Module 4 Reading Reflections

I cannot lie; the Dugan videos were pretty confusing. I watched Dugan’s series twice and could not wrap my mind around all of the technical jargon he laid out. Symbiosis? He said it was a science term, so immediately my mind just shut off. Science and I do not mix. I think I was most confused about how to really apply these technical terms that he presented to the two chapters that we had to read from Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture by Karen Sternheimer (Chapters 6 and 8).I think I was confused partly because the content in Sternheimer’s chapters have been discussed countless times.

In Chapter 6, Pop Culture and Promiscuity, Sternheimer tells the reader that we must not blame popular culture about the growing promiscuous ways. Instead we should look at the social structure of our society. (Sternheimer,  2013) Sterheimer admits that social structures have changed since media first became an influencing object, but she does not do a great job of explaining why our social structures have changed. Based on the content presented to us so far throughout the course, I highly doubt Sternheimer is an anthropologist and could easily explain the shifts in societal culture through the years. To blame social structure entirely on growing levels of sexual promiscuity seems rash in my opinion. How can media not influence sexual promiscuity? I am not blaming media entirely either, but I find it very hard to believe that media does not play a part. Sternheimer presented loads of statistics answering attempting to my question throughout this chapter, but the attempt was futile. The statistics were about young peoples and sexual activities, of course, but none explaining the diret effects of media. All of the content of media and sexual promiscuity seemed like assumptions to me.

In Chapter 8 of Sternheimer’s book tackled health and media. Once again, as stated in the first paragraph, the topic of health and beauty in the media has been tackled many times. Sternheimer tackled obesity, anorexia and bulimia. She did point out the small number of young women with anorexia and bulimia, Less than 5% of women will develop anorexia or bulimia based on the statistics tat Sternheimer presented, assuming I interpreted the statistics correctly. (Sternheimer, 2013) I could have interpreted those numbers incorrectly, numbers and I do not mix. The correlation of media and eating disorders seems simple, she states, but it is highly complex. Sternheimer lost me here. She did a decent job of presenting all of the factors that affect health in the media. I was happy she did not blame these issues entirely on the media, and acknowledged environmental and biological factors.