Module 3 Readings

 

I started with Lankshear and Knobel’s “Attention Economy” because it had really interested me as I viewed the Voice Thread that was created by our Professor. I had never thought about how valuable our attention is to media or as Goldhaber calls it, “The money industry economy”. I had never realized that since there is so much information that our society is drowning in, our attention is the extremely important to media. Throughout the article and the Voice Thread, I learned a lot more about attention and how necessary it is for media to gain it from its viewers.

Goldhaber writes, “The energies set free by the successes of … the money‐industrial economy go more and more in the direction of obtaining attention. And that leads to growing competition for what is increasingly scarce, which is of course attention. It sets up an unending scramble, a scramble that also increases the
demands on each of us to pay what scarce attention we can (Goldhaber 1997: n.p.)”. This quote is arguing that our attention is scarce and limited due to the amount of information that is out there. I completely agree with Goldhaber because I for one get my attention grabbed somewhat easily for things like fashion and makeup but someone else may not be interested in those topics at all. This means that media has to try and grab someone else’s attention that way it grabbed mine using different topics and targeting a different gender, age group, ethnicity or culture.

I also chose to discuss the quote from Adler that says,
“Advertising is a domain of human practice with a strong stake in the economics of attention: the ‘first challenge for every advertiser is to capture and hold the
attention of the intended audience’ (Adler 1997: 5). This quote really helped me understand this article as a whole because I feel as though this quote sums up a lot of what Lankshear and Knobel are arguing. If media does not gain our attention, then they will not succeed in their advertisement. In my opinion, this is why Ads may use Hausman’s techniques because a person who is not media literate would not know to look for small print leading them to get tricked. I also think having outrageous print like 50% off your entire purchase catches almost anyone’s eyes, because we would like to think that we could get half off our entire purchase off without any exclusions.

I then read Neil deMause and Steve Rendell’s “The Poor Will Always be With Us” and was shocked, yet not too surprised, The first line of the article states, “According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data, 37 million Americans—one in eight—lived below the federal poverty line in 2005, defined as an annual income of $19,971 for a family of four.” Between payments on houses, cars, supporting your family and simply trying to buy food with an annual income of $20,000 is practically impossible. They then mention that news channels do not cover these impoverished towns and people unless it is to share about a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina. DeMause and Rendell state that ABC, CBS and NBC mentioned them a very limited amount of times with the statistic that shares, “During the more than three years studied, there were just 58 stories about poverty on the three network newscasts, including just 191 quoted sources.” They share that there were more stories of Michael Jackson’s death than anywhere near the amount of stories about poor families and towns. The authors also share that the way impoverished people are portrayed on the news is through an expert, who is not close to being poor (such as George W. Bush). This actually really bothered me because Bush created a plan to help fight hunger and homelessness which sounds like a great idea. To me the issues is that he then gets praised for this and it then turns into Bush becoming a hero when the real heroes are these homeless and poor people who work as hard as they can everyday, to sometimes not even receive a meal for days.

After I watched the video “Child Poverty- In Their Own Words” where many young children share their experiences of being poor. One girl shared that her mother would only put $0.50 worth of gas into her car while she watched other people putting $20.00. She said she wondered why and when she asked her mother, her answer was “because I don’t have enough money to put more in.” Another girl shared that her family sometimes did not get to eat dinner at night. These videos are truly terrible to watch but I am glad that I know a few students a schools that I went to that got free breakfast and lunch at school. They were all very grateful for the meals that they were able to receive from their public schools. With more meal plans and programs like this, it will allow more children to be able to go to bed at night with food in their stomachs.

I then began to look through the “Global Food Disparity Photo Diary.” They had such a great line in the beginning that says, “If you look closely at the types of food being purchased you can see the difference between “eating to live” and “living to eat.” As some families of 4 have enough food to feed 20, some families have 5 mouths to feed that can hardly fill up one. I was saddened as I viewed this diary because you can truly see who is eating to live and living to eat. I think this line is truly powerful and impactful as I see some families eating nothing but endless supplies of junk food and thinking others that seem as though they will savor every last bite of their minimal meals. It makes me feel very grateful and lucky that I am able to eat meals when I feel hungry and it definitely will make me think twice at how fortunate I am to have the food and other necessities needed to live.

I then read Shannon Ridgeway’s “4 Problems with the Way the Media Depicts Poor People” which again was very impactful. I suspected number one would be “poor people are invisible” and the reasoning behind it is that people simply do not want to see or hear about them. She uses this term “escapism” which I found to be very true and I often use escapism when I am bored with my life. Her second problem is “the poor as statistics” which, again is true, and completely heartbreaking. She says they are facts and or rates, which doesn’t not show them human beings but merely as statistics. She says this makes people who live in poverty feel as though they do not matter which I completely agree with. They are not numbers; they are humans like everyone else. Money does not make someone anymore human than another. The third problem she discusses is “The Poor As Poor Due to Their Own Life Choices” which is obviously not true whatsoever. If we could all choose to be rich like the Kardashian’s, I am positive a lot more people would be. I really wanted to mention this quote because I think it was really well said. She states, “Being the third generation in a family trapped in the poverty cycle, having a history of mental illness, or reeling from a sick family member’s medical costs that put them over the edge financially are all very real, concrete issue that affect people and their lives.” When I took a course that focused on the Black Lives Matter Movement, we had talked about how many of them were stuck in a cycle of poverty because they needed to take care of family members, or get a job at a young age in order to feed their families. This takes away a child’s chance of being a kid and forces them into adulthood at a young age. I would say that is 100% out of their control. The last and fourth problem Ridgeway mentions is “The Poor As Temporarily “Down on Their Luck” meaning there are ways out of poverty like “clipping coupons” although the people who do this are middle-class citizens who have money but choose to use coupons and save a lot of their money. Being poor is not a choice, it’s not luck, it should not be another statistic we hear about and no impoverished town or family should be ignored. Ridgeway’s article truly opened my eyes to such ignorant ways of how people view poor people.

The next thing I read was Jiang’s “Basic Facts About Low-Income Children under 18 Years Old” which again, is heartbreaking. Although I read every statistic, I pulled out one specific graph that really touched me.

This graph made my shed a few tears because of the image of these children and how being impoverished affects their childhood. Like Ridgeway mentioned, poor people are not just another statistic, I feel as though graphs are just a helpful way to visualize truly how many children that are growing up poor. As a future teacher, I feel as though it really important to make sure every single student gets at least one nutritious meal so they can perform as best they can at school Education is near and dear to my heart and I feel if a child gets a fair shot at becoming educated, then the future can offer them a lot more.

I then read Simone Kuper’s article “Poverty’s Poor Show in Media” and it made me think of a couple shows where they try to show poverty as ‘cute’ or ‘sexy’. The show I immediately thought of is “Young and Hungry” which is about two young girls who live in San Francisco, both working. One girl if a chef, who eats all the time, and the other girl worked at a gym. They live in an apartment (in San Fran…the rent a month would be outrageously expensive). The girls constantly talk about how they have no money, yet they are both gorgeous, shop all day and buy food constantly. If I am catching Kuper’s main idea, the media makes “poverty” look cute like the girls in “Young and Hungry”. I also really like the lines he writes that says, “As the Tea Party likes to point out,
most journalists are liberals. However, most are also upper-middle-class folk who never visit the poor areas of their city” showing that once their jobs are over, they go home and nestle into their nice homes and eat their dinner. He mentions the interviewees of the interviews meet in a fancy hotel lobby as they speak about being “poor” rather than going out to the ‘ghetto’ where poverty actually exists.

I then watched “Poverty in America” which was lighter. I do not mind hearing about poverty struggles or things that are out of my control but I am always wondering if anyone will offer a solutions. Marian Edelman offers solutions to end poverty in children by saying it would cost 77.2 billion dollars a year but in the long run save tax payers billions of dollars and would help impoverished children. She makes several great points that I want to mention. One being that these children who are currently being neglected is our nation’s future. If something isn’t done now, imagine what the future will hold when half of our nation is poor. I also really liked that she said these children do not to choose their families, their race, their neighborhood or their economic statues. This is why hearing about children that will grow up poor is so heartbreaking because it is completely out of their control. She says, “These children did not choose to be born” which made me cry. Not one child deserves to grow up poor or grow up with an empty stomach, which is why the more people like Edelman that stand up and give solutions, the less children will be neglected and ignored by their own nation.

Lastly, for the poverty and media literacy topic, I read “Children’s Defense Fund” website and was able to find a few ways to help reduce poverty such as making sure parents and or caregivers have well paying jobs. I think this is really important because a child follows their parent’s work ethics so if they see their parents working hard, hopefully they will want to as well. The site stated, “Reducing child poverty 60 percent with these improvements was estimated to cost $77.2 billion in 2010, only 2 percent of U.S. government spending that year, 0.5 percent of the 2010 U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), and 15 percent of the estimated $500 billion the nation spends every year for the costs of children growing up poor. By reducing child poverty now the nation would reduce these children’s chances of becoming poor adults and reduce child poverty in the next generation” I pulled this quote from the overview because I think it was a perfect way to show that there are ways to help end poverty and to end the topic of poverty in my blog post. If people do not make the poor invisible and understand the struggles impoverished families and towns face, they will be more willing to be a part of the $77.2 billion needed to help change the lives of millions of children.

Then I watched Barthlow’s “Effects of media violence on mind, brain and behavior” which was fascinating. He shows a lot of what the “naysayers” feel about violent video games or in other words that media does not make children act violent. He then shows the “yea-sayers” which believe that media does make children act violent. The yea-sayers claim, “More than 5 meta-analysis examining links between media and aggression have been published. All show that greater media violence viewing statically predicts greater aggression by the viewer” (p. 336). Barthlow goes back and forth between the parties of naysayers and yea-sayers to prove that the yea-sayers have a lot more effective research than the naysayers. I too believe that violence can be caused from media because media is extremely powerful. If media can cause women to become anorexic or bulimic, it makes sense to me that media can cause people to become violent. I have seen my cousins play games where half naked women are being shot, or they shoot policemen and then rob stores. To me, a child who does not have as much life experience as my cousins, may think behavior like that is okay. This may make a child commit a violent act because of their naivety or lack of awareness that the video game has caused them.

I saved Karen Sternheimer’s chapter 5 “From Screen to Crime Scene” because I wanted to see how much it related to the other readings and videos. I read one of the headlines titled “Violence Has Declined as Media Culture Expanded”. This part of the text was really interesting because I think it related a lot to Goldhaber’s idea that we live in an attention economy so with all new gory video games, movies, books or comics, there is a wider variety of violence that can be chosen by adolescences. This to me seems as though crimes would go down with all the new ways in which children can be exposed to violence. I do believe though that something visual, like a movie or video game, would make a child a little more likely to commit a violent act over text in a book. She then goes on to argue that these crimes may be to blame for video games but she does not really seem to believe this is a valid excuse for these crimes. I too agree that video games may not be at blame because if a child sees a violent game, they should know better than to assume committing murder is acceptable, but I also agree that when they see these games, they can easily get ideas from them. For example, if a child pays a game where the commit a robbery, they may not necessarily go out and commit that crime but they may try to steal from a store. She also says a lot of killers are copycat killers which I completely agree with.

One of the most interesting parts of this chapter is when Sternheimer discusses the “many Meanings of Violence” because something that may seem violent to one viewer, may not seem violent to another. Montreal’s Gazette claims, “Kids may say they know the difference between real violence and the kind they see on television and video, but new research shows their brains don’t” (Sternheimer 123). I feel as though I am very back and forth on this topic but to me it seems it’s up to the child, where they grew up, whether they play video games, or other extremely relevant factors that may lead them to committing violence.

Sternheimer then talks about poverty, which can relate to a lot of the readings and videos we read and watched. She claims, “For most of those interviewed, poverty and neighborhood violence were overwhelming influences in their lives, shaping their interactions and their understanding of their futures” (Sternheimer 127). I think this is very true because I feel as thought where and whom you grow up around truly affects how you are as a person and your future of you will be as a person. I am the way I am because of the neighborhood I grew up in and my family who raised me. She gives statistics on how most children are asked or forced to be part of gangs and how many children have witnessed a shooting. She talks about how much these kids struggle because of where they live or because they have no money, which reminded me of the video “Child Poverty” because many of those children too suffered because their families were poor.

Overall, I had never realized how much media effects poverty and violence. Media does not represent poverty or violence as it truly is and I think this catches people’s attention so easily because people enjoy hearing about impoverished families or violent crime scenes because it scares them. Ridgeway says, “poor people are invisible” which sadly is true because as she later mentions, we don’t like to hear about poverty, which in my opinion means we are scared to hear about it. We couldn’t imagine a life without media while some can only think about going weeks without food.