Module 3 Blog assignment 1!
Hey everyone! This week we read a LOT. Honestly, I am going into a little bit of information overload over here. Anywho..
The module this week focused on the idea of attention. It was stated that attention is a scarce resource within a reading from Lankshear and Knobel (2001). In the same paper, it was discussed that our future economy will rely greatly on that of attention, taking the place of information. Within the same paper, they talk about how Goldhaber makes six points of relevance which talk about how we have become overly interested in receiving attention from others. He then goes on to split people in to ‘Stars’ and ‘Fans’, which is fairly self-explanatory but fascinated me. I started to wonder if I were ever a star and a fan. I think that based on his definition of each, people can switch between these classes. For instance, I have had times where I am very popular, such as my wedding day, and everything is about me, and I’ve also had other times when I give someone else all of my attention, like my husband. However, I don’t believe that my experiences are as shallow as the ones he described. He goes on the talk about illusory attention which was interesting and made sense because if ‘Fans’ don’t feel appreciated, they will move on to someone who will appreciate them. Although he talks about getting attention through an electronic jacket, this article is older and today we have things such as Instagram that provide us with instant gratification and attention.
The next few readings switched us over to talk about poverty and low-income children. Throughout the readings, it was made clear that we don’t like to see poor people on our televisions and we don’t like to hear about how children don’t have enough to eat. Even when stories are done on the poor, they don’t show actual photos of the people. I for one get extremely frustrated when I see sad commercials where they are asking for money to feed children. Of course we want to help kids but I don’t trust the person who made the commercial. According to DeMause (2007), news coverage in relation to the poor gives off the sense that poverty is a problem to mostly be worried about on holidays, when poverty is considered to be shameful. After all that talk about hungry children, we viewed the food diary, provided by Fricat (2008). This showed families from all over the world with their food for the week and how much was spent. The least expensive and best looking food included mostly fresh fruits and vegetables. Unfortunately in the United States, we consume an abundance of processed foods which make us unhealthy and fat. Some of the families pictured were feedings close to 10 people with the same amount of food we use to feed a family of four!
The most challenging part of this module so far is hearing about how many children are living in low-income or poor homes. I realized that although I don’t make much, I still make more than what the qualification for being poor is. Unfortunately, I blame the parent of these hungry and poor children for not taking care of their kids. The YouTube video that had the kids talk about how they would only put 50 cents in the gas tank broke my heart and the young man who sang throughout the video was definitely adding to the experience. This country offers many programs so that people can get what they need, as far as I know and I personally want them to work harder for their children and provide. According to Jiang (2013), the likelihood that a child would live in a low-income or poor family decreased if the parents had higher levels of education. This is important because if education can help people provide for their families then we need to help get them educated! There were two other readings that talked about how we don’t like to see the poor in person or have reporters go to those impoverished neighborhoods. They also talked about how those stories are usually filled with boring and depressing statistics rather than personal stories from the people living that life.
Finally, I want to discuss violence, which we learned about from Karen Sternheimer. She talked a lot about video games and the relationship to actual violence. In reality, there is no cause-effect relationship. Instead, there is only a correlation, which was elaborated on by Bruce Bartholow. It turns out that we want to blame video games so badly for people’s heinous actions that we completely ignore the research. I was surprised to hear that the average video game player is 37! This also corresponds with the previous chapter where we learned that cyber bullying is mostly performed by middle aged people rather than teens. I was happy to hear that we have decline in crime rates and that our youth isn’t any more violent now than they were in the past. In fact, people aged 24-29 were the most likely to murder someone!
Overall, I learned many different things from the readings and videos this week and I will probably re-watch a few of them. They made me feel differently about video games in relation to violence and more specifically, school shootings and they also made me more aware of how our media definitely does not reflect our society which includes the poor and low-income!
