Module 3 Reflections
Attention is often associated with admiration or desire. We pay attention to people we admire because we desire to be like them. This perfectly explains why we follow supermodels on Instagram and not homeless people. By that same token, people who are more or less satisfied with the material aspects of their life and have relatively few needs begin to crave meaning, which they usually find through attention; the more attention they receive, the more important they feel. There are two classes within the attention economy; stars, whom attention is paid, and fans, who pay attention. Children are the perhaps the most attentive group of people by far, and make up a large portion of the fan class. Young children are still in the process of defining who they are, and they need role models to help guide them. These role models are made easily accessible through the media (Lankshear & Knoble, 2001).
Unfortunately, there are some people who behave violently in order to receive attention. Most of us can name at least three mass shooters in the last decade who have taken the lives of many innocent people in order to bring attention to themselves or their causes. It is nearly impossible to turn on any news station without being bombarded with stories of violence, and if you change the channel, it is highly likely that you will find even more violence portrayed in television programs. So what came first; the chicken or the egg? Is the world truly a horrible place full of violent people who create violent content as an outlet of expression? Or are we being corrupted by the media, and becoming increasingly violent with continuous exposure to atrocities of all kinds?
Studies from the FBI have shown that media violence and actual reported crime have a negative relationship; While media violence has been rapidly increasing and escalating for the last twenty years, crime has been on a steady decline. Even children do not seem to be interested in imitating violence seen in the media. While sales of violent video games have continued to rise, youth violence has significantly decreased (Bartholow, 2014). In her chapter on media violence, Sternheimer (2013) addresses how exposure to violence in the media influences youth. One major concern is that children frequently exposed to media violence will begin to develop inaccurate, negative perceptions of the world, or “mean-world” syndrome, as identified by George Gerbner. However, media violence can have the opposite effect on children from impoverished, “dangerous” neighborhoods. They are not jaded by the depictions of violence in the media simply because it is unrealistic. Although in some cases, media violence can reinforce preexisting fears from prior real-life events (Sternheimer, 2013).
The problem appears to be not quite as simple as previously thought. Although, it is clear that the problem with media violence stems from attention. Maybe news sources portray the world as being more violent than it actually is because people are generally more afraid of being killed by another human than they are afraid of starving to death. When someone dies at the hands of another, they are victims, but when someone dies from extreme poverty, we do not tend to recognize them as victims at all. FAIR’s study examined three major news sources over the course of three years, and only found 58 stories about poverty (deMause, 2007). We see more homeless people on the streets than violence, so why does poverty receive so little attention? For starters, we look away because poverty is unpleasant. There is nothing to be glamorized about not being able to shower for weeks. Also, poverty is so terrible that we cannot bear to imagine that it could happen to us. It feels much safer to blame poor people for their problems than blame circumstances that are out of our control. We also tend to assume that poverty is temporary, and that poor people will figure it out eventually (Ridgway, 2013).
As consumers, we have to power to decide what is important to us, and what deserves our attention. The media caters to us based on what we pay attention to. While it is sometimes amusing watching wealthy families act crazy and spend money, there are people in our neighborhoods who are suffering more than we can imagine. Once we show that we care, the media will follow.
