Module 4 Reflection

I leaned a lot from Terry Dugan’s video series on culture and mass media. The topic of culture has always been a little bit confusing and hard for me to get my head around. The first video on what culture really is helped me a lot. I found it really interesting that Dugan says that storytelling no longer happens in families, but through media and also that media is a convenient villain to blame for rejecting culture (2010). I didn’t realize there are so many parts to our culture. According to Dugan, we have our personal culture, family, bounded, and dominant culture.  I didn’t know this before and I think that may be one of the reasons I struggled with understanding culture. In videos 2 and 3, Dugan discusses the role and effects of mass media. He says that mass media is not mass anymore, except for advertising. I think mass media isn’t considered mass anymore because we don’t need a national common experience since we have so many niche communications to narrow the common culture. I have heard of the 8 elements of communication before in my computer literacy for educators class, but we did not go in depth like Dugan did so I was able to learn more about the process of media communication.

I found chapter 6, “Pop Culture Promiscuity” interesting to read because I, and probably many others, believed the idea that because pop culture is full of sex, kids must be too. I found the section about “sexting” interesting because this is something that is talked about a lot in media. “Sexting” is something that people think teens and young adults do all the time, but according the Sternheimer (2013), only 2% of 12-17 year olds have ever sent nude or partially nude photos of themselves to other people compared to 5% of adults aged 30-49 years old. I hate to say that I would have thought this number would have been higher with how much we hear about it on the news and internet, but as we know, for news to report something, it usually has to have shock value and be something fairly extreme. News doesn’t usually report on things that are happen all the time. So, does media cause teens to have sex? I don’t think there is one thing that causes teens to have sex. Media might be one factor, but there is also peer pressure, sex education, age, etc (Sternheimer, 2013).

Since health and media is one of our main topics this week, chapter 8, “Media Health Hazards?”, was really interesting to read and I was able to learn new ideas. We hear a lot about obesity in children today especially in the United States and I have heard people blame this on the amount of television children are watching. Something new to me was reading that studies show that while there is an association between watching television and obesity, watching a lot of television does not cause obesity (Sternheimer, 2013, 201). Reading the section on anorexia and bulimia made me think about the guest lecture and how media can lead to shame. Does this lead to anorexia and bulimia? I would have believed so before reading this chapter. According to Sternheimer, there is not much of a relationship between reading magazines and watching television and eating disorders (207). Media does not seem to cause eating disorders. I was kind of shocked to read that peer influence was the strongest influence on body dissatisfaction (207-208). Each week I am learning more and more about the stereotypes about media. It has been really interesting and I find myself usually changing my opinions.