final study guide

SCREENING:The Merchants of Cool: Know Main points

-creators and sellers of popular culture who have made teenagers the hottest consumer demographic in America

Go cool hunting- find individuals who are on the next trend and commercialize it
-The Economics of the Media Industry (23-33): Know trends in, and critique of, media ownership, conglomeration and integration, and how this relates to political power.

- One of the clearest trends in media ownership is its increasing concentration in fewer hands. Ownership of Media has become so concentrated that by the mid 2000s, only 5 global firmed dominated the media industry in the USA, operating like a cartel by taking over smaller media firms to make less competition.
-Hegemony (Lull, pp. 33-36 & Lecture): know the author’s main points about the role of the mass media in perpetuating hegemony

- Hegemony does not mature strictly from ideological articulation. Dominant ideology streams must be subsequently reproduced in the activities of our most basic social units. Because information and entertainment technology is so thoroughly integrated into the everyday realities of modern societies, mass media's social influences is not always recognized, discussed, or criticized, particularly in societies where the overall standard of living is relatively high. Hegemony, therefore, can easily go undetected.

-The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism (37-43): know author's’ main points about social, political and economic context in which the internet has developed

and why the democratic potential of the digital technology/revolution in general has not lived up to its promise.

Argues that the internet should be treated as a public utility but is instead becoming the territory of capitalist robber barons, while the U.S. government is failing its citizens by standing aside. Foster and McChesney say if we assume that a genuinely free market is the best option, we should proceed to analyse the internet in that light. They find it lacking in three key respects which are ISP, Market Concentration, and Information as a public good. “The system’s overriding logic must be as an institution operated on public interest values, at bare minimum as a public utility.”
- Supersexualize Me (Gill, pp. 255-260): Know Gil’s point about the difference between sexual objectification vs. sexual subjectification;

3 challenges advertisers faced in early 1990’s; commodity feminism; characteristics of the “midriff” & themes of midriff advertising; critique of sexual subjectification/midriff & its “post-feminist” discourse.

Sexual objectification is the act of treating a person as a mere object of sexual desire whilst is treating a person as if they are below you. Advertising has been shown to have a comparable influence to education and religion, and that graphic violence and hyper sexualized imagery are two prominent methods for advertisers.
-La Princesa Plastica: Hegemonic & Oppositional Representations of Latinidad in Hispanic Barbie (380-385) Know main points of author’s critique of the “Barbie narrative” and “Hispanic Barbie.”

The article basically explains that Diversity is beautiful and toys as a form of material culture are regarded as one source of cultural data. They are said to encode the cultural values of their creators. In the case of Barbie, there is the reproach that ethnicity is defined by other than white, that blonde Barbie sets the standard from which "the other" comes. While "ethnic Barbies" are qualified by their language, foods, native clothes etc.,"Standard Barbie" can do without these ethnic symbols
-Transgender & Transitions: Sex & Gender Binaries in Digital Age (126-134): know main points of author’s critiques about how and why the internet and other popular/commercial media tend to define and shape perceptions of trans bodies and trans identities.

Contemporary representations of transgender people often reinforce rigid gender binaries of masculinity and femininity, leading transgendered individuals to feel they must seek out hormones or surgery to “correctly align” their bodies with their gender. Cultural texts (e.g., films, television, Internet, digital texts) reinforce this “pre-op or post-op” ideology for trans identity. The pre-op or post-op MTF or FTM binary mandates an alignment with the heterosexual gender system (feminine female or masculine male). In this article, the author focuses on trans identities and how representations codify the need or desire for surgery and hormones and examines the paradoxical reification of gender and sexual stereotypes (particularly dichotomization) by electronic media for transgender consumers of these media at the same time that these same sources provide an abundance of information for those who would otherwise not be made aware of the resources available to them. The competition between marketing of products and services for transgender individuals and provision of otherwise non profitable information for the same individuals ranging from normalizing, informing of sources of help and health information is examined as well as the use of the Internet as a medium for transitioning individuals to share their experiences. This article argues that instead of a culture of hormones and surgery, teachers, medical professionals, and counselors should embrace and educate towards acceptance of trans identities and bodies that does not rely on the mandate of hormones or surgeries. Finally, the impact of the dissemination of information in the uncontrolled environment of the Internet illustrates the impact of culture on media and vice versa.
SCREENING: Clips from Hip Hop Beyond Beats & Rhymes (sections we watched were the opening, “shut up and give your bone marrow,” and “manhood in a bottle,” plus Self Destruction (See lecture notes for link)

-Explores the issues of masculinity, violence, homophobia and sexism in hip hop music and culture, through interviews with artists, academics and fans. Hurt's activism in gender issues and his love of hip-hop caused him to feel what he described as a sense of hypocrisy, and began working on the film.
SCREENING: Tough Guise : Know main points.

• The epidemic of male violence that plagues American society needs to be understood and addressed as part of a much larger cultural crisis in masculinity. Whether he's looking at bullying and school shootings or gay bashing, sexual assault, and violence against women, Katz makes a powerful case that male violence, misogyny, and homophobia are inextricably linked to how we define manhood as a culture. The film gives special attention to how American media have glamorized increasingly regressive and violence masculine ideals in the face of mounting social and economic threats to traditional white male heterosexual authority. Katz's innovative cultural approach to gender violence prevention has been adopted by the NFL, the NCAA, and the U.S. Marine Corps.

-Video Games & Machine Dreams of Domination: Know Sonbonmatsu’s critique of video games, particularly in relation to sexism, racism, instrumentalism, and militarization of everyday life; know main point about simulated vs real life.

• Video Game culture conditions us to instrumentalize human thought facilitating an ever more fateful intrusion of capitalism, technological fetishism, and masculine fantasies of domination are into the fabric of our daily life.

-The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies & the Media (90-92). Know main points about ideologies and how they function, racist ideology, and overt vs inferential racism.

• Ideologies are of course, worked on in places in society, and not only in the head. The fact of unemployment is, among other things, an extremely effective ideological instrument for converting or contrasting workers to moderate their wage claims. But institutions like the media are peculiarly central to the matter  since they are, by definition part of the dominant theme of ideological production

-[2015] The Year We Obsessed Over Identity (85-89),

Main Idea: During 2015 everything had to do with race. Whether it be from the president and how he was a mix of black and white and how the show Key and Peele would show how racism was in America in a comedic way.
-Big Talkers: Rush Limbaugh, Conservative Talk Radio, and the Defiant Reassertion of White Male Authority (157-162): Know main points.

• A key part of the appeal of conservative talk radio to its predominantly older white male audience resides in it reinforcement of traditional masculinity in the face of a culture where economic transformations and progressive social movements have shaken old certainties about what constitutes a “real man”
  -Dissolving the Other: Orientalism, Consumption & Katy Perry’s Dark Horse (108-117): Know main points of critique.

• The east is soft, feminine, and irrational in need of the saving grace of rational Western masculinity
• The video echos the ways in which Egypt was produced as a consumable product during the colonial era.

-Resistant Masculinities in Alternative R&B?: Understanding Frank Ocean and The Weekend’s Representations of Gender (329-339)

Starting from the argument that hegemonic masculinity in contemporary R&B and hip hop culture can be and has been challenged, we conducted a textual analysis of the gender representations of two artists within the genre of alternative R&B. As implied in public debate (cf. supra), male alternative R&B artists are embodying and expressing alternative masculinities. This research wants to, first, investigate how the masculinities performed within the genre are alternatives to the hegemonic norm within R&B and hip hop culture and, second, whether the alternatives qualify as cultural resistances to the norms and values linked to the hegemonic masculine man. We chose to work with two young Black artists, namely Frank Ocean and The Weeknd, who are considered popular within alternative R&B and representative for the genre.

-The Latino Cyber-Moral Panic Process in the United States (657-664),

know what moral panic is,

the impact of internet/cyber media on moral panic,

what this research concluded

about how this has been applied to Latino/Mexican immigration.

In the article, “The Latino Cyber-Moral Panic Process in the United States”, the authors talk about how moral panic occurs in the United States. From the definition, moral panic is the “reaction of a society against a specific social group based on beliefs that the subgroup represents a major threat to society”, and people who create such sense of fear are called “moral entrepreneurs”. Throughout the history, a certain group of people have been always victimized. Chinese people were prohibited from moving to USA by the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, and it was European immigrants’ turn in early 20th century. In the recent days, Latinos are abandoned because of several facts, such that they fail to learn English, do not adopt the Protestant values, and above all, they are large in number.
-Injustice Rolls Down Like Water…”:

Challenging White Supremacy in Media Constructions of Crime and Punishment” (217-224).

• Basic Idea: Media is used to frame people of color as a problem and the use new mobile technology to further their agenda but new independent media sources can of digital media and a new genre of citizen produced journalism
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