Module 2 Wrap Up
After finishing up these readings and the videos, I did take in quite a bit of information. In the video that Tollefson posted, the principles of media education were talked about. There was the five core concepts and the five key questions and it was emphasized that you want to ask those key questions when you are looking at media.
What really got my attention though was the video Trope vs Women. Before this video, I have never even heard of the word trope. Just looking at the title I asked myself “what the heck is a trope? According to the video, a trope is “a common pattern in a story or recognizable attribute in a character that conveys information to the audience.” This video I found very interesting because it really opened my eyes about how women are rarely the main role and really showed the Smurfette Principle. This principle mentions how there is one female among a group of males. An example that was used was “Big Bang Theory” and used Penny among the group of guys and they make her seem like the “dumb blonde” compared to them. Another thing that was mentioned was how women are usually the sidekick or the sexy accessory, this is very noticeable in the James Bond movies. There was a test created by Allison Bechdel called the Bechdel test which is a “simple way to gauge the active presence of female characters in Hollywood films are just how rounded and complete those roles are” (feministfrequency, 2009). Overall, both videos are very eye opening and made me really aware.
When I opened the book to the required reading chapters, chapter 3 title really got my attention, “Does Social Networking Kill?” Throughout chapter 3, it is repeated a couple of times that with the internet and our smartphones, it is hard for parents to monitor these messages. One thing about this chapter that really stood out to me was the story Tyler Clemeti’s suicide. His story was about his roommate setting up a webcam in his room to catch him with another man and streamed it online. After this story though, really shocked me. It says that it is hard to get a solid number, but it is assumed that “30 percent of all youth suicides involve LGBT individuals” (Sternheimer, pg 54). Another thing was how she mentions that teenagers are actually the least likely to commit suicide, which honestly surprises me because when news stories about suicide are published, most of the time it seems like they are teenagers. Moving on to chapter 4 was a huge jump, going fro suicide to a question “Is popular culture turning us into a nation of shallow idiots?” (Sternheimer, pg 71). What I liked about this chapter was how it contrasted some of the articles we read in the last module. It mentioned how there were some studies done that proved the opposite of what those articles were talking about. One that I really liked was “Sesame Street viewers had larger vocabularies and showed grater readiness for school than other children.” (Sternheimer, pg 75). Something that really stood out to me that even though the that the SAT scores have been declining, its shows a positive trend. Sternheimer stated that there are more students taking the SAT and plan on going to college, which to me was interesting. But with these conflicting studies, who should we actually believe?
Out of all of the articles that we read, the one that I found the most interesting was Struggling with Stereotypes: Uses and Abuses of a Critical Concept by Carlos E. Cortes. The reason that I say this is because it really differentiated generalizations and stereotypes. Cortes pretty much said that generalizing is good and help us create labels (that sounds kind of contradicting, but its true). He says that without labels, we would be unable to communicate among each other. One thing that I found interesting that he said was “generalizations provide clues to individuals who belong to different social groupings, but stereotypes those clues tend to be assumptions.” Before reading this article, I thought generalizing was the same as stereotyping, but it really isn’t.
All of the articles that we have read so far are very interesting, some more confusing than the others, but very interesting. Every article that was I read, I learned something new, which is great. They are making me more aware of things and really opening up my mind and making me think.
