PopCulture Blog

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Response to Final Chapter

The last chapter of the book relates the whole social media world to a real life matrix. The corporate matrix is what stretches across the globe and is in control of the mass media itself, while we are part of the media matrix that fuels the corporate matrix. This metaphor is extremely accurate to how the mass media works. Without its consumers, those who are in power will no longer have a place in the mass media.  The corporate matrix will keep thriving off of what we consume, which makes them very powerful. I think that those who have gained control of the mass media will keep succeeding because the mass media is a global phenomenon.   We have been lured in extremely well that it will be hard to un-attach ourselves from them.  The problem with the corporate matrix is that they control what information they feed us, therefore, we are in their control and half the time we are blind to it. Their advertisements appear everywhere we go and it becomes close to impossible to not be exposed to it.

Although not all people will admit to being active mass media consumers, it is unavoidable. Even when you are trying not to consume it, you are still subconsciously thinking about it.  Social media has become such a powerful tool in today’s society. People are hooked on using social media sites such as twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr, so when you look around there are always people looking down at their cell phones or laptops updating statuses and posting pictures. I do not think I have been to one public place that did not have someone with their heads buried in their cellphone.

I do wish that the mass media could experience some sort of reform so that the corporate matrix does not have extreme power over us. The only way I believe they can be stopped or at least turned around would be to continue the education of how the mass media works and who is behind the scenes.  This may cause some much-needed changes to what we are consuming. 

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Critique of Women in Social Media

This photo above shows a picture of a young model and how she carries herself almost as a young adult model. The caption relates to how the media influences everyone it can get a hold of, especially the younger generation. Instead of wanting to be a doctor or dancer, the photo relates the young girl's strive to be pretty. Is ‘pretty’ something you really want to aspire to be when you grow up?

The media gives us such a skewed image of what real beauty looks like. It feeds us false images that some people strive to see themselves as. Most perfume ads I see in magazines and on television commercials have girls half dressed seducing a man, such as in Calvin Klein and Old Spice. There are plenty of ways to promote perfume without having a girl half dressed trying to sell a product that has nothing to do with having to be sexualized. Even with selling clothing, women seemed to be sexualized a majority of the time. I have seen an ad where they were promoting jeans, but the woman had no shirt on, while she is covering herself. I do not see women walking around in public wearing jeans with a bare top, so why have to create an ad selling it that way?

It is extremely hard to ignore what the media is feeding to our minds because it is everywhere you go. Ads of women half clothed are on large billboards, magazines have women with photo shopped faces and bodies, and commercials have women displayed the same way. It is such a shame that the media won’t stray away from the extreme editing of women. If a woman has to have her body altered in a photo, then that is not a realistic image. No matter where you go, there is a preconceived image of how a ‘pretty or flawless’ woman should look like. 

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Findings in Women in Social Media

This photo above shows different statistics on women in the film industry. It does not surprise me that there are more men in films than women. Even in television shows there are a large amount of men in contrast to women. Men are normally the main characters in films, while women are secondary characters. Over 30% of women in movies get partially naked in films, while only about 10% of men do. Also almost 40% of girls wear sexually revealing clothing. The representations of women in film spans across different types of social media. Women are normally sexualized or objectified in the media, while men are just portrayed as nothing really out of the normal. This does not help with the image of women because society will believes what they are advertising because it is becoming a norm to publish women in a manner that is no where near realistic. It can cause men to have misconceptions of women and how they should look and act. It can also make women insecure about their looks or body image because there are so many misguided images of what they should look like. 

 Less then 20% of females represent directors, writes, and produces. This definitely can account for the faulty images of women that are being consumed by the media and its viewers. If women are not represented well enough in the social media, then there cannot be accurate or realistic images of how women are portrayed. It does not make sense that men control the images of women in social media, because it just gives a bias look of how they perceive their ideal women would look like. Their image can be something that is completely unachievable by women. The male population is dominating the media, yet there are plenty of women that are being used in social media. 

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Introduction to Women in Social Media

Women are seen all over social media whether it is in ads, magazines, cinema, and etc. Depending on what the platform is, they can be portrayed in ways that can be desirable and undesirable for the viewer, or who ever, is consuming the social media. There are tons of advertisements in magazines and billboards that show women with very slim waistlines and flawless faces. As the consumer, other women may want to "look" like the models in these ads or do whatever they can to achieve that look. Realistically, the ads show an extremely edited side to who ever the model is for that ad. This gives other women who desire to look like these models an unachievable standard that the model cannot even achieve. 

I have seen in different social media platforms that a lot of women’s ads are also sexualized in the publisher’s hopes to appeal to more consumers. I see this as using a women’s body to grab the attention of a broader audience, but puts a bad image to women in general. It almost seems that women cannot be dressed in normal clothing without having skin showing or posing in a sexualized way. It is such a sad thing to see especially being a woman who consumes media on a daily basis.

Women in televisions shows and movies are also sexualized, even in Disney movies such as The Little Mermaid. In this movie, Ariel is wearing seashells as a bra, which can be seen as being sexual or very little dressed for a children’s movie. Women in action and superhero movies usually wear form-fitting clothing or have roles that try to seduce other men. Some of them even wear high heels while fighting crimes, such as Cat Women in the movie Batman.

 The media gives a large amount of false images of women that make it harder for an average women to achieve. 

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Advice for Future Students

My advice to future students is to really take the time to pay attention to the lectures and readings that are given for this course. Pop culture is a part of everyday life and no matter where you go it will always be a part of society. This course is a lot more than just readings and assignments; it is about applying what you learned to real life. Social media is a big part of today's society and practicing how to use these social media tools can become very beneficial, especially if it is something that you have never utilized before. Businesses often use social media to grab your attention to sell products or to promote what they have. It can help you in future jobs or even the job you currently have now. 

 I am not a sociology major or anything dealing with media, but I have taken a good amount of useful information in this class that I can take with me in my future journeys. I am currently a person trainer aspiring to become a physical therapist. I have recently just started paying attention to my gym’s Facebook page and I found that they do most of their promotions and flash deals online. This is very important because it can really help with drawing in cliental, especially if there is a good special going on. Knowing that my job utilizes the social media can really help me think of ideas to help draw in more members as well. This is just one of the examples that I have found myself paying more attention to before this class. I find myself being more aware of what is around me, rather then being left the shadows of the media. I advise you to really open up your minds because you can take in a lot of information that is relatable in your everyday life.  

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Qualitative Analysis

In my qualitative analysis, I compared two popular female artists music videos and observed how they represented women in their video. The music videos were Partition by Beyonce and Dark Horse by Katy Perry. They both portray a female lead, but convey different messages in their music video and lyrics. 

In both pop artist’s music videos, the main focus is a female lead.  These two objects convey different messages to the viewers in relationship to feminism. The first music video, Dark Horse, has a strong message about female power and loyalty. This is done by having Katy sit on a beautiful throne with different men longing for her love and offering her gifts to impress her. Her power is shown by the way she turns the men into sand if she suspects them of something bad or unworthy. This gives women an image that men are not the only ones that are in control of a relationship. She is also portrayed as very beautiful but does not give in to the needs of anyone else but her own. In the second music video, Partition, Beyonce showed the opposite view of women. She is dressed to impress her man and longs to get his affection. She is somewhat objectified in this video because she is giving her male partner a dance show making it look like she is his entertainment. These two objects are very different from each other and show different messages on the issue of feminism. 

I learned that different female artists can really differ in how they represent themselves in their music. For the "queen" of R&B, Beyonce has a strong female fan base and her portrayal of herself being an object of a man's affection can influence how women represent themselves. Even though Katy Perry's song was a huge hit as well, Beyonce still has an overwhelming number of views and downloads for that one song, which shows how big of an influence she can be. 

link to photo

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This video is related to my topic of women's representations in social media because it shows what photoshop can do to someones appearance. It's significant to my topic because it shows how ads and magazines show an unrealistic view of how women should look like. 

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Women in Social Media (Link)

"On one my album covers, my arm was shaved down and it made me look very skinny. I think that gives a false reality."

This link is relevant to my topic of women's representations in social media because it shows all the editing that gets done to a women when she is being shown in popular press. This is a famous singer's stand to all the work that gets done to change the appearance of women to make them more "appealing" in the publisher's mind. 

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Quantitative Analysis

In the quantitative analysis assignment, I did my observation and study on the show Modern Family. I have never watched this television series prior to this assignment, so it was very interesting to see the, somewhat, diverse cast members on the show. The majority of the television I consume consist of predominately white heterosexual characters and a few, if any, diverse nationalities. Although this series has mostly white cast and crew members, there are some diversity in the show. 

In my study, I observed a majority of white cast members at 89%. The rest of the 11% of the cast members were hispanic. This is not surprising because most shows that are shown on TV are made up of a predominately white cast. In regards to gender, it was surprisingly about half and half. Most shows that show almost an equal amount of males and females are reality shows, but this is a sitcom. There were 56% males and 44% females. When it came to sexuality, 22% were gay and 78% were straight. There were no known transgenders or disabilities in the cast or crew members. This data was taken out of 9 cast members.

The crew members showed less diversity. In the race category, 80% were white and 20% were asian. Gender diversity was the same as the cast members, about half were male and the other were female. All the crew members were notably straight, and none of them had a known disability. This data was taken out of 5 crew members. 

These observations are nothing too surprising. It showed a white dominated cast and crew with no disability and most were straight. It was different to see a gay couple on a popular series, but nevertheless they are still underrepresented. 

https://secure.static.tumblr.com/47cf3a1abb9ae1b0dd54a259fa83a206/wutlsnw/XKMn68yvy/tumblr_static_modernfamily.jpg

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Pop Culture Autobiography

When I was a toddler, I used to watch TV every single morning. I did not have cable growing up, so I would watch the children shows on the local channels. I remember waking up around 7 am just to start my mornings with Barney and Friends followed by Sesame Street. I used to obsess over these two television shows because they were highly advertised in local stores in the form of stuffed toys and clothing. As I grew older, I started to really pay attention to all the other children’s shows that aired in the mornings until noon. I watched the Teletubbies, Clifford, and blue’s clues as well. Since cable was not something my parents invested in at the time, I had a large collection of VCR tapes of my favorite television shows. These tapes were a must have because the afternoons did not have many television shows on for children.

When I was old enough to go to school, I actually remember coming home and watching soap operas like The Young and the Restless and the Bold and the Beautiful because my mother would be watching it. I did not understand much of the content at that age but it was something that caught my attention and watched because we only had one television set.

My parents finally upgraded to cable when I went to middle school. It was mostly because I bugged them so much about it since most of my friends had cable and were watching shows that I had no access to. This is when I started watching the Disney channel, Nickelodeon, and then soon after, MTV. Consuming these types of teen shows definitely started to change the way I presented myself. I had to have all the trendy clothing and accessories as they came out. I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV because my parents would tell me that it was not appropriate for my age due to the explicit images in music videos and shows like the Real World. As a stubborn child, I would sneak and watch it when my parents weren’t home because my friends watched it. This was definitely the start of social media taking over my life. At around 12 years old, the use of the Internet became more popular and, of course, it consumed a large amount of my time. Instant messaging and MySpace became really popular and was the only thing I was interested in taking part of.

Once high school came around, Facebook and twitter were the social networking sites that most of my classmates had accounts in, along with video streaming like YouTube. Advertisements and popular press were something that I began to subconsciously take in as well. I found myself always talking about what a celebrity wore or new clothing styles that were being advertised. These were the years that I spent trying to stay on trend with what was “popular” and balancing schoolwork at the same time. I remember the two books I read on my leisure were the Twilight Saga and the Fifty Shades of Grey series. These caught my interest because most people were raving about it on social media sites and were highly advertised in stores that had a book section.

Now, as a college student, I rarely ever watch television unless the Walking Dead or Game of Thrones is on. I use my cellphone for all the updates on new trends that are going on, but it does not consume nearly as much of my time as it did before.