The Media, Society, and Culture

Pg 294 – “Television, which both recognizes and overrides state boundaries, now exercises an influence potentially much greater than that of the press.”

~I think that televison/film really influences how one forms pretty much any identity. This quote partially sums up that idea.

Kramer, L. (1985). The media, society, and culture. Daedalus, 114(1). Retrieved November 9, 2008, from JSTOR database.

Life in America pt. 1

Pg 26 – “Where it has been most conclusive is in showing how children, particularly under the age of 6 and particularly for the medium of television, repeatedly demonstrate higher levels of aggression, after viewing scenes of injury and destruction (Hamilton 1998).”

~ Outside things affect identity; makes you express a certain part of your identity more (expression).

Allison, A. (2004). Cyborg violence: Bursting borders and bodies with queer machines. In Baker, L. D. (Ed.), Life in America (25-45). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Pg 51 – “Indeed, in certain areas of the Southwest, Latin American immigration is generating a powerful infrastructure dominated by a growing Spanish-speaking mass media (radio, television, and print), new market dynamics, and new cultural identities.”

~ When part of identity oppressed by outside circumstances (English-speaking media) then another part works to express itself (Spanish-speaking media)

Suarez-Orozco, M. M. (2004). Everything you ever wanted to know about assimilation but were afraid to ask. In Baker, L. D. (Ed.), Life in America (45-62). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Thoughts on readings so far

So I haven’t posted recently, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading. It means I’ve been slow to type up notes and comments and thoughts on the reading. But since it’s nearing the end of the semester I thought I better get to cracking on some of this. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have caught most of the way up on all the work I’ve been trying to get through.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is changing the active/passive atrophy idea of my original post to more of a expressing or oppressing identity stages. I’ve begun kind of thinking of identity on a sliding scale with oppression on one end and expression on the other end. For every identity you have it slides back and forth on the scale depending on how much you express or oppress it. This works well with all established identities, but does not cover what happens with identities one has yet to discover. They are not necessarily being oppressed, they just do not exist yet. Perhaps these scales do not pop into existence until after the identity is made. Or perhaps a yet unfound identity is being oppressed. Or maybe oppressed is not the right word. I’ll keep working on it.

Another reason why I really like the oppression/expression idea is because most of the time if one oppresses one identity it is because they are expressing another identity. This would mean that two scales could be placed parallel to each other with the expression of one next to the oppression of the other, and the oppression of the first next to the expression of the other. Like below:

expression____________________________________oppression (potential identity one)
oppression____________________________________expresssion (potential identity two)
development level

The development level would slide back and forth along these scales with one identity being expressed more and the other is oppressed more. This would still work alongside the stages I earlier mentioned on my first post, but would add to how the overall concept works together.

As I said earlier, more posts to come soon. Especially the ones that led me to this idea!