Group 2C
Carley Bartlett, Ryan Powell, Antoniya Petkova, Jordan Muckley, Bashir Yusuf, Katherine Tysoe and Sarah Myers.
We began our discussion this week by commenting on each other's individual tasks and what media objects we picked to analyse. A few examples are: Facebook, Lady GaGa and the Dove beauty campaign. What is obvious is that we picked very different media objects and not too controversial ones, which makes it a little more difficult to measure the negative effect they would have on vulnerable audience or society in general. However, we tried to look at all the effects these objects will have and a few common occurrences of morals and standard ethics came up.
We touched on what we talked about last week and the way media is manipulating the way certain cultural images are being shaped and how we perceive aspects of society as a whole. When discussing the beauty campaign, what was obvious was that the way we perceive beauty is pretty much controlled by the media and what is considered beautiful nowadays differs in different cultures because of the way media is twisting the cultural image of it. Moreover, the media is conjuring up negative images of how beauty should be (examples are size 6 models) setting up impossible standards to maintain and putting pressure on young women who end up developing eating disorders such as anorexia and/or bulimia, etc.
The vulnerable audience are heavily influenced by these cultural images. If you think about young girls, whose bodies are starting to develop, girls who are growing up and looking in the mirror and not seeing air-brushed flawless skin or skinny figure, perfect noses, hair, etc, they start wondering why they don't look like that and in time develop a very low self-esteem, as a result of which some of them develop eating disorders, others turn to alcohol or drugs, others fall into clinical depression, etc.
As a group, we believe that the Dove campaign is a very positive event that's happening, given that it is going to change the way beauty is perceived in society. It probably won't happen in one day or with one campaign, but as we discussed last week, it is the analysis of the stereotypes that leads to their destruction - once you realize how ridiculous a cultural image is, then that would inevitably lead to its change in time.
There are two different opinions in our group when it comes to the idea that the media in general has a direct and measurable negative effect on the vulnerable audience. The one side of it is that even though media has a definite effect on children, because they tend to imitate what they see, it doesn't mean that a child that watches a lot of action or horror movies is going to turn into a criminal. It might be a temporary effect on children, when they're still young, but once they grow up and start making their own decisions, they are not necessarily likely to continue imitating what they've seen before.
The other part of the group believes that media definitely has a huge impact on the vulnerable audience, as they are being presented with "what's normal" and children tend to seek those lifestyles, just because they are being shaped as how one is supposed to live. This also leads to alienations of everyone who doesn't agree with those cultural images and people are scared to oppose the trends that are being set by the media. They believe children are definitely being affected by stereotypes about different cultures and later they are bound to be judging those people from the moment they meet them, even if they still don't know them as individuals.
Generally, all in our group agree that individuals need to take responsibility for their own actions. It is not as simple as if a child is a criminal, it must have watched a lot of violent movies and if it's not, it probably didn't watch any. A lot more influence on children's behaviour and character comes from parents and society, rather than what they see in the media. For example, bad parenting or lack of attention could lead to all sorts of issues, without media actually having influenced the child's perception of reality. Even though media might have a direct and "hypodermic needle effect" on children, it is not that simple and it is definitely not the only thing that is shaping us as individuals and defining what kind of people we are.Labels: tasks |
