Module 3 Readings

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Yet again, I am very impressed by the articles and videos of this module. They give so much important insight into major issues that must be overcome and their connections to the media and society as a whole. While most all of them had to do mainly with poverty or violence, they all put forth different knowledge and perspectives to the table.

The reading by deMause and Rendall was focused on a study done by FAIR having to do with poverty and representation in media. It also included a large number of statistics and while that is typical for an academic study, it is a big contrast to some of the ideas in other articles. While statistics are not necessarily the best way to convey information, it worked acceptably in this sense and it is still extremely startling and disheartening when seeing how high the numbers truly are. According to a study by the University of Michigan, one third of U.S. residents will experience government-defined poverty in a 13 year period. This idea is just incomprehensible. How can we allow so much of the population to live struggling in poverty? Even worse is how can we be ignoring this problem? The article also mentions that the poverty line created by the government hasn’t been changed in nearly four decades aside from the increase to balance inflation. This means that there are even more people who are forced to live and struggle through such hardships while not even being at all acknowledged. It is such a sick irony that the U.S. is the richest country in the world and yet, it cannot even notice let alone support its people. The study that took place monitored 3 new stations and how many times they had a story about poverty within a 38 month period. Over the course of just over 3 whole years, only 58 stories about poverty were broadcasted and instead, “networks deemed the pop star’s legal problems twice as newsworthy as the economic plight of tens of millions of poor citizens” (deMause and Rendall 2). Something else that was pointed out which is extremely noteworthy is the fact that even when there are stories about poverty, it is extremely rare that the people living it were ever “allowed to describe for themselves the causes of and cures for poverty” (deMause and Rendall 6). Instead it is always “experts” who talked about it. One of the examples that showed how messed up these experts coming to talk about poverty could be was a woman labeled to be a “labor economist”. In reality, she was actually working for a corporation in order to downplay the problems during a recession. This shows how backwards and out of touch some people are. That corporations, greed, celebrities, and popular culture are more important than real, living people caught in the middle of a society that chooses to ignore them is inexcusable. A final point that demonstrated this was when a reporter asked John Edwards why he thought poverty was a “winning political issue”. He replied simply, “This is not a political strategy. It’s a huge moral issue facing America” (deMause and Rendall 9). Poverty is not something made up. It’s not something to be used to other people’s benefits. It is a problem that the media needs to show and that every person needs to be aware of.

The food diary was very stunning as well. Just from pictures and prices, you are given so much insight into the lives of these families and perhaps even the countries that they live in. It was absolutely astonishing at the differences between each picture. The difference in the types, amounts, and prices of the foods, the number of people in each family, and the housing that they live in was very eye opening. Many of the comments by other viewers were very thought provoking as well. I thought that it was very interesting that others shared their own stories and at all of the different places that they came from as well. Poverty is definitely not just an issue for the U.S. but something that the whole world must work to overcome as well.

The “Basic Facts about Low-Income Children” was exactly what it advertised. It gave astonishing facts and numbers about just how many children are living in poverty and low income homes. It divides it into regions, parent’s educational levels, and various other measures that connect to poverty as well as providing neat graphs for each. While it provides the numbers, it does not provide the personal touch that the next two articles make particularly clear.

The two articles by Kuper and by Ridgway were very powerful and were much more focused on taking action than on the numbers behind the crisis. They both talk about how the poor are ignored in the media. Kuper also mentions about poverty being global and that “2.5 billion people living on less than $2 a day – are considered even more boring, due to the triple whammy of being non-white, non-Anglophone and poor” (Kuper 2). He thoughtfully notes that the only way for poor people to be noticed by the media is if there is major disorder. This says something about our society as well. The media believes that people will only watch things that are “interesting” and filled with “excitement” and that seeing ugly but real and important parts of the world will bring their station ratings down. That is not something that can be accepted though. Ridgway says this point extremely well:

We need to see this and hear about it, so that we can keep our humanity intact and maintain our ability to have empathy and compassion for others. When we make an entire community invisible in media, what we’re implying is that they don’t exist – not in any meaningful way (2).

So how is media supposed to show it so that people will pay attention? Once again, Kuper and Ridgway both address this problem. One thing to realize is that the media is always controlled by the “well-fed”. The media is controlled by and its world initially interpreted through the views of generally upper class people. So the problems and the views of people in other social groups are misrepresented and ignored. The other problem is when reporters use only facts and numbers to represent poverty. This is a problem because it has a dehumanizing effect. All people see are the numbers and not the faces and lives that they are made up of. People need to feel a connection to truly take notice. The media also needs to let the people actually talk for themselves about the problems and the factors that contributed to their situations. No matter how much people in power try to make others believe it, there is no way that poor people live the way they do because of their own choices. The American dream that anyone can make a good life for themselves through working hard is not a reality. When people are unable to get a job or have a living wage and when they are ignored and seen as being less than human, how can it be so easy to get out of that cycle? It’s nearly impossible. As Ridgway rightly state, “that’s what media literacy education is about. It’s about learning how to notice. It’s about being open and able enough to question what we see” (1).

The videos about children in poverty were also extremely strong and noteworthy. Hearing about each child’s own personal story was truly heartbreaking. As we have learned and seen for ourselves, people dealing with situations of poverty, let alone children, are rarely ever seen in media. So being able to hear a child’s voice and their perspectives on what is happening is of extreme value. The second video, while not quite so personal, made some very important points. The line that the speaker said that really caught my attention was: “Our greatest threat to national security does not come from an external enemy. It comes from the internal failure to build a strong citizenry” (Edelman). So often, people are worried about enemies from outside the country that they fail to notice the demons that are plaguing their own society. If things such as poverty and discrimination continue to hurt people without any aid or resolution, eventually society will snap from the pressures. If people will not look at societal problems through a moral basis of helping other human beings, then maybe seeing it as an issue of defense as well will turn some more heads.

The video by Barholow and the Sternheimer chapter went hand in hand very well about media and violence. Some of the studies and experiments discussed in the video were pretty interesting. You always hear headlines about violence and videogames, but I had never really heard about the ways in which that theory was supposedly tested. One thing that stood out to me was the speaker’s emphasis on the difference between violence and aggression. In some of his studies he found that yes, violent video games can increase aggression, but not for very long periods of time and it depends on the individual person. This is a very big difference than proving that playing video games can make people violent. The Sternheimer text also does a very prudent job in pointing out that all of these tests and studies cannot “prove” anything. Violent video games and other forms of media cannot be the single cause that makes people dangerous. The number of violent crimes has even largely decreased over the last two decades. Instead, there are a number of other variables that many people choose to ignore. This has to do once again with ignoring poverty and with the media’s obsession of extremes to get people’s attention. Unfortunately, for far too many children living in bad situations, violence can be a part of their everyday lives. The interviews of some children like that from the textbook were terribly eye opening. It is a whole different world that people living in comfort cannot even imagine. Yet, the media and others blame it on video games rather than the hardships that society continues to keep them in. Something else that I found interesting from the textbook was some of the reasons why children decide to watch or play violent and scary movies or games. The quote that illustrates this idea perfectly is that: “Viewing media violence is a way of dealing with the most frightening aspect of life in a safe setting, like riding a roller coaster while knowing that you will get off and walk away in a few minutes” (Sternheimer 125). While it cannot compare at all to what the children have to go through, the comparison to a roller coaster really helps to give somewhat of an idea to their feelings. It also shows a real maturating in the children. Facing their fears, especially when they are so real, must be a very hard thing to do.

The final reading about the attention economy was a much tougher read and certainly less emotional, but it gave a lot of insight and clarity about the topic of attention that we have been learning. One idea that I found interesting was when the author said:

Everyone who is seen on television models one common role, as do all teachers inschools, and that role is to be the object of a good deal of attention. Thus, without planning or intention, there has been a kind of cultural revolution, telling us that  getting attention is a fine thing (Lankshear and Knobel 3).

This was a way of thinking about attention that I had not noticed before. The example of teachers really hits home as well. Being the center of attention really has become of great importance in American culture. The media is able to use this knowledge and form tactics in order to grab people’s attentions. In order for us to truly understand the workings of media, it is therefore of great importance to understand this attention economy as well.

Module 3!

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So far this has been my favorite section of the class. The topic of attention is much more important than I have ever thought. I started to think to myself and reminisce what really grabs my attention? That answer was easy my phone! It constantly alerts me of events that are important to keep in mind but most is filled with non-sense. The amount of time I spend staring on a screen is ridiculous. This leads into my first topic on the article Attention Economy.

This article gives several reasons as to why the topic of attention economy verses information economy is prevalent in today’s society. This article makes notion that we are part of an attention society. Our society is full of competition to obtain attention from the media and others who get info from the media. We seem to place our attention on various things and people that seem most interesting.  A great example I found was the attention we give to movie stars and famous people. They receive extreme amounts of attention due to the fascinating work they do to produce movies that we enjoy seeing.  This society spends a lot of time watching information about stars look at the Kardashion’s for example they are famous because of the lavish lifestyle they choose to live. Often times our focus gets carried away in giving stars attention and being interested in their life we fail to see the value of that information.  This article mentions that society enjoys giving attention as well as receiving attention. Seems to be a two way street, but in reality the amount of attention stars give back is only an illusion. A star will give the crowd of people a small amount of attention when in return the crowd goes wild. This concept is called “illusory attention”, and society doesn’t recognize that we are giving energy into a person/people that don’t do the same. “Attention involves exchange” and in order to get attention one has to give attention, a concept part of Attention Economy that I thought to be interesting. Goes to show our attention as a society can be leading in the wrong direction.

Another very important part to the Attention Economy article was the topic of attention in education. In schools the goal of every teacher is to grab their student’s attention with information that will further their knowledge. But this is an issue for teachers, the difficulty lies in getting children to pay attention in school. School aged children are drowning media and their attention is placed in a video game or TV show rather than ideas and values taught in school. There is also this difficulty in schools with giving attention and getting attention which results in behavior issues while at school. It seems that the media is having a bad influence on children and their learning. If students are requiring more attention than the students are paying attention to materials the unsuccessful learning is taking place. I was able to create a connection between this article and thoughts given by Karen Sternheimer. I discovered a point that Sternheimer made and it is that children “cannot discern fantasy from reality” thus their attention is placed in fantasy of a violent video game.  In their minds, children may relate violence and bad behavior learned in video games and media as a rewarding experience. Violence in video games sparks responses in the mind of a child, only if education could always do the same. This article pushes for teachers to create new techniques to fix this challenge we are facing to get children’s attention to learn and promote good behavior.

The next topic addressed in this week’s reading was the attention given to those living in poverty. Or in other words the lack of attention media places on those who live in poverty. In the first YouTube video called Child Poverty: In their own words gives the chance for children who live in poverty to reveal what they have faced. In the video the children and teenagers are free to say what their life is like and what challenges they come into contact with. These children shared what it was like growing up, some had to sleep on the floor in a small room that their whole family lived in where it was dirty and living conditions were uncomfortable. Many of these children grew up with single parents whose father’s left them and the mothers struggling to work several jobs and were never adequately rested. A young girl explains that she tried to eat more at school so when she got home her siblings could have the food they had. Children explained there were nights where there was nothing to eat and no money to buy food.  These children have little to call their own. This video was purely their feelings not twisted words the news and media likes to place as their voice. Seeing those children speak in the video was heartbreaking to watch how media does very little to recognize a large amount of people that are struggling.

The next article about Poverty in the News really made me upset of how little poverty is shown on the local news. During the articles 3 year study only “58 stories about poverty made it on the news and 191 quotes sources” during this period of time.  Those results really astonished me, it seems that media is so concerned what they deem as important to play on the news. Poverty is an issue that is happening all around America yet little of the news recognizes this as an issue. This article gives a great example of how messed up the media be while comparing Michael Jackson’s trial in 2005 to hurricane Katrina that wiped out New Orleans. During that year NBC aired the most on poverty “44 stories on Michael Jackson to 22 on poverty and hurricane Katrina” this left me in disbelief. The country was experiencing a horrific natural disaster but the media still chose to focus on a less important topic in my opinion. This relates back to my previous point above that media shares stories that think will be in most interest of the public. The only way this country will stick together during times of disasters is if the country supports each other. We seem to be in a divide over what news on the media we really need to be paying attention to.

The next article that really grabbed my attention was the Global Food Disparity: The Food Diary by Fricat. This article consisted of photos from Fricat’s travel around the world. The purpose was for us to explore what a week’s worth of food for a family looked like. This article really captured my interest since I have never seen pictures of a bunch of different families from other cultures before. Each picture resembled what their family looked like and what and how much they typically ate. Each cultural was amazing to see. If it wasn’t for this photographer pictures like these would never be on the media. Much of what news shows about other cultures outside ours is limited. Another realization I saw was the lack of fruits and vegetables the American family had shown in their picture. I took this in 2 ways. For one, the media seems to lack the representation of healthy foods in America.  Secondly, it made me realize how easily accessible junk food is for our society. Food in America was one of the most expensive but had the smallest amount of nutrition. Children and families that live in poverty may only have access to food items such as fast food hamburgers since they are inexpensive and quick to get. But of course the media doesn’t give attention to that struggle.

The next article of my readings was The Basic facts about Low-income children: children under 18 years by Yang Jiang. After reading this article my heart once again was torn about the facts I was reading about children that lived in poverty. There are more children and families that live in poverty that I had ever expected. The article stated that “44 percent of children live in low-income families” and “22 percent of those children live in poor families” all children that are 18 years old or younger. These statistics point out that about half of the children country wide lives in poverty.   The main focus I had on this article was the percentage of children in low-income families and varying rate between race and ethnicity since it related well to Sternhrimer’s section Violence in Context: poverty and racial Inequality.  In Jiang’s article it revealed that “65 percent of African American children and 63 percent of Latino children live in low-income families” (Jiang pg.4).This was shocking news to me once again. Sternheimer did a fine job of relating crime to poverty rates in the Latino and African American low-income neighborhoods. Sternheimer explains that crime rates aren’t only linked to children playing video games at a young age but to poverty as well. Gangs and crime rates seem to have skyrocketed in these low-income neighborhoods. Crime seems to be overwhelming influence in these areas where violence is seen on normally on a daily basis. Several children are frightened by guns and crime. A way to take away that fear was to become part of it and learn to defend yourself. These children getting involved at young ages were not looking in ways to “swoop down on the weak” but rather get involved based on fear and hopelessness. They were trying to survive in “destroyed communities as best as they could” and their violence was liked to survival. Wow that was powerful to me. That last line really hit home for me in this section. I’ve never made that connection before prior to these readings.

The next 2 articles I think relate very well Poverty’s poor show in the media by Kuper and 4 Problems with the way media depicts poor people by Ridgway. An excellent point that shows how messed up our society is the reveal of this quote by Kuper. “The global poor -2.5 billion people living on less than $2 a day – are considered even more boring, due to the triple whammy of being non-white, non-Anglophone, and poor”. Since the media doesn’t think of the poor as exciting news it seems to fen away from the importance it actually brings to the table. Instead media wants to fill our minds with shows about rich and spoiled people since talking about the poor seems “sad”.  In order for the poor to get attention some type of chaos has to happen says Kuper. News casters never seem to capture low-income areas because they would rather interview people more like them middle to upper class. This gives the feeling that the poor seem to be invisible which leads into Ridgway’s topic of poverty invisibility as a big problem media depicts poor people.  This article by Ridgway explains the reasons for the most part poor people are invisible in media. Why might we ask?? “Because no one wants to see or hear about it”. Ridgway explains the idea of escapism, where we escape from what reality really is. Like my example earlier in the paragraph about rich people shows being of a higher importance, a fake reality that poor problems don’t exist making them invisible. This quote also comes from Ridgway’s article… “We need to see that there are people out there who struggle, and who deserve to have attention paid to their struggles”. That was another quote that touched me. We live in a world that no one seems to care too much about others and it is heartbreaking to know that.  The poor are just as important as the rich people we see flaunted all over TV and should be shown in the media light.

The next video part of this module about the Children’s defense fund to end poverty gave light to this sad situation we have been discussing. In the video the lady states that more 14.7 million children are poor and 6.8 million children are extremely poor. I am glad there are people that care about this situation and are willing to make a change to help end poverty. United States is one of the richest countries in the nation yet it fails to address the poor. Not making a change to end poverty will negatively affect our future, and is costly to our economic security. Approving this yearly fund of 7.2 billion dollars would improve the lives and futures of millions of children. The call to end poverty in this richest nation will drop poverty by more than 60% and improve the lives of 97% percent of poor children’s circumstances. As we can see this could be an awesome thing for our country. I hope this fund will be successful in improving our poverty rates. I am for helping the children who live in poverty. It seems silly if American turns down opportunity.

Prior to watching Bartholow’s video Effects of media violence and reading the chapter 5 in Sternheimer’s book From Screen to Crime Scene I had a very set opinion about media violence. I was very well convinced that violent video games did cause aggression in young children. I still believe that it does have an effect that might not be positive there are other factors that lead into child aggression. However I have learned from this section that factors that can indicate violent behaviors are poverty, unemployment, or family issues have an influence on crime” (Sternheimer pg. 133). These factors listed account for more childhood violence than video games both the video and Sternheimer present in a well proving matter. This chapter and the video both revealed to me that we need to look outside media for answers about aggression. Yes the media does have an influence on crime but then how it is that crime rates have drastically dropped over the recent years says Bartholow. Media likes to blow up crimes on TV and make them seem much worse than what they actually are. That causes media to pay extra attention to those crimes instead of identifying the problem. Since media ignores the poor and doesn’t help address issues the young adults and children are left to figure it out themselves. If the media gave attention to the low-income and poor and helped address issues in front of them society could stop blaming that video games for causing aggression. The base of the problem is media and the poor attention it gives to matters that are important and the extreme attention it gives to things that aren’t an issue but more of an interest. In concluding this blog I have ultimately learned that the attention we give to the media might not always be what is most important. So I challenge both you and myself to steer your attention to matters in the media that are actually important not what the media thinks is important.

Module 3 Readings

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I started with Lankshear and Knobel’s “Attention Economy” because it had really interested me as I viewed the Voice Thread that was created by our Professor. I had never thought about how valuable our attention is to media or as Goldhaber calls it, “The money industry economy”. I had never realized that since there is so much information that our society is drowning in, our attention is the extremely important to media. Throughout the article and the Voice Thread, I learned a lot more about attention and how necessary it is for media to gain it from its viewers.

Goldhaber writes, “The energies set free by the successes of … the money‐industrial economy go more and more in the direction of obtaining attention. And that leads to growing competition for what is increasingly scarce, which is of course attention. It sets up an unending scramble, a scramble that also increases the
demands on each of us to pay what scarce attention we can (Goldhaber 1997: n.p.)”. This quote is arguing that our attention is scarce and limited due to the amount of information that is out there. I completely agree with Goldhaber because I for one get my attention grabbed somewhat easily for things like fashion and makeup but someone else may not be interested in those topics at all. This means that media has to try and grab someone else’s attention that way it grabbed mine using different topics and targeting a different gender, age group, ethnicity or culture.

I also chose to discuss the quote from Adler that says,
“Advertising is a domain of human practice with a strong stake in the economics of attention: the ‘first challenge for every advertiser is to capture and hold the
attention of the intended audience’ (Adler 1997: 5). This quote really helped me understand this article as a whole because I feel as though this quote sums up a lot of what Lankshear and Knobel are arguing. If media does not gain our attention, then they will not succeed in their advertisement. In my opinion, this is why Ads may use Hausman’s techniques because a person who is not media literate would not know to look for small print leading them to get tricked. I also think having outrageous print like 50% off your entire purchase catches almost anyone’s eyes, because we would like to think that we could get half off our entire purchase off without any exclusions.

I then read Neil deMause and Steve Rendell’s “The Poor Will Always be With Us” and was shocked, yet not too surprised, The first line of the article states, “According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data, 37 million Americans—one in eight—lived below the federal poverty line in 2005, defined as an annual income of $19,971 for a family of four.” Between payments on houses, cars, supporting your family and simply trying to buy food with an annual income of $20,000 is practically impossible. They then mention that news channels do not cover these impoverished towns and people unless it is to share about a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina. DeMause and Rendell state that ABC, CBS and NBC mentioned them a very limited amount of times with the statistic that shares, “During the more than three years studied, there were just 58 stories about poverty on the three network newscasts, including just 191 quoted sources.” They share that there were more stories of Michael Jackson’s death than anywhere near the amount of stories about poor families and towns. The authors also share that the way impoverished people are portrayed on the news is through an expert, who is not close to being poor (such as George W. Bush). This actually really bothered me because Bush created a plan to help fight hunger and homelessness which sounds like a great idea. To me the issues is that he then gets praised for this and it then turns into Bush becoming a hero when the real heroes are these homeless and poor people who work as hard as they can everyday, to sometimes not even receive a meal for days.

After I watched the video “Child Poverty- In Their Own Words” where many young children share their experiences of being poor. One girl shared that her mother would only put $0.50 worth of gas into her car while she watched other people putting $20.00. She said she wondered why and when she asked her mother, her answer was “because I don’t have enough money to put more in.” Another girl shared that her family sometimes did not get to eat dinner at night. These videos are truly terrible to watch but I am glad that I know a few students a schools that I went to that got free breakfast and lunch at school. They were all very grateful for the meals that they were able to receive from their public schools. With more meal plans and programs like this, it will allow more children to be able to go to bed at night with food in their stomachs.

I then began to look through the “Global Food Disparity Photo Diary.” They had such a great line in the beginning that says, “If you look closely at the types of food being purchased you can see the difference between “eating to live” and “living to eat.” As some families of 4 have enough food to feed 20, some families have 5 mouths to feed that can hardly fill up one. I was saddened as I viewed this diary because you can truly see who is eating to live and living to eat. I think this line is truly powerful and impactful as I see some families eating nothing but endless supplies of junk food and thinking others that seem as though they will savor every last bite of their minimal meals. It makes me feel very grateful and lucky that I am able to eat meals when I feel hungry and it definitely will make me think twice at how fortunate I am to have the food and other necessities needed to live.

I then read Shannon Ridgeway’s “4 Problems with the Way the Media Depicts Poor People” which again was very impactful. I suspected number one would be “poor people are invisible” and the reasoning behind it is that people simply do not want to see or hear about them. She uses this term “escapism” which I found to be very true and I often use escapism when I am bored with my life. Her second problem is “the poor as statistics” which, again is true, and completely heartbreaking. She says they are facts and or rates, which doesn’t not show them human beings but merely as statistics. She says this makes people who live in poverty feel as though they do not matter which I completely agree with. They are not numbers; they are humans like everyone else. Money does not make someone anymore human than another. The third problem she discusses is “The Poor As Poor Due to Their Own Life Choices” which is obviously not true whatsoever. If we could all choose to be rich like the Kardashian’s, I am positive a lot more people would be. I really wanted to mention this quote because I think it was really well said. She states, “Being the third generation in a family trapped in the poverty cycle, having a history of mental illness, or reeling from a sick family member’s medical costs that put them over the edge financially are all very real, concrete issue that affect people and their lives.” When I took a course that focused on the Black Lives Matter Movement, we had talked about how many of them were stuck in a cycle of poverty because they needed to take care of family members, or get a job at a young age in order to feed their families. This takes away a child’s chance of being a kid and forces them into adulthood at a young age. I would say that is 100% out of their control. The last and fourth problem Ridgeway mentions is “The Poor As Temporarily “Down on Their Luck” meaning there are ways out of poverty like “clipping coupons” although the people who do this are middle-class citizens who have money but choose to use coupons and save a lot of their money. Being poor is not a choice, it’s not luck, it should not be another statistic we hear about and no impoverished town or family should be ignored. Ridgeway’s article truly opened my eyes to such ignorant ways of how people view poor people.

The next thing I read was Jiang’s “Basic Facts About Low-Income Children under 18 Years Old” which again, is heartbreaking. Although I read every statistic, I pulled out one specific graph that really touched me.

This graph made my shed a few tears because of the image of these children and how being impoverished affects their childhood. Like Ridgeway mentioned, poor people are not just another statistic, I feel as though graphs are just a helpful way to visualize truly how many children that are growing up poor. As a future teacher, I feel as though it really important to make sure every single student gets at least one nutritious meal so they can perform as best they can at school Education is near and dear to my heart and I feel if a child gets a fair shot at becoming educated, then the future can offer them a lot more. Screen Shot 2016-06-14 at 3.08.25 PM

I then read Simone Kuper’s article “Poverty’s Poor Show in Media” and it made me think of a couple shows where they try to show poverty as ‘cute’ or ‘sexy’. The show I immediately thought of is “Young and Hungry” which is about two young girls who live in San Francisco, both working. One girl if a chef, who eats all the time, and the other girl worked at a gym. They live in an apartment (in San Fran…the rent a month would be outrageously expensive). The girls constantly talk about how they have no money, yet they are both gorgeous, shop all day and buy food constantly. If I am catching Kuper’s main idea, the media makes “poverty” look cute like the girls in “Young and Hungry”. I also really like the lines he writes that says, “As the Tea Party likes to point out,
most journalists are liberals. However, most are also upper-middle-class folk who never visit the poor areas of their city” showing that once their jobs are over, they go home and nestle into their nice homes and eat their dinner. He mentions the interviewees of the interviews meet in a fancy hotel lobby as they speak about being “poor” rather than going out to the ‘ghetto’ where poverty actually exists.

I then watched “Poverty in America” which was lighter. I do not mind hearing about poverty struggles or things that are out of my control but I am always wondering if anyone will offer a solutions. Marian Edelman offers solutions to end poverty in children by saying it would cost 77.2 billion dollars a year but in the long run save tax payers billions of dollars and would help impoverished children. She makes several great points that I want to mention. One being that these children who are currently being neglected is our nation’s future. If something isn’t done now, imagine what the future will hold when half of our nation is poor. I also really liked that she said these children do not to choose their families, their race, their neighborhood or their economic statues. This is why hearing about children that will grow up poor is so heartbreaking because it is completely out of their control. She says, “These children did not choose to be born” which made me cry. Not one child deserves to grow up poor or grow up with an empty stomach, which is why the more people like Edelman that stand up and give solutions, the less children will be neglected and ignored by their own nation.

Lastly, for the poverty and media literacy topic, I read “Children’s Defense Fund” website and was able to find a few ways to help reduce poverty such as making sure parents and or caregivers have well paying jobs. I think this is really important because a child follows their parent’s work ethics so if they see their parents working hard, hopefully they will want to as well. The site stated, “Reducing child poverty 60 percent with these improvements was estimated to cost $77.2 billion in 2010, only 2 percent of U.S. government spending that year, 0.5 percent of the 2010 U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), and 15 percent of the estimated $500 billion the nation spends every year for the costs of children growing up poor. By reducing child poverty now the nation would reduce these children’s chances of becoming poor adults and reduce child poverty in the next generation” I pulled this quote from the overview because I think it was a perfect way to show that there are ways to help end poverty and to end the topic of poverty in my blog post. If people do not make the poor invisible and understand the struggles impoverished families and towns face, they will be more willing to be a part of the $77.2 billion needed to help change the lives of millions of children.

Then I watched Barthlow’s “Effects of media violence on mind, brain and behavior” which was fascinating. He shows a lot of what the “naysayers” feel about violent video games or in other words that media does not make children act violent. He then shows the “yea-sayers” which believe that media does make children act violent. The yea-sayers claim, “More than 5 meta-analysis examining links between media and aggression have been published. All show that greater media violence viewing statically predicts greater aggression by the viewer” (p. 336). Barthlow goes back and forth between the parties of naysayers and yea-sayers to prove that the yea-sayers have a lot more effective research than the naysayers. I too believe that violence can be caused from media because media is extremely powerful. If media can cause women to become anorexic or bulimic, it makes sense to me that media can cause people to become violent. I have seen my cousins play games where half naked women are being shot, or they shoot policemen and then rob stores. To me, a child who does not have as much life experience as my cousins, may think behavior like that is okay. This may make a child commit a violent act because of their naivety or lack of awareness that the video game has caused them.

I saved Karen Sternheimer’s chapter 5 “From Screen to Crime Scene” because I wanted to see how much it related to the other readings and videos. I read one of the headlines titled “Violence Has Declined as Media Culture Expanded”. This part of the text was really interesting because I think it related a lot to Goldhaber’s idea that we live in an attention economy so with all new gory video games, movies, books or comics, there is a wider variety of violence that can be chosen by adolescences. This to me seems as though crimes would go down with all the new ways in which children can be exposed to violence. I do believe though that something visual, like a movie or video game, would make a child a little more likely to commit a violent act over text in a book. She then goes on to argue that these crimes may be to blame for video games but she does not really seem to believe this is a valid excuse for these crimes. I too agree that video games may not be at blame because if a child sees a violent game, they should know better than to assume committing murder is acceptable, but I also agree that when they see these games, they can easily get ideas from them. For example, if a child pays a game where the commit a robbery, they may not necessarily go out and commit that crime but they may try to steal from a store. She also says a lot of killers are copycat killers which I completely agree with.

One of the most interesting parts of this chapter is when Sternheimer discusses the “many Meanings of Violence” because something that may seem violent to one viewer, may not seem violent to another. Montreal’s Gazette claims, “Kids may say they know the difference between real violence and the kind they see on television and video, but new research shows their brains don’t” (Sternheimer 123). I feel as though I am very back and forth on this topic but to me it seems it’s up to the child, where they grew up, whether they play video games, or other extremely relevant factors that may lead them to committing violence.

Sternheimer then talks about poverty, which can relate to a lot of the readings and videos we read and watched. She claims, “For most of those interviewed, poverty and neighborhood violence were overwhelming influences in their lives, shaping their interactions and their understanding of their futures” (Sternheimer 127). I think this is very true because I feel as thought where and whom you grow up around truly affects how you are as a person and your future of you will be as a person. I am the way I am because of the neighborhood I grew up in and my family who raised me. She gives statistics on how most children are asked or forced to be part of gangs and how many children have witnessed a shooting. She talks about how much these kids struggle because of where they live or because they have no money, which reminded me of the video “Child Poverty” because many of those children too suffered because their families were poor.

Overall, I had never realized how much media effects poverty and violence. Media does not represent poverty or violence as it truly is and I think this catches people’s attention so easily because people enjoy hearing about impoverished families or violent crime scenes because it scares them. Ridgeway says, “poor people are invisible” which sadly is true because as she later mentions, we don’t like to hear about poverty, which in my opinion means we are scared to hear about it. We couldn’t imagine a life without media while some can only think about going weeks without food.

Module 3 Reflection

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I have learned a lot through this week’s readings about attention and poverty. I found it to be very thought provoking. The idea of an attention economy is totally new to me. I think Lankshear and Knobel did a great job describing Michael Goldhaber’s idea of an attention economy. Our economy is based off of what is desired and what is scarce. Today, the amount of information available is overwhelming. In Lankshear and Knobel’s essay, they state that Goldhaber thought that attention is scarce because “each of us only have so much of it to give” (Lankshear & Noble, 2001, p.2). Attention can only come from humans, it can not come from media such as the internet like so much information comes from. I found the section on attention in schools to be particularly interesting since I want to be a teacher. According to the essay, children in schools who are seeking attention are often thought of as trouble makers while children who don’t pay attention are thought to have short attention spans (Lankshear & Noble, 2001, p.19). I can definitely see this in schools. So many children today are being diagnosed with ADD/ADHD because of attention difficulties. I would guess that many of these diagnoses are incorrect and that children are just not being engages in the information they are receiving.

Poverty is an issue that I hear about quite often these days. It is quite prevalent in our society. Out of 72 million children under age 18, 44% of them are low income (Jiang, Ekono, & Skinner, 2013, p.1). That is nearly half of all children under age 18. That really makes me sad to think about. Again, because I want to be a teacher, things about school stick out to me. It’s scary to think that nearly half of my future students will be part of low income families. According to the Children’s Defense Fund’s article , “Ending Childhood Poverty Now”, being hungry effects children’s ability to learn (2012). I want my students to be able to learn to the best of their ability and I hate to think that some children won’t be able to because they couldn’t afford to eat.  My question is what can we do about this? Well according to the same article, we can start to better childhood poverty by providing more assistance (Children’s Defense Fund, 2012). We need to make sure that children’s basic needs are met. According to this article, some ways we can achieve this are to increase earned income tax credits, increase minimum wage, create more subsidized jobs, provide more affordable childcare, and help with housing costs to name a few (Children’s Defense Fund, 2012). I hope to see these ideas implemented so that children’s needs can be met.

I have actually seen the Global Food Disparity images before. I can’t recall which class it was in, but I believe a teacher in high school showed it to us and I want to say it was either economics or health. I remember being shocked at these images when I saw them the first time and I was just as shocked looking at them again this time. It doesn’t make me feel good when I look at the United States. We spend so much money on junk food that doesn’t supply us any nutritional value. This could be a way to help us with solving the hunger and poverty issues. We should be teaching people to spend their money on fresh food. You can find fresh produce for cheap at places like the .99 Store.

As we have learned, media tends to showcase white, middle and upper class males with perfect lives. Why would they want to show people living in poverty? According to the article, “Poverty’s Poor Show in the Media”, most of the times, poor people are only featured on the news if they are causing some type of disorder (Kuper, 2013, p.2). The media doesn’t think people will be entertained by this. This reminds me of how people of other races are only seen on the news if they have committed a crime or something of the like. This article also mentions that it is easier for journalists to attend a PR event at a hotel than to go into the “ghetto” to interview people (Kuper, 2013, p.2). Poverty is hardly shown in the news. According to the article, “The Poor Will Always be with Us: Just Not on TV News”, major news stations such as NBC, CBS, and ABC featured about 1 news story regarding poverty every 15 weeks (DeMause, 2007, p.2). The article continues to state that these news stations had more stories relating to just Michael Jackson alone than poverty (DeMause, 2007, p.2). Typically in the media, the poor are not depicted well. Media makes the poor invisible, they are only looked at as statistics, they are blamed and told it is their own life choices that made them poor, and they are depicted as being “down on their luck” (Ridgeway, p.1-3). The one that makes me the angriest is that media makes it seem like people are poor because of their life choices. I am sure that this is true for some people, however; I do not agree with this. Often news stations report about things like poor people using food stamps, but they don’t report on what the real reason people are using them for. I hope this is something people keep an eye out for.

My final thoughts are on media and violence. I was never allowed to play violent games growing up because not only did my mom just not like seeing them, but she also was afraid it would lead my brother and I to become violent. I have to admit that before I started to become more media literate, I would have thought violent games also would lead to violent behavior in children and teens. I still personally don’t like violent games, but I know they won’t cause children and teens to be violent. According to Sternheimer, as media culture has expanded, violent crime rates have actually declined (104). The numbers do not support the idea that media culture is causing children and teens to act violently. I get why people would believe this though.

 

MODULE 3

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A lot of the reading that we focused on in this module was Poverty. Poverty is a huge issue that we face in America today, but I feel like we don’t pay much attention to it. We tend to pay attention to other things such as what the latest trend is, or what Kim Kardashian may be up to, instead of focusing on the bigger issues and doing something about it, in the Article Poverty’s Poor Show in the Media by Simon Kuper, he stated, “The media have probably always ignored the poor, but we continue to do so even as poverty becomes the most pressing problem in developed countries.” He also sated that, “we look away”, when we see the commercials of children asking for money, or to be sponsored we change it to look away from it so we don’t have to help. Often times when media, or we focus on people in poverty is when they commit crimes, Sternheimer stated that “Violence can be linked with a variety of issues, the most important one being poverty (Sternheimer, 108). Because people in poverty are unemployed, or can’t afford many things that they may want, they turn to violence or crimes, and when they do, that is what they are known for only in the media.

In the youtube video, The Child Poverty: In their own words was very touching to me, and grabbed my attention the most. A lot of the times I feel like when people are struggling they tend to try and hide it from their children, and try and protect them with it, but after watching this video it was children telling us their personal experiences and how they were living. How some people barely saw their moms because they were working too much, or how a mom only had fifty cents and her daughter noticed that other people were putting twenty dollars or more, as well as when Ayriq Sims said, “when your homeless, you don’t really have much to call your own,” and realizing that they had necessities and nota concern. This was very touching because like what we learned in the module about representation and attention and the way that media represents them, and we don’t pay attention to them in the media.

Another article that was very intriguing to me was the Basic Facts about Low-Income Children, Children under 18 Years, 2013, by Jiang, Ekono, and Skinner, I knew that we experience poverty dramatically, but I always thought that children would be taken care of by the government and taken into a home if they were seen out on the streets, this article stated that, “There are more than 72 million children under age 18 years in the United States.” A lot of the times people tend to judge other people for the amount of children they may have, and people say if you can’t afford to have children why are we bringing them into a world that is going to lead them to fall into poverty as well. People of color are often judged that they have more children so they can get more money from the government, but we still have millions of children are growing into poverty and many times it is hard for them to get out of poverty, Jiang, Ekono, and Skinner stated that, “Younger children are more likely to live in low-income and poor families than older children.”

Module 3 Reflective response

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Currently, societies communication within the medium of media has dictated individuals perception on issues, ideologies, and behavior through persuasive stimuli.  As a result, individuals no longer understand nor question consumed information. Yet, perceive said digested information as a norm that can not be changed. Thus, an illusion is created towards each individuals attention in the hope they are distracted from further intellectual growth. However, this distraction is not the fault of the eye of the beholder, but rather the lack of educational awareness of this structured power. I first want to discuss Lankshear and Knobel (2001) article titled, “Attention economy” to illustrate an understanding of the concepts and theories behind the relationship between both education and attention economy.

Although I found that this article to be a challenging read to dissect; it allowed a further understanding to each theory presented on an attention economy. Interestingly, there were two theorist who were of great interest to me because both shared similar points that made sense to me. These two men were Michael Golhaber and Richard Lanham. Golhaber hypothesized media as an abundance of information disallowing individuals the ability to fully understand intellectual property. Which I agree with completely. While, Lanham believed attention was losing its structure towards in-sighting wisdom and information sharing.  Lanham hypothesized this to be in short supply due to the lack of structure within the medium of media in regards to receiving information. While both theories made sense. I leaned more towards Goldhaber’s theory which further stemed towards the idea of human attention as an economy in regard to scarcity. Golhaber states, “when our material desires are more or less satisfied, such that we do not feel pressures of scarcity (such as being afraid of hunger or lack of shelter), we are driven increasingly by desires of a less strictly material kind” (1998a). Certainly this all made sense when comparing media and desensitization. The reason being is humans are statistically proven to spend more time on the cyber-web which Goldhaber stated would be the beginning of a new economy. Therefore, when one is subjugated to habituate into a behavior that simply consumes information, rather than question. That same individual is left to fall under the rule of power of misunderstanding how media facilitates its information or understand issues that are dire. A perfect example can be found within the coverage of poverty. This by far was the most disgusting information I was made aware of when I read the FAIR research. It was disgusting to see the lack of humanity behind the illusion of our news programs. This was a prime example of how behavior is changed only because information is not properly given or clarified. Thus, this is what I have learned thus far from our readings on attention economy, poverty, and behavioral change through media. It is disgusting to be aware of the true nature of how things are run through the means of media, but by knowing serves a greater purpose. By understanding the meta analysis behind this structure of power, one can determine where he/she attends their attention towards.

 

Module 3

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I’m not sure if it was just me, or maybe I was just too focused on the midterm, but this week’s Module was INCREDIBLY dense and, as a result, a bit difficult to follow!  Hoping I understood correctly, let’s start with of our readings about our society going from an information economy to an attention economy.  Goldhaber identified cyberspace as the being where the attention economy will come into its own.  “The idea of an attention economy is premised on the fact that the human capacity to produce material things outstrips the net capacity to consume the things that are produced” and in this context, “material needs at the level of creature comfort are fairly well satisfied for those in a position to demand them” (Goldhaber 1997).  Goldhaber continues to argue that when our material desires are more or less satisfied, we do not feel as many pressures of scarcity. (Lankshear and Knobel 2001).   As I look around our society today, I can agree with Goldhaber that, unfortunately, we feel less pressures from our surrounding society when our material desires are satisfied.  Once upon a time, people only cared about the food on their table, the roof over their head and the clothing to keep them protected and warm.  Fast forward to today, and although we still need a roof over our head and clothes on our bodies, our perceptions about how these necessities need to be is what makes us such a materialistic and attention economy.  I remember as I was taking my in-class courses that required many assignments to be printed how embarrassed I constantly felt because I did not, and still do not, have a printer.  While most students loved when our homework was to simply print out a couple pages for a following class, I had to request work to let me leave early in order to make it to the copy center before class.  If the copy center was closed, I’d have to find a student who seemed nice in the library that could possibly let me borrow their printing card for a moment.  In summary, if my materialist need for a printer was met, I would have felt a lot less pressure from the society of school that required everything to be printed.  Now, even though my example was small and a printer seems like such an easy fix, I cannot help but think about all the children in our society with all of their iPhones and tablets.  I can only imagine the pressure children of poorer families feel when their teachers require them to go home and look something up on the computer… a computer they might not have.  Even when you take away the material necessities for work or school, I hear children all the time mocking those who could afford an Android phone rather than spend more on an iPhone.  To connect this back to the article we read by Lankshear and Knobel, our attention economy will always reside to going online and using our materialistic tools because, well, it’s the only options our attention spans can handle these days!

This lead me to think about another one of our readings by Neil DeMause and Steve Rendall about how “The Poor Will Always Be With Us: Just not on the TV news”.  As a child development major, it breaks my heart to hear how the poorest age group in our country is the children, with more than one in six living in official poverty at any given time (DeMause and Rendall).  I feel that our attention economy has a dire need to have the latest, greatest, newest and biggest everything in our lives which kind of goes hand-in-hand with our American dream of climbing the ladder and creating successful lives for  ourselves.  But as DeMause and Rendall pointed out, the poverty line has not changed in almost four decades and studies of a minimal decent standard of living routinely find that the typical cost is twice as high as the poverty line, or higher!  Mark Greenberg, director of the Task Force on Poverty at the Center for American Progress was referenced in their article saying that ninety million Americans (nearly one-third of the nation) have household incomes below twice the poverty line.  These statistics were shocking to me, but the fact that our news and media chooses not to discuss these important topics just puts another crack in my heart!  DeMause and Rendall pointed out how unlike the powerful sources who are overrepresented throughout our media, the poor don’t have public relations staffs or corporate communications offices to speak up on their behalf.  People from poor communities are left to depend on the journalists who once spoke up for society’s underdogs, but the news companies these journalists work for seem to prefer more happy or shocking news that Americans actually “want” to see.  As stated in Shannon  Ridgway’s article 4 Problems with the Way the Media Depicts Poor People, “America’s poor is invisible because no one wants to see or hear about it” (2013).  Because of this, we reinforce the idea that to be a “true” American, we need to be as rich and as successful as possible.  We also read in the article Poverty’s Poor Show in the Media how sometimes it is not that journalists do not want to cover these stories, but that they are just not around these people and situations enough to see the problem and make a story of it (Kuper).  But all that says to me, is that journalists simply have “better” stories to cover elsewhere in the world.  This reminded me of the importance of advocacy in our own lives.  Even though we feel like college students without a voice, we actually can have a lot of power if we get ourselves out there and into the communities that need our help rather than pretend they don’t exist.  I feel that this is a main source of many problems in our society: rather than address something, we want to sweep it under the rug, or so to speak, in an effort to pretend that there is no problem at all; and I feel that our media does this constantly because, deep down, we all prefer to watch or hear something happy and fake rather than something sad and true.

The next topic that was addressed was the impact that violence in the media has on our society.  This topic has been widely argued over the years, especially with the popularity in video games.  I have always told myself that violent video games result in violent children, but several authors in our readings showed me else wise.  Sternheimer studied the rate of juvenile crime since the ’80s and, to my surprise, there have been no new waves of crime since… not even since Grand Theft Auto filled video game stores!  Bruce Bartholow explained in his lecture about the Effects of Media Violence on Mind, Brain and Behavior that violence in entertainment has existed well before television and media.  As Bartholow points out, violence in entertainment goes back to the Roman days when they would hold competitions in the Roman Colosseum that literally involved killing each other.  Even Shakespeare’s plays like Hamlet and Julius Caesar involved acts of violence, and we insist that our children read these plays in high school!  However Bartholow does agree that the violence we allow in our media is on another level of what we once considered “inappropriate”.   But after hearing Bartholow’s lecture and reading Sternheimer’s research, I will admit that maybe my thoughts were wrong about the impact violent entertainment has on our society.  I will still suggest that parents don’t allow their children to play games that involve killing innocent people, but according to the statistics, apparently there is no correlation… so I guess for this topic, I will just sit back and be quiet rather than worry about our youth’s video games!