I found this weeks readings to be quite interesting. As a younger person I never really think about my consequences for what I post online whether it be a picture, a status or a shared news article. When reading chapter 3 of Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture, Sternheimer says that we should be more aware of what is happening online and to be cautious of what we are posting because you never know who it may offend. Things such as cyberbullying  happen every day and I believe not everyone really realizes that everyone on the internet are actual people too. The problem with cyberbullying is that one person can think that it is all a joke and they do not really mean the things that they are saying while the other person may find it extremely hurtful and take it very seriously. Sternheimer goes into talking about how these things may lead to a person committing suicide such as the cases we have seen with Tyler, Megan, Amanda, Phoebe, and Jamey all who committed suicide because of being bullied online. I remember very specifically the Jamey case and when it was all happening I felt hurt because I knew what mean things could be said through the internet. He was a kid that was trying to stand up to the people who were bullying him and not let it bother him but the pain became too much as kids still bullied him even when he made videos of how he would not stand being bullied any longer. To think that these poor kids felt as though there was no other way out is so tragic because we as a society could have prevented it with being more aware of what is going on through the internet. Many times it is not even children that are the ones being harassed as it happens with adults as well which is even more reason to try and fix the situation.

In chapter four of Sternheimer’s text book she also looks into how or even if the media is “dumbing down Americans.” I think there are many different ways to looks at this as true but not always at the same time. It is all about looking at the different ways that people are actually using popular culture to figure out if it really is helping or hurting this society. When thinking about television we see that there are plenty of news channels telling us things about what is happening all around the world which I think we could all agree is a good use of television. Although, many of the news programs only show what they want you to see and what they think is going to be good television to get as many viewers as possible. When reading Out of the mainstream: Sexual minorities and the mass media, Gross says, “Decisions about which events are newsworthy and about how to present them are heavily influenced by considerations of dramatic form and content (e.g. conflict and resolution) that are drawn from fictional archetypes.” This quote could not be any more realistic. These news programs are still all about the money and they do not get as much money with non-interesting stories.

Something else that we must worry about with any form of media that may be hurting children’s learning outcomes. With television, the internet and their smartphones it is almost impossible to have a child sit down and do their homework without any distractions. The new smartphone era is truly hurting the learning outcome for children today because they now have a new way of communication. They have texting language which is much different than our normal language, they use abbreviations for everything and when they do try to spell something the right way and get it wrong they do not even notice because they have spell check there to save the day.

So when we ask the question of, is media really dumbing down America? I think it is safe to say that it most certainly is. The children today are so distracted by social media or television that they do not find it important to learn things. They have the mindset of if they do not know the answer to something, google does. It is truly sad to think that most of the things that children learn today are from reality television and fake news articles that they read on Facebook.

As a society we have a hard time envisioning the endless possibilities and believing change is possible. Especially when it comes to our school system. People have to work together in order for change to occur. Parents can have a voice when it comes to their children’s education. In the book Volatile Knowing there is an example of parents and school faculty members holding meetings together. They talk about issues that need to be addressed rather than “little backstage room” addressing it. This gives me hope for the future since I do not have children yet. I think we are on the right path for tomorrow. It is obvious that there is a “pyramid that is divided into a series of hierarchical rows” when it comes to the pecking order of social classes and how they relate to the school system.

I believe that children need to be protected from media. All adults have a lifetime of constructing media messages and therefore should be able to deconstruct them at the simplest level. We all have an obligation to protect our children’s trusting disposition. The ideology behind the Barnyard is male dominance. I’m surprised that no one caught on to the main character Otis having a female body with a male voice. Not one of us saw this! This shows how blinded we are to the smurf theory and how predominant it is in the World. Is this how we want to raise our children? I also wonder if we were all blinded to the Barnyard because we all grew up with too much media? With “Product placement and embedded advertising”, (Common Sense Media, 2014) we think we wanted a product because of a craving sensation but it was because we saw it in a TV show, ad, etc. There are too many harmful statistics about how many hours of media children of all ages watch every day. Should we start actively doing something about it? On this same topic there is more than enough information to understand that too much media in unhealthy for children. Sternheimer says that there is no link between TV watching and ADHD. Am I the only one that had a hard time reading chapter four because of a difference of opinion? I am not saying that 100% of children will get ADHD from watching TV but it is unmistakable that children’s creativity is stunted as a result.

Sometimes you have to find humor in order to get through life. This is the stance I take when it comes to women’s age and their not being as wanted anymore. Maybe I am turning a blind eye or being too optimistic. Obviously the “smurf theory” is real, there is no denying this. I choose to power through life, work as hard as needed, and ignore the negative things that could hold me back. There is always a line when enough is enough. I am also extremely thankful to our grandmothers who fought for equality in women’s rights. Without them we would not be where we are today making 40 cents on every dollar that a white man makes. (there was a little sarcasm behind that last sentence)

Stereotyping in films is still a problem. Maids are hispanic women, criminals are African American, women are always in the kitchen, etc. Cortés says labels are inevitable but they can have their downsides. They can be used as a slur or in an offensive manner. This thought goes beyond Hollywood and into people’s homes. The people who watch the movies and TV are brainwashed into having almost all these expectations from races. On the other side after reading Gross’s ideological writing it was clear to me that he had an over the top liberal and pessimistic view of the World. It is my opinion that we as a society have come farther than white or black, male or female. Everyone in their journey through life has a hard time for one reason or another. Saying that life is hardest on gay people is a stretch. I personally know people from high school that are heroin addicts, none of them are gay. Their lives are horribly hard and I am sad to say will be short lived. Most of these people were born into privileged families, and they are straight and white. You never know what life is going to hand you. Aren’t we all doing the best we can?

Media and bullying hit a nerve in me. I have a zero tolerance outlook on bullying. There are two ways of looking at this topic. One: facebook, twitter, snapchat, instagram, all news channels, TV programs are all avenues that bullies can use to hurt people. Two: these mediums can promote no bullying beliefs and highlight people like Ellen Degeneres, as role models. Since media is not going anywhere I believe we have to go with number two and fly high with it!

Cyber bullying is a new version of old fashion teasing. Crime rates and violence, especially in schools are increasing more in these past couple years then they have in the past ten years. What’s causing this? Are parents allowing their kids too much freedom and not monitoring their behaviors, friends, and whereabouts? Could this be a leading factor to the issue? It is more common in today’s society that both parents are working employees. I personally have noticed that kids are given house keys, meanwhile their parents are at work and children have a house to themselves after school. Teens and children have access to social media and with new technology it is harder to monitor these smart phones and the Internet. Kids in today’s generation are not like the kids when I was growing up. One great example I mean by this, is clothing and fashion trends. They way young girls dress today is sometimes very provocative and revealing. Tying into that, chapter three states that the fear of kids communicating inappropriately with one another makes it easier on the Internet to interact with strangers, creating new concerns about cyber predators. (Sternheimer, 2013) The extremely sad and disgusting truth is that predators exist and they are everywhere. Many articles and stories shared in this chapter and on the news have focused on young girls flirting and revealing personal information to the person they are chatting with. They believe it is a cute boy their age and because one cannot see who is on the other side it is possible that it can be a predator. This issue raises potential dangers adults could pose to young people on-line and kidnappings. Media and the Internet at times can be helpful, informative and even educational. However, it can also be very dangerous, life threatening and harmful. Chapter 3 discuses the harmful affects in media that have ruined relationships in adults and have harmed the life of children. It’s extremely sad and heartbreaking to know that cyber bullying and other on-line issues have gotten worse and that kids can be so mean to bully others via on-line.

As chapter three discusses the harmful and saddening affects of on-line bullying, chapter four takes a turn and discusses the social problems in terms of the Internet “dumbing down” Americans. One thing that I wanted to touch on from this chapter that I found the most interesting is the issue of the Internet. Google and other Internet sources allow for the easy access to any information and answers. Is whats being posted on-line nonsense or is it more informative? Does being able to research on your smart phone cause us to be more uneducated then having to go out and find the information through physical or environmental research. In this chapter the author suggest that the Internet is a lazy and easy way for us to find information and because of that being an issue, it is destroying us more than it benefiting to us. Sternheimer also brings up the issue with television and how the informative programs don’t exist much anymore. Television is viewed in today’s society more for entertainment rather than education. If I were to do a survey right now, I bet the majority of people would view TV for entertainment than education. For example, it’s Sunday night, you just got home changed into a comfy outfit and plopped on the couch. If you turn on the TV and there’s only three programs on, 60 Minutes, Game of Thrones, or Walking Dead, which are you going to watch?

      In the article, Struggling with Stereotypes,  Cortes states that the words that we use to stereotype people are being used so frequently that they are loosing their power. This statement made me reflect on the assignment we completed in Module 1 about the Barnyard lies. For example, one that stood out to me the most was how media portrayed men and their hierarchy roles. Such as, it being more common to say “hey guys” to a group of people versus saying “hey ladies” without offending anyone or someone finding it disrespectfully wrong. That activity opened my eyes to how Media has affected us in that, commonly used phrases or the way society displays certain topics are becoming so routine that we don’t even realize it when we see it. This raises the question for me, is media the main culprit as to why society has become more desensitized to the world and the trauma? If this affects us as adults and yet we know and can understand right from wrong, what about our developing youth?

        We hear that generalizations and stereotypes exist everywhere, schools, restaurants, and of course the media. Cortes really puts this topic into perspective and I was quite shocked that a lot of this information I had already known but never really critically thought about. Such as, restaurants, when you dine at a restaurant their categorizing their entrees to meet that of the culture. For example, you wouldn’t find Mexican food at a Middle Eastern restaurant. It’s as simple as that but because labeling, categorizing, and stereotyping exist more than we see or acknowledge we become immune to the issue. He also talked about how shows depict characters and how each individual has their own social category. A great example I thought of is the show, American Crime. You have the rich white junkie, the African American male drug dealer, and the families who come from money and their kids are in expensive schools and they outcast the poor society. These shows a labeling and stereotyping racial identity and it’s impacting our youth and the audience.

        The article, Out of the Main Stream, focuses on sexual minorities and the mass media. The sexual minorities Gross is referring to is, lesbian women and gay men. Gross states that “These two groups also constitute by their very existence a presumed threat to the “natural” (sexual and/or political) order of things.” (Gross, 2001) The fact that the media can view someone’s sexuality identity out of the norm and problematic to viewers, yet the movie Fifty Shades of Grey can expose sexual violence and deem it as sexy and erotic is so upsetting to me. Our media believes that they are helping us by exposing us to reality, when in fact they are potentially corrupting viewers. Media does not display a fair representation of the LGBTQ community, rather they have a character and instantly within the first few episodes are typically killed off. Gross states that the majority of these characters are those who represent the elites who define their public agenda. After completing activity 12, making representations of identities visible, I could not agree more. In my experience with this assignment, I found that a huge majority of the people who were representing the norm were, middle aged, middle to upper class, Caucasian males viewed as heterosexuals.

      The issue with this public agenda is that the media is not telling us what to think but what to think about. Their message to the public is that this representation of people is what is considered the average American family. In my opinion, the majority of society doesn’t want to watch shows based on gay men raising a family and their reality. They want to watch the show where the American dad drives an SUV and goes to work while his wife performs her female gender roles, like cleaning cooking, and taking care of the kids. I blame that on the media. For so long they have instilled into viewers that anything outside their so called considered norm, is unacceptable and because of that we have expectations of what we want to see on TV. One of my favorite shows is Modern Family. Its a glimpse of reality because you have the modern American family, then the older Caucasian man who divorced and remarried a Latina 25 years younger than him. Then you have the Gay couple who adopted a daughter from an orphanage in Vietnam. In summary, lesbian women and gay men do not constitute the ideological minority the same way that the typical American modern family does. More common that not when they are given a scene they are killed off easily or are not treated properly and fairly. The message being sent to the audience, that only the American modern family is socially acceptable is affecting viewers. This shows the viewers that society is not accepting of gay men and lesbian women as much as they accept the modern family.

           A huge problem we are facing in our society today is that “we have a hard time believing in possibility and imagining that things could be otherwise.” (Tollefson, 2016) An issue leading to this problematic mindset is that teaches are not doing much to enforce the positive possibilities and outcomes in their classrooms. This reading reminds me of a blog written by Nicolas Ferguson, he states that “your success depends on your ability to believe in the possibilities.” (2008) Audrey Hepburn once pointed out that the word “impossible” actually says, “I’m possible.” I love that and I agree because I feel as humans we tend to doubt ourselves before believing in achievement. I’m guilty of this myself. In most situations I’d like to think the worst possible to prevent myself from getting hurt or let down. In reality, I am setting myself up for failure and if the mentality from the get go is to fail, than chances are, most likely I wont succeed. The fear of failing overcomes the wondrous outcomes that could exist if you believe and imagine.

        Teachers have a huge influence on their students, they are their role models. If a teacher has a hard time believing in a student and encouraging them to succeed how can we expect the majority of students to believe in themselves. In this article Dr. Tollefson also discuses the importance and issues of lack of power in schools. In a study conducted by Dr. Kaia Tollefson, it was found that one of the biggest violations, which is disclosing issues in education to others, were discussed by groups in the study. This raises the question, is the power among teachers lacking because there is more negative comments and less support in school systems? Essentially, have teachers given up and become more lenient with their students resulting in inadequacy? Once authority can actually be defined, understood, then acted upon can schools gain power and educate their students in believe and imagining certainty.

        I chose the article, Advertising to Children and Teens; Current Practices, because we have focused greatly on the influence media has on our youth. One of the biggest questions that society raises is, should we be protectionist or constructivist? What do you believe? Should we protect our youth from the power of media or should we allow them the experience of enjoying media yet advocate analytical skills? One thing I found interesting and translated into my own words, is that the author of this article acknowledges that media and advertisements primary target is children and teens. An important factor of this research is to provide a list of the persuasive techniques and methods being used to market children and teens. However, the issue is that kids are not being provided the full truth. Highlights in this article mention that the research being done is scarce, incomplete, or outdated. (Rideout, 2014) The writer of this article, Victoria Rideout, touches on a few lies that on-line advertising uses to market children and teens. In module one we learned that Huasman described several ways that media lies to us. One strategy used in the article is the logical leapfrog, especially in on-line gaming. Advertisers try to sell to the parents and youth that if a child is an on-line gamer then it can actually stimulate their brain. Or it could potentially assist with teens and socialization because they have something in common they can talk to their friends about. We all know this is a phony selling technique, in reality those so called proofs are not logical of on-line gaming. This article also mentions that the Coca-Cola ad used celebrities to make their campaign and engage in the children which is also a persuasive techniques. Teens are our trend setters, their a huge culture that marketers want to target. They don’t have jobs or financial responsibilities and they receive an allowance, therefore they have money to throw around. If teens see that celebrities are doing it, then there going to want the same things. In conclusion, there are many areas of improvement media campaigns and advertisements need to focus on when marketing teens and children. I would agree with this article in that we can’t control the exposure children have to the media. It is everywhere whether we like it or not, so it is our job to educate them. As Hausman would agree, educate them so they are able to make judgments based on their own opinions and knowledge not based on the lie of the advertisers.

As others had mentioned previously, I too had never known very much about media literacy before this class. I had somewhat underestimated it in the beginning. I had no idea just how many complexities and aspects there are to media literacy and just how important and necessary of a skill it is to learn. These readings really opened my eyes and taught me so much more. They were very enlightening and made me think about things in ways that I perhaps had not truly thought before.

Beginning with the piece, “What is Media Literacy?” was definitely good as the initial building block. It provided well done definitions and explanations from experts who definitely helped to clarify the topic as well as the differences between media literacy and media education. The exert that actually really stood out to me was the one from Neil Andersen in which he distinguished media literacy and media education from one another. He did it in such a simple, straightforward, and informal manner in which even children would be able to understand. Using basic comparisons and somewhat silly sentences made the topic much friendlier to people who had never had experience with it before.

The next article, “The Core Concepts: Fundamental to Media Literacy Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” pointed out some very important ideas and I was particularly interested in a lot of the information that came from Len Masterman, who was the primary developer for the discipline. The first point that I thought was particularly good was the notion that “media education is nothing if it is not an education for life” (Jolls and Wilson 70). Having media literacy is of such great importance in life and is a necessity in order to think and question critically. It is not something to be learned and then immediately forgotten once the class is over. It is something that you should always keep with you. My other point of interest had to do with “Masterman’s 18 Basic Principles for media awareness education”. They were all certainly very knowledgeable and important points but one that really stuck out to me when first reading them was the principle: “Media Education involves collaborative learning. It is group focused. It assumes that individual learning is enhanced not through competition but through access to the insights and resources of the whole group” (Jolls and Wilson 70). The reason was because it had a big connection to important ideals that I have learned in previous classes, especially my Computer Literacy for Educators class. It had focused a great deal on collaboration and why it was important and beneficial for students to do so. We live in a society; we are always surrounded by other people. When we get a job, you are supposed to be able collaborate with coworkers. So why is education different? Why had it been so self-focused and isolated rather than being able to work together and share knowledge? This principle definitely reinforced this important ideal.

The three models of media literacy were very interesting, especially when comparing them to one another. While the article, “That It Was Made by People Our Age Is Better” talked largely about a study with teenagers and youth culture with media, it also did well going further into depth about the three models. From the readings thus far, I feel that the Protectionist view is the least practical and beneficial, while the Constructivist is the most. The protectionist model claims that young people need to be “protected” and that “students are considered ‘cultural dupes’ who cannot resist powerful media and who must be taught correct discriminatory practices” (Zaslow and Butler 33). This is completely underestimating the students. Students have their own experiences and views which they can contribute to further discussion. It is extremely important to engage students in the process. Doing so will help students to learn more, be able to view things with a greater range of perspective, and greater cement the skills that they achieve. This is why the constructivist approach seems to be more beneficial. This view rightfully “advocate[s] the development of students’ analytical skills while also allowing for the experiences of pleasure that young people take from media” (Zaslow and Butler 33). It encourages students to explore rather than trying to hide them from “bad media”. Students become active learners in their education.

Finally, the topic about television and its effects on children contained a deal of information to debate. The article from the University of Michigan Health System, “Television and Children” and some of the ideas from Chris Worsnop’s “Orthodoxy is the Enemy: Four Ways NOT to Teach Media Literacy” contrasted each other well. I was somewhat surprised by the first article and how negative it was. When viewing statistics, it is always startling but as a whole, the article felt overly critical and too presumptuous. It did not take into account many other factors that could be affecting children. It is not the mere act of watching television that will be the whole cause for why a child may be violent or for their academics dropping. Such events cannot be pinned on this single factor of watching television. Worsnop’s article views television and other media in a more realistic fashion. He brings to attention that fighting against children watching television or other popular culture activities will only alienate them. Worsnip prudently claims that “the minute we criticize the stuff kids like to read, watch or listen to as being in some way inferior, we have lost their attention, pushed them into an attitude of rejecting our values as strongly as we reject theirs” (Worsnop 3). In order to help guide and educate children, teachers need to accept their students and the culture that defines them.

As can be seen from even just the readings there is an infinite source of information that can be discussed and debated upon about media literacy. In such a small amount of time, I feel that I already have and will learn a great deal which I aim to retain and make use of in both everyday life and hopefully as a teacher in the future.