RSS Image Feed Test 2
This is a test.
Posts
RSS Feed Test 1
This is from AARR Blog.
Welcome Fall 2016 Students!
Hello! Information for each of my English 105 and English 102 courses is available via the menu on this site. Just select the link for the course in which you are enrolled to access the syllabus, course calendar, assignments, and so forth.
Feel free to take a look around to see what we will be up to this semester and feel free to email me with any questions. Thanks and I look forward to meeting you!
Professor Jordan
Congratulations to our CS students on being named 2016 GHC Scholars and receiving GHC 2016 Scholarship Grant
Congratulations to our Computer Science students Daniela Miles and Maria Contreras on being named 2016 GHC Scholars and receiving a GHC Scholarship Grant to attend 2016 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference.
Very proud of you!
Freedom & Violence
The realization of an epidemic of police violence, racial/economic inequality, and deep-seated divisiveness across our country that has been growing for the past year and half exploded last night in Dallas. The soul searching and groping for ways to move forward has been helped along thanks in no small part of technology.
Access to Data
Given the lack of good, nation-wide data on police shootings, we have been forced to turn to media outlets and advocacy groups who have recently begun to establish their own datasets to explore this phenomenon objectively. Arguably the best of these is the Washington Post’s database (their 2015 data is freely accessible on GitHub if you’d like to explore it yourself) which suggests that police officers kill an average of three Americans of all stripes per day and disproportionately kill unarmed black folks. This Washington Post’s tracking of such violence only began in 2014 and as of today only extends back to 2011. And while it covers all police shootings (suspects who pulls out a gun and shoots at officers, bystanders accidentally hit by stray gunfire, etc.), the rate appears to be going up.
We know that this phenomenon didn’t begin in 2011. The drivers of this violence are legion and rooted in systemic racism and inequality across our country’s historical arc. But the real reason this dialog has come to widespread attention in the past year and half (and especially this past week) is the ubiquity of cheap but powerful technology in the form of cell phones and their associated ability to record events as they unfold.
Democratization of Tech
Access to technology (especially high technology) is increasingly being viewed as a civil right and fundamental to our first amendment rights as Americans. Both individual technologies (e.g. RFID, Bluetooth, 4G cell phone networks, satellite data transmission, fantastically high resolution cameras) and ways of sharing ideas and information (e.g. social media and novel streaming platforms) are common and increasingly user friendly. Our friends in places like Russia and El Salvador harassed by their local law enforcement forces rarely use such tech to hold security forces accountable given the blowback that routinely ensues. But those of us in western democracies do indeed have access to this tech and have increasingly grown comfortable with generating and consuming tech’s media products over the past two decades.
I think most of us see technology as a ratchet. A one-way street that will only tend to get better. This is at best a pipe dream. Indeed, tech companies are busy right now experimenting with ways in which to limit the utility of their creations in certain settings. For example, Apple has recently filed a patent for infrared signal-based disabling of your iPhone’s camera. The idea here is to help stop the dozens of folks surrounding you at that concert from recording that oh-so moving ballad or kickin’ jam. But in the hands of your local law enforcement (like this guy) or phone company (like mine), we can easily see how this or similar such anti-recording tech can be used to block citizens from freely exercising their ability to document events happening to them or their community. Such developments are things we all need to pay attention to.
Killer Robots Are Here
But the real technological leap “forward” last night wasn’t the ability to record an event or spark interest in it. It was the ominous use of new tech to end it.
While information is still pouring in about the particulars of last nights’ insanity of a sniper attacking police and protestors at a non-violent march (12 people were shot, five officers were killed) in Dallas, it has now become clear how the threat of additional violence ended. After the initial shooting spree, the sniper apparently holed up in a parking garage and threatened to detonate bombs. He stated “the end was coming” and he was hoping “to kill white people, especially white officers” according to Dallas Police Chief David Brown. Understandably feeling they needed to end the standoff quickly, Dallas Police strapped their own explosive onto an articulated arm of one of their robots typically used to detect and dispose of bombs. They then drove it up to the hiding sniper and killed him with a controlled detonation of that explosive.
As far as I can tell, this appears to be the first use of a robot to intentionally kill someone in the U.S., certainly by a police force. Peter Singer told Gizmodo the only thing that could vaguely be considered in the same category was an “accidental case in [Tennessee], where [a] tear gas canister shot during a standoff accidentally started a fire that burned down a mobile home.” The consequence of this use is clear: remotely piloted systems are now part of the mix when in comes to the array of deadly force options considered by law enforcement.
To be sure, police forces will not go out and start blowing up suspects tomorrow. Indeed during last summer’s Robotics Challenge Workshop we attended after the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals in Pasadena, former fire chief and current Deputy Under Secretary for Science and Technology at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Robert Griffin pleaded with our audience of roboticists to please focus on reliability of the platforms we were creating. He noted that “you need to keep it real simple for us…that fireman or that officer doesn’t have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering” and that the biggest hurdle we need to solve before robots play a larger role in first responder settings is simple reliability. “Until a fireman can grab one of these suckers, drive it up to the house is question, and have it work almost 100% of the time, we can’t really use it” he added. Indeed, our Ventura County Sheriffs Department has an array of ground-based and aerial robotic technology, but rarely brings those technologies to bare on day-to-day problems both for reliability and for public perception concerns. This is the case even though our County Board of Supervisors approved the use of such technologies prior to the department ever seeking to acquire them AND the fact that more than 94% of Ventura County residents and people across the U.S. strongly support the use of robotic technology by such first responders (see our soon-to-be-released national polling results next week). But apparently we don’t need a sophisticated unit to kill folks. An RC car and a roll of duct tape is essentially all you need if you have access to a explosive.
And as I have seen for the past 20 years with mountain lion management here in California, when confronted with a stressful, novel crisis situation, law enforcement officers often rely on Googling news reports for how the last law enforcement agency responded to such a crisis and often simply emulate that previous approach. Hence, I think it is likely that robots will increasingly be seen as a means to project lethal force in crisis situations across our country (and I’m not the only one to think so). Add to this mix our breaking wave of increasingly powerful and available small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) and we have likely crossed the Rubicon last night in Dallas.
Perspective
Ultimately the technologies to document events and usher in their conclusion are in our hands. Rarely do things go well when we let the purveyors of these technologies do whatever they want unscrutinized or unmoderated. Now is the time for not just a wider discussion of police practices and social justice. It is also the time for continuing the discussion of the importance of technology and what we as a society consider the appropriate or acceptable uses of various technologies. These discussions are no longer (if they ever were) separable.
Carl Sagan said it so well in 1997’s Demon-Haunted World:
We have arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements…profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a recipe for disaster…human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance…
Confronting and growing beyond violence need not be tied to technology, but in the world we have grown for ourselves, it is hard to see how to separate the two.
Here is to all those who feel the boot heel of injustice and those who try to do the right thing day by day.
Everyone can build these days
The array of robotic platforms and control systems is truly staggering these days. No more so than at the potential entry points for those of us who are “non-experts” but who can see the value in such technologies.
While not all of us got to park next to the first iteration of the Google Car every day (although truth be told that was at my previous university and back before it was DARPA-winning project of the Stanford Computer Science Department, pre-Google X ownership) or stumble upon old deep sea probes lying around in need of repair (like our Phantom 500), most of us can afford any of the toy-esque technologies out there at increasingly cheaper price points.
One of our honorary AARR lab members from our distant San Francisco subdivision, Pax (the son of our great lab member emeritus who did all the heavy lifting for me in the era when we SCUBA dove* for a living and ran our Creek Monkey Crew’s across the hot Palo Alto hillsides…but I digress), has shown that even a youngster who can’t reach the kitchen sink can create and control his own robot. If you can click together Legos and move a cursor on a screen (or tap the screen of your iPad if you tastes run to that flavor of interface), you can use Makeblock‘s symbolic/GUI-based programming interface to program a small robot to do just about anything. Pax just built and programmed his $75 mBot-Blue to pick-up his extra legos, drive them over to his Lego box (where Dad can help them out of the payload bay), and then return. m-Bot uses the Scratch 2.0 architecture to program its Arduino brain. Next task: build a robot to drive us all the next Star Wars Premier (the Pax and the Dax crowds are big Star Wars fans). No pressure, but we are counting on you Pax!
For those who might be a bit taller, there are many more options to enter into the world of robotics. From the ground up approaches of open source programming built around Arduinos and Raspberry Pis architecture to the more dedicated robot forms from manufacturers such as Parallax and Aerial Sports League, there is something for everyone out there.
Our most recent trial with entry level robots arrived a few weeks ago. Robolink’s Kickstarter-funded Co-Drone (note: no link here as their site apparently has malware running on it as of this writing) promises to be a micro quadcopter easily programmable to do whatever you want. I backed this first model to experiment with and see if it might serve as a “first drone” for my undergraduate ESRM 370: Introduction to Remotely Piloted Systems class. If it ultimately turns out to be as user friendly as advertised, it might make a great replacement for our existing step of “first flight” that currently uses Hubsan micro quads. Our “first flight” follows on the heels of student mastery of computer-based flight simulators, but doesn’t feature any introduction to control system/programming (as of now).
In short there are no shortages of entry points for those who might want to dip their toe into the robot pool. I’d love to hear about your first dalliance into robotics. What year was it and what platform did you use?
Note: * For all you grammaristas out there “dove” is what we all say these days. Not “dived.” Just ask Google’s ngram.
MODULE 5!!!!!!! We’re DONE!
Group #3! We did it! We’ve reached the homestretch, and I can happily say that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It was so awesome to read your posts each week, and hear your insight on what you took from the module. At the beginning of this class, I had no idea what to expect as this was my very first online class, and my first summer semester at CI. I didn’t know what media literacy meant, let alone how it would benefit me as a future educator. I didn’t see how the two topics would overlap. However, now that I have completed (almost) this course, I can easily see the importance of media education, and why we need to educate EVERYONE in our society in the topic of media. That being said, this modules readings tied everything that we have learned over the course of the past five weeks together. It made it crystal clear to me how much power the media has over our society, and it is a crucial part of life to be able to determine the biased messages the media is giving us viewers.
The power of media on our lives is immense, it is not only a source of entertainment but it helps in making us form our opinions on major issues of social importance. The media has impacted society for decades by selectively reporting what they feel the public needs to know. After reading the first group of slides, titled ‘media and democracy’, the first thing that surprised me was how the role of the media had shifted since it had begun. When the media began, it had a political agenda. It was an outlet through which the common people would criticize the government. Now, it has shifted into the media giving viewers biased information to benefit billion dollar corporations. I believe that it is the medias duty to give honest, valuable information to the society. One of the things that make a democracy free is a well-informed public. We as a society need access to information about all sides of an issue or all the facts about candidates in an election. Which brings me to my next point, media ownership. It surprised me to read that a high percentage of media outlets are owned/controlled by only a couple of corporations such as: Comcast, Disney, TimeWarner, Fox, CBS and Viacom. This is extremely frightening to learn because the fact that all media in the United States is controlled by less than a dozen companies means that these companies control the information received by most Americans. Which then leads to these companies shaping the realities and perceptions of the public as a whole, and gives these billion dollar corporations ALL the power.
Another point made, that also shapes the publics ideas and thoughts and perceptions of reality was the unrepresentations in the media that has been brought to our attention multiple times in this course. In the video of Who makes the news, it touched upon in great detail this huge issue we have within our society. When the news is misrepresenting reality, it changed people perception of what reality is. In the article, “Who gets to speak on cable news” by Peter Hart, it reminded me of the evaluation we did of the news this module. Hart talked about how majority of news reports are done with white people. I found the statistics presented to be extremely unsettling, and I think this is an issue that needs to be addressed.
In Chapter 11, Karen Sternheimer also touched on the topic of inequality which ties into wrongful representation within the media. Once point that she made that stood out to me, was the one about poverty within children in America. “ Ads for starving children in faraway places might gain out sympathy, but poor American children are often seen as invisible or just seen as a threat to public safety” (Sternheimer, 2013) This point stood out to me because, prior to this class I had no idea the huge issues we had within our country of poverty, but specifically poverty within children. This is s a perfect example of how the media shapes our beliefs.
In Karen Sternhehimer’s chapter 10, I found myself having these “AHA! Moments”. Throughout the chapter, I felt like it really was hitting the nail on the head with what consumerism has become in our country, and even around the world. Sternheimer makes the point that, “we need things we are making statements about who we are as individuals, and we are affiliating ourselves with certain groups, making status distinctions” (Sternheimer, 2013). This quote really showed that consumerism has become our identity within our society, and I feel as though this is the greatest issue of all. Because this is such a huge part our peoples lives, it allows the people making those products and selling them(media) to have all control.
Module 5 Readings
While reading this article I found it interesting the contradiction of the cardinal rule of news media. That it needed to stay politically neutral, only to find out that “The third bias of professional journalism is more subtle but most important: far from being politically neutral, it smuggles in values conducive to the commercial aims of the owners and advertisers as well as the political aims of the owning class” (McChesney 2002). I also found it sad that media today is based towards a more “desirable middle and upper class.” It really shows a bias toward people that are less fortunate. Many stories will as they said “fall through the crack” because it will not reach the target market that the media avenue wants to appeal to.
“The biggest harm media power can yield is not in creating killers, but in creating complacency.” I agree with what Sternheimer’s words here that it is created from news reports based on emotion. “Not everything you see on the news is newsworthy, and not everything newsworthy is on the news” (Sternheimer 2003). Redford’s saying reminds me of the previous article that the information the news sometimes doesn’t tell can be due to that it won’t reach the demographic that they are wanting.
In the article “Who Gets to Speak on Cable News?” I found it disturbing that when guest were coded by their race/gender that “eighty-four percent of guests were white” (Hart 2014). In this day and age I find that number to be quite high and unexpected. Are we still living in a day when there is still such a discrimination on race? I also found it interesting that “Male guests widely outnumbered women on every show” (Hart 2014). It shows that with all advances this country has made, there is still bias against women and their capabilities when it comes to media.
“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,” Joseph Stalin observed. Media today will usually relay more stories of homicide’s deaths than suicides, even though suicide rates are higher. Even when it comes death there still seems that media shows bias.
In the article Conservatives vs. Liberal Beliefs, you get to see different viewpoints of the same issues. The two sides of democracy, left and right. This article explained different issues such as abortion, death penalty, education, global warming, gun control, immigration, and taxes. This related to media because if we know how each side feels on the issue, then we can better understand how they are trying to influence us. Different news stations are usually guided towards a certain side. Learning about the two sides gives us the bigger picture and makes us more media literate.
While reading FAIR the first heading is How to Detect Bias in News Media, it made really happy thinking that in this course I have learned some ways to do that. As well as other tactics in advertisements, it feels good to have useful knowledge and see media in a different way now. The next, Who are the Sources? I feel like that is something that I normally automatically consider because of writing. In high school and college you are expected to have “academic” sources, or trustworthy sources. I like the paragraphs on double standards and skewed coverage. Another one I really enjoyed was do the headlines and stories match, I never really thought about it but it’s so true! The headline is there to grab your attention and it could be a very small detail of the story and then the main purpose of the story turns out to be completely different than what you thought.
In the Who Makes the News video it explains that we assume news is true and accept the facts they present to us. It also shows that 51% of the population are female but only 24% are represented in the news. The media reinforces stereotypes and gender inequalities. The video said what we don’t see it just as important as what we do see.
In this chapter, it first discusses how young adults have “misguided priorities”. Instead of worrying about education, they are focusing less on that they do have and are stirred to what they can’t have. Adults try to blame advertisers and how they prey on the innocence of the youth but it is not that simple. Sternheimer describes how parents are actually the easily targets because of the great influence their own kids have on them. Advertising isn’t a easy business anymore and it is often hard for the industry to keep up with all the fast moving trends. A huge part of the business is not even sales but whether the companies are receiving an increase in “brand awareness.” Another big problem Sternheimer talks about is advertisements coming into education. Not only is there brand names in the cafeteria or on the student’s clothes and lunch boxes, but schools are actually the hosts of multiple advertisements in order to gain school supplies or updated technology. Due to the fact that “consumerism is deeply intertwined with the American economy and linked with economic growth”, in order to progress we must first realize that we are driven by a “consumption-based society.” In essence we need to stop wanting what we don’t need and what we can’t have.
Sources:
Global Media Marketing Project. (2015). Who makes the news Retrieved from http://whomakesthenews.org/gmmp
Hart, P. (2014, July 1). Who gets to speak on cable news? Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. Retrieved from http://fair.org/extra/who-gets-to-speak-on-cable-news/
How to Detect Bias in News Media. (n.d.) Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. Retrieved from http://fair.org/take-action-now/media-activism-kit/how-to-detect-bias-in-news-media/
McChesney, R. (2002). The rise and fall of professional journalism. Into the buzz saw: Leading journalists expose the myth of a free press. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books (363-381) McChesney The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism.pdf
Radford, B. (2003). The news bias: Distorting reality and feeding fears. Media mythmakers: how journalists, activists, and advertisers mislead us. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, pp. 65-101. Radford 2003 The News Bias Distorting Reality and Feeding Fears.pdf
Sternheimer, K. (2013). Consumption and materialism: A new generation of greed? Connecting social problems and popular culture: Why media is not the answer, pp. 245-268
Sternheimer, (2013). Beyond popular culture: Why inequality is the problem. Connecting social problems and popular culture: Why media is not the answer, pp. 273-287.
Student News Daily. (2010). Conservative vs. Liberal Beliefs. Retrieved from http://www.studentnewsdaily.com/conservative-vs-liberal-beliefs/ (NOTE: Student News Daily is a great resource for people working with middle and high school aged students.)
Last Module
Hello ladies! Congrats to us all for completing this summer class!! I enjoyed reading all of your reflections throughout the semester because it opened my eyes to other perspectives on the readings/videos.
Now to begin my reflection, out of all the readings and videos what stood out most to me was the video Who Makes the News. GMMP. Overall this video was about the misrepresentation of women. Not only are women misrepresented by news anchors, but as news stories as well. This video reminded me of the assignment that we did evaluating the news because I was able to confirm their findings with my own experience. For example, in the video Who Makes the News I learned that women are rarely seen talking about the economy and politics and as I was watching the news coverage on the senate and abortion, as well as the support of Hillary Clinton, the anchors were only white males. Also, I was not surprised when I learned that some news tend to flip the truth in order to focus women and their stereotypes. For example, the news article of the 5th grader who had a baby but was represented as promiscuous instead of targeting the man who raped her!
Secondly, in chapter 10 I too was surprised to read on the average materialistic consumption by children. Also, a great example of this would be My Super Sweet 16 because many of us grew up watching these shows were the bigger the better. This show shows how many of us have become materialistic and then blame the media for it. On page 256 Sternheimer states, “Children under eight do not understand that the intent of commercials is to persuade them to buy” as well as “children in preschool are less likely to recall advertisements later”. These statements were very controversial to his information that children purchase about $100-$300 billion of products. When I used to work at Walmart, I think that parents were more influenced than children by advertisements because they looked more excited when purchasing toys than the children. The children were happy with a candy where as parents wanted to go all out and buy their kids what was “in”.
Module 5 Reflection
In his article, The Rise and Fall of Professional Journalism, McChesney discusses how the media has progressed to be what it is today. He claims that there are two fundamental roles that the media was built on: (1) to be a watchdog of those who are in power and those who want to be in power and (2)to provide reliable information from a wide range of sources and opinions. As media began to develop in the 18th century, there were a few things that were understood to be crucial values that the media was expected to maintain no matter what. First, the media should be politically neutral. It was also understood that if the government had the ability to outlaw or circumscribe newspapers, it would kill democracy. The press has a lot to offer democracy as long as there are numerous, well subsidized media, providing a broad range of opinions (McChesney, 2002). By the 19th century, it was clear that the commercial press system was being dominated by the political ideology and agendas of wealthy individuals. By the 20th century, the 1st Amendment right of a “free press” was being seriously questioned as it became more and more obvious that the press worked best for corporate interest. American author, journalist, and political advisor, Naomi Wolf argues that “The First Amendment was designed to allow disruption of business as usual. It is not a quiet and subdued amendment or right.” The First Amendment was created to allow us to speak out against injustices, to give us a voice in the communities that we are an interconnected part of. When the media is controlled by those who have little interest in communicating the truth, we are being robbed of our First Amendment. McChesney believes that journalists are often oblivious to the compromises they are constantly making with authorities. It has just become an accepted part of professional journalism. I think that it is interesting that even back in the 18th century, far before they could have ever predicted the technology that we would have today, it was widely known that it would be very dangerous if the press did not hold up its moral responsibility of being an objective watchdog and source of credible information. It has been somewhat of a gradual progression, but the biases we currently see in the news are the exact traits that our founding fathers warned us against.
In an article published on FAIR, Peter Hart discusses the findings of a study done on who speaks most frequently on major cable news networks. The results showed an astonishing lack of diversity among those who made it on screen of these networks. The networks were all dominated by white males, who were responsible for delivering the news to a country that is over half female and filled with people of all different ethnicities. While women and people of color did make the occasional appearance on these news networks, they were seriously underrepresented in terms of their actual demographics in society. Global Media Marketing Project explored the question: What does a snapshot of gender in one ordinary news day look like? In their 2015 video, Who Makes the News, GMMP explains how women are seriously underrepresented and misrepresented in the news. Even though women make up over half the world’s population, only 24% of people who appear on the news are women. When they do appear, they are also inaccurately representing. This reinforces stereotypes about gender roles in an incredibly unprogressive way. Furthermore, only 6% of stories on the news discuss gender inequality, resulting in missed opportunities for awareness and advocacy. Even though these injustices are difficult to change, it is not impossible. So why is it important to monitor the news in the first place? Well, the news is the most dominant source of information that the public receives. As the most dominant source of information, we accept it as truth. This gives it the power to not only influence our personal views, but also the power to change local and foreign policies as well.
In his 2003 Article, Benjamin Radford discusses how the news distorts reality and the biases that make it what it is. As Radford ironically states, “The news is what news people say it is” (2003, p.67). News stories do not just happen, they are created. There are many steps that journalists use to create stories, including judgment, selection, and interpreting actual events into the versions that the audience will receive. Radford argues that journalists strive to find and create stories of fear and sensationalism because these are the stories that get the most views. When more views correlate with more profit, the selection and interpretation process tend to be skewed towards what will grab the most attention. It is more like campfire storytelling or a bad game of telephone for journalists. Which wouldn’t be a big deal if it was widely known and accepted that many stories become somewhat fictional after they have been manipulated and retold. However, the public does accept the news as truth. This leads to warped worldviews about irrational threats that are incredibly rare, while the public remains uninformed about the real threats that are actually present in our everyday lives. Radford also argues that “not everything on the news is newsworthy and not everything newsworthy is on the news” (2003). News directors and editors select what is “newsworthy” based on competing stories, the amount of time available, and coverage area. This leads to only a small, carefully selected, set of bizarre events getting attention from the media while far more relevant stories get ignored. How facts are filtered and presented have a powerful impact on how an audience will interpret an event. By doing this, the news changes the meaning and significance of events. They do not just inform about events, they turn events into stories. In order to avoid being manipulated by the biases of the news, FAIR provides us with questions we must ask before accepting media messages as truth: Who are the sources? Is there a lack of diversity? From whose point of view is the news reported? Are there double standards? Do stereotypes skew coverage? What are the unchallenged assumptions? Is the language loaded? Is there lack of context? Do the headlines and stories match? Are stories on important issues featured prominently?
In chapter 10, Sternheimer discusses how and why we focus concern about advertising and consumption onto youth and the social/economic factors that have lead our excessively materialistic culture. Sternheimer explains that “The fear that children are lured into our hyper-consumerist society too soon draws on romantic nations of childhood innocence, in which children are somehow untainted by consumer culture until advertisers enter their allegedly pure space” (2013, p.249). However, consumerism is something that most of us are born into. To simply blame parents for spoiling their children and having corrupt values is not quite enough either. Our consumer centered society has been deeply rooted in our culture since WWII ended and the postindustrial period began. Instead of blaming individuals for their materialistic habits, we must recognize the massive structural foundation of consumerism that our economy has been built on. Another easy scapegoat for materialism is advertising. Many people argue that advertising is unfair to children and that they are too vulnerable to be exposed to persuasive messages. However, this oversimplifies children and their abilities. While of course they can be manipulated by advertisers, so can adults. Although they are contributing factors, advertising and individual personal values are not solely responsible for children’s materialism. If we want to find what created these high levels of materialism, we must recognize the structural patterns that have occurred over time in our society.
In the last chapter of Sternheimer’s book, she concludes all of her arguments that the media and popular culture are not to blame for all of society’s flaws. She argues that if we want to move towards a more healthy society, we must understand what the “big picture” causes of social issues are. Although it is not always perfect, “media analysis is a great tool for exposing the complexities of issues like violence, gender and sexuality, racism, and homophobia. Our media culture provides great text for both artistic and social criticism” (2013, p. 283). Instead of being afraid of media, we should embrace it as a way to explore and understand the world around us. Since the media and popular culture are not going anywhere, we might as well learn how to critically use it as a tool to educate ourselves and generate new ways of thinking. It is easy to fall into believing that children need protection from it and must learn how to avoid being manipulated by it. However, it is just as crucial that adults learn to navigate their way through media messages as well. Sternheimer compares the media to a sheep in Wolf’s clothing. It is attention grabbing and seemingly very powerful which can make it appear to be harmful. Yet underneath the wolf clothing, media is far more of a follower than a leader of change. Sternheimer argues that media phobia is counterproductive in addressing the central problems that are prevalent in our society. In her closing argument she explains, “It would be a mistake to focus only on the negative in these changing times, overlooking the positive aspects of both media culture and the next generation…we can’t be distracted by the lure of popular culture, which is ultimately not the key problem, nor is its control the solution” (2013, p. 286).
