www.usmagazine.com/

Magazine Media Literacy: Step One

ECOMP 6016 - Assignment #5B: Select ONE magazine that is online and captures your interest. Post your answers to the following questions:

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1. What is the name of the magazine?  The Week
2. Who is the target audience?  It took some digging, but under the link at the bottom of their site entitled “AD INFO” I found a brief description of their intended audience: the “busy executive.” Now, I’m by no means an executive or anywhere near it, but I am busy being a teacher and a learner. [http://ads.theweek.com/ad_info/home.php]
3. What are the titles of a few articles?  One of the reasons why I like to read this magazine is because of its variety in articles from national and international stories to both written and video entertainment. On Wednesday, June 1st the following articles were available for reading:
   ~“The House’s ‘phony’ debt-ceiling vote: A win for the GOP?”
   ~“Can a ‘general amnesty’ save Syria’s Assad?”
   ~“Could solar panels on the moon power the Earth?”
   ~“Is 4 years old too young for kindergarten?”
4. What kinds of visual images are displayed?  Almost every article heading is paired with a photograph or illustration meant related to the topic. Opinion articles are tagged will illustrations of the authors. Almost every page contains sections with images and title headings that try to connect the reader to other stories, from a “featured articles” box to a “Must Clicks” horizontal header bar. Sometimes these images are paired with the article titles and other times subject areas (e.g. opinion, technology, lifestyle). And of course, what news magazine would not be without a political cartoons section (and I’ll admit to it, this is one of my favorite sections).
5. What are typical advertisements selling?  First and foremost the website has advertising for itself spread throughout the site. The majority of the self-ads promote subscribing to their magazine in paper form, followed next by downloading their iPhone or Android app. (these are currently free). The site does support advertisements from a variety of businesses including other news outlets, hotels, manufacturing, information technology and service-oriented businesses.
6. What techniques of persuasion do the articles, images and ads use?  In their “about us” section they use the basic persuasion technique of intensity, stating that they pull news from the best sources and cover the latest developments in a variety of news categories. In ads, when you look at how many times and in how many places they advertise themselves via subscriptions or their portable app. you can’t help but thing of the repetition form of persuasion. Within some of the articles I sense some advanced card stacking persuasion going on or rather, an attempt to remove this persuasion from the issue being discussed in that commentators are responding to an initial author statement and debate its merits, including additional information and/or disputing other data. Sometimes I will take what might be considered the very basic approach of noting to which side of the room a commentator seems to lean, specifically the commentator who speaks first in the article and who speaks last, essentially getting the last word for the story.
7. Include the URL for the magazine.  http://theweek.com/

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