Module 4
n the serious of videos watched by Dugan, what I thought was worth remembering was in general at the very beginning was about culture. As a sociology student, culture is something that we covered in every class in one way or another; culture is a huge aspect of sociology. I thought it was interesting how he stated that culture is not something we are born with, and it is true because I never really thought about it in that sense at all. I actually thought about it in the opposite way, thought culture was something we are born with and get from our parents, and then we just learn it across our lifetime. We make it unique because of the many different cultures that there is, we all have something to show, something to experience and allow others to experience our culture as well as they allow us to understand their cultures.
Another interesting point that he made that relates to our class and what we have been learning about is, when he mentioned, “men and women learned how to act from films, radio, and mass media advertisements.” This is very interesting and relatable because today we look at media to see what the right way is to act, what is in and what is out, so that we can fit in and in a way not looked down on because we aren’t following what may be in today.
Also with the process of the message, a lot of the things that we were doing in the class was looking at ads and finding the connotations and denotations, which is basically the same as the message and the process of encoding that he describes, complex communications can have many messages, and simple messages have one message. We all see articles different depending what we see, we can identify different messages or one simple message, a way of communication.
In chapter six, Sternheimer mentions that, “Societal shifts spurred by economic changes have altered American life, which has made it more difficult to monitor teens, popular culture did not create these changes…” (166). And in chapter eight in regards to beauty image, obesity, and eating disorders, he asked “Can popular culture make people both obese and anorexic? This seems like a contradiction…” (197). These were interesting, very interesting points to me because, a lot of the things that happen such as obesity, anorexia, teen pregnancy’s, is due to pop culture and what the media is displaying. When media is throwing all these things at us, we want it, we want to be living in what is in, what is interesting to us, and therefor, we eat the latest foods because we saw it on a commercial and it looked too delicious to resist, we want to be skinny because we want to look like all these famous peoples, and sex is everywhere, so how do we keep it away from children and teens, we can’t keep them locked in a room without living just to prevent them from all this.
