Module 3

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!