This is my final blog in Mass Media and American life. Overall, I really enjoyed this course and everything we learned and researched. Usually I use Professor Schlegel’s zoom classes as a podcast. Very interesting stuff all the time around the world of media in the past and even looking more in depth into the future. Last year I took Social Media and Society with Professor S. If I had to pick between the two courses, I would pick this one, even though the previous course with him was all about social media, we still covered a lot of that in this class and then a lot more added onto that as well. There was definitely more thrown at us during this course with the history and dilemmas with the media and American Culture. I wish we could have been in person for these classes because you pay attention better and are more tuned in if you’re in person learning face to face, however we have to adapt to new changes due to the COVID outbreak. I hope this goes away soon as it is getting very old and tiring. The class was fine over zoom though as we had no major group work or hands on activities. I look forward to taking more media classes in the future. 

The screening we had to watch to wrap up the semester was called “12 Angry Men”. A movie that was based in 1957 about a trial of a young teen who killed his father by stabbing him to death. The Jury is made up of 12 men, hence the name 12 Angry Men. None are given names throughout the entire film until the very ending of the screening. All of them having mixed personalities from each other, every member of the jury seems unique in some way. Most of the jury would just follow the group and settle with what the whole says instead of standing up with what they actually believe in. One of the members however consistently stands up for what he believes in, which really stands out because nobody else is really doing that. The film ends and it leaves you in immediate thought for a while, the directors purposely made it this way as you never really find out what ends up happening with the trial. 

I really enjoyed writing blogs for this course. I enjoy writing about what we learn and also see what everyone else has to say about the same topic. Even though we have specific guidelines to follow for each blog, there is a good amount of freedom that we are given to while writing our blogs, we can express ourselves an share what we think about a specific topics in the media world. Pictures below is a really cool “Mad Men” themed poster of the 1957 hit “12 Angry Men”

This is a very intersting topic to write about solely because we have completley grown up surrounded by technology and the media around us. Everything we have done or been involved with in our years usually is tied with the media or technology of some sort. That isn’t a problem because that is the way the world is moving in modern day society. Everything is all about the media and technology and how to make it better, however, every generation before us had to grow up without technology and then watch it completley take over the world we live in today.

The screening we had to watch this week was Galaxy Quest, I have never heard of Galaxy Quest before this week but I really enjoyed watching it. I really got a Star Trek vibe from this which I assume was on purpose. Since we are talking about fandom and how Star Trek really started that off. It was along the same story line with Aliens on steady attack. The Star Trek world and fanbase took Galaxy Quest as on of their own as they welcomed it into their family with open arms. I really enjoyed this film and would definitley reccomend it to any Star Trek or Star Wars fans but a good watch for anybody in general.

Our parents grew up with very little technology, everyone had a telephone and a TV set but that is really it. Nobody had computers or other ways of communicating besides the phone. In the very late 90’s and early 2000’s is when the world turned to technology and the media. I really enjoyed this weeks TED talk as it grabbed me almost immediatley as her attention grabber was very well set up. Mary Franklin is a perfect example of someone that grew up with no sort of communication or social media or technology, she lived in an isolated beach so she was never able to see the outside world really. She went into depth about how she was a huge Star Wars fan and she thought she was the only femal Star Wars fan in the world. Until the world of technology came around and she realized there were hundreds and thousands of female Star Wars fans around the world. She then decided she would create a fan base or a fan page online with all Female Star Wars fans. This made her more confident and able to step out in the world and start making moves.

As a population, I think most people think that social media is very negative and bad. It does nothing for you because it’s just pointless scrolling all day, but it’s stories like this that make you realize the media can completley change somebody’s life. Mary Franklin was a shy girl thast seemed to be content with being bottled up in her little isolated village. After technology came out, she was able to see how the world really is and what it has to offer. The best thing to come from social media in my opinion is the connections you can get and the opprotunities that come from that. Jobs and lifestyles hapen over social media and technology. People fall in love and Soul Mates meet online with social media and technology. It is an extrememly pivotal part of our economy and the lifestyle that we live everyday. I think the positives definitley outweigh the negatives when it comes to social media. People don’t realize but we need social media and technology and online communication in order to keep moving forward in the direction that technology is taking us. Not in a bad way like Robots taking over, but the online world is crucial, and it will remain the same from here on out.

Being in the media field is one of the most stressful jobs you can have, constantley fighting with a group of people to win over someones attention who usually is famous or important in some sort. The media crews will do anything to get to the people that they need to talk to in order to keep their jobs. Lives and families depend on whether or not you can get an interview or ask a question to someone with significant value. I feel like that’s really where ethics and boundaries have to be made when in or around the press (media).

We all know the videos and run outs between very famous people and what is known as the “paparazzi”. The crazy media team with flashing cameras and recorders rolling at all times picking up every movement and sound that the celebrity makes. Yes, this really does happen to an extent. They really “boost” this in movies and TV shows but this does actually happen. There are so many positives to being a celebrity, basically having unlimited money and can have and do whatever you want, however, the media is one of the biggest negatives to being a celebrity. At first, all the attention and fans can be awesome because you finally get to feel like a pop star but I can assume it gets very old after a little while, people watching everything you do and reporting on it to the whole world is something that I’m okay living without. I’m assuming everyone has seen the video of the reporter telling Kanye West “good morning” and Kanye simply responds by telling the reporter to “Shut the ___ up”. This is one of the best examples of the media invading someone’s privacy. Kanye does have a reputation to go crazy

The media continues to get larger and larger every year as new technology comes out and social media platforms. There are so many media jobs available in that field. As annoying and abnoxious this may seem to some people, the first ammendment protects people by being able to express freedom of the press. They are annoying and like little mosquitoes nipping at you at all times, but there are careers and money and ammendments that protect that. in my opinion, the biggest media channels on TV are the source for the biggest news across the world. Most of these channels and programs are very biased when it comes to political views, views on the economy and when it comes to changes that need to be made. I think FOX is very guilty of this for being biased and I think CNN is also very guilty of this because they are very biased as well. Channels and social media pages like TMZ live for fake drama and fake news across the country. There are some really reliable pages and channels to watch but for the most part, it’s very hard to believe anything you hear when it comes to the media.

In conclusion, I think the media is a very pivotal thing for people to hear what they want to hear and to get a quick info scoop along the way, but at the same time, I think it’s very toxic and negative for the people who feed into the biased takes that people have to say when they get a platform to talk on, but we do need media in our lives.

The media and the effects that it has on us as a whole is a very bizzare aspect to try and wrap your head around. It’s something that we never think about, but we all get trapped in the obligation to adapt to the media. I don’t think it is a veery good and healthy way to live but the way modern day society is, it’s hard not to be apart of the media and the behavior that comes along with it. This has never really been a problem for past genertations because we are the first genertation that solely relies on technology and social media. Nobody has ever experienced that before us so this is all a big change for us that is becoming the new norm.

Whenever I think of Media effects and behaviors, I always circle back to the Stanford Prison Experiments. One of the coolest and most intriguing things to learn and research about. Basically, the people running the test found people to participate in this experiement. All students. Half were guards and half were prisoners. Randomly selected. All of the students figured that being a prisoner would be way better than being a guard but that wasn’t the case at all. The prisoners were very poorly treated and not given good care at all and the guards were very aggressive. You weren’t allowed to touch anybody but those rules were bent a lot throughout the whole experiment. The prisoners quickly became very edgy and unsure of the whole situation. In a very creepy way, it seemed to get more real and more real as the experiemnt went on until the prisoners actually felt like real prisoners and the guards actually felt like real guards. The people taking place in the experiment became very stressed and worried when in reality, they were in the downstairs basement of a Stanford Lecture Building. They transformed the whole basement to look like a prison without any of the students knowing. I also watched the documentary on Netflix and thought it was really good.

The film we were assigned for this week was called the “Human Behavior Experiments”. I really enjoyed this film as I have never seen it before it was assigned. It really shows how humans react and how we can change so quickly. It concentarted a little bit on the Stanford Prison Experiment, which was what really caught my eye. It goes into detail how people handle media effects and changes that are thrown upon us. How certain settings and moods, atmospheres that can change us in so many ways.

I think the media effects us in numerous ways but I think its very pivotal to our life. We may not even know it because it is such a norm now but our generation has completley grown up with this. Always having certain icons change how we act, dress, talk. It all effects who we are as people. Not only does the media change us, it changes everything around us. 

A film being rated a certain way that it is, is a concept that most people just look over and simply use as quick way to find out the mood of a movie. It’s extremely important and pivotal in the movie industry, but is it more than just a letter?

There is so many positives to having a movie being rated. Movie ratings are very important to parent’s. Everyone wants there kid to be so innocent and every parent tries to hold their kid back from seeing certain parts of life for as long as they can until they start getting older and are more mature for that content. For that reason, parent’s love ratings. It gives them information about what is in the movie and if it is appropriate enough for the whole family to watch. Nothing is more embarassing than an awkward scene coming up in front of the whole family, especially as a parent (I can assume). The whole concept of ratings was created in 1968 with a simple letter format to indicate the rating of the movie. It went G,M,X (R). PG replaced M later on and PG-13 was created in 1984.

This week, we were assigned to watch “This Film is Not Yet Rated”. It’s a documentary that was made in 2006, basically going over America’s rating system and the effect it has on the American culture. Most of the attention is pointed towards Hollywood films and independent films. They go more in depth with how they think movies should be rated. Points were made about an assortment sexual scenes, scenes involving drugs, swearing, and nudity. I really enjoyed watching this film because it really opens your eyes to whats actually behind the ratings of movies. This film was directed by Kirby Dick and produced by Eddie Schmidt. The MPAA were a big factor in this film, The MPAA is the highest order of people to give a movie a rating, they give the final word. The MPAA gave this film a NC-17 because of the slight sexual content. 

The second film we were assigned to watch was “A Decade Under the Influence” which was an American Documentary Film and is all about the “turning point” in American movies during the 1970’s. It was directed by Ted Demme and was actually his last film that he directed before he died in 2002. I liked this film as well, It’s interesting hearing about what made the cinema world blow up and how did it happen. Everything they thought would change the world is blown out of the water now by newer and more quality technology. If I had to pick between the two films thenI would definitely choose “This Film is Not Yet Rated” because I could relate to that more and it was more about modern cinema, but I enjoyed learning about the past as well.

The Cinema industry will always be in our life, but so will ratings. Overall, I think ratings on movies are a very helpful and useful tool for so many people when researching movies. 

The concept of motion picture is a very unique one. Purely for the entertainment of the audience. Something we could easily live without but also something that has changed all of our lives for the better.

Nothing makes people more comfortable than watching a movie in their home. There is so many genres and types of movies you can watch. I strongly believe that there is a type of movie for every person on this planet. Motion picture was invented in 1892 by Edison and Dickson. Their invention obviously took off almost immediatley and was commercialized the following year. It obviously never looked back from there. Expanding and expanding quickly across the world. The field of cinema turned the world around. Jobs and lifestyles have come from that industry. Actors and actresses are some of the highest people in the world making you an instant celebrity. Thousands of movies are produced every year across the world.

For our film this week we were assigned to watch “Film History: Rise of the studio system. I really liked the brief history that it gave on the start up of motion picture. Edison ended up not happy with the amount of foreign films on US screens. He stablished a group called “The Trust” or “Edison Trust” in which their responsibilities were to standardize the distribution of movies and motion pictures, making it allowable to only have US films shown on US screens. They introduced the concept of rentals and tried to end the basic sale of movies and films. They were cut as a group in 1915, only seven years after they established, they shut down. Shut down for conflicts within the industry. In the film they talked about how the US was so successful because of pivotal political and global factors around that area in that time frame. The three examples and major events that were talked about to back up this statement were the fact that the Panama Canal opened, Franz Ferdinad was assasinated and also “Filming of a Birth of a Nation”. The Panama Canal opening was a huge factor because that really showed everyone that we were in “perfect economic condition”. This made it able to produce very quality movies and films. The US put a lot of time and effort and money obviously to produce “Birth of a Nation” With Franz Ferdinand dying, that forced Europe into World War 1 making the film production all over that country to come to a hault only boosting US to jump over competition when it came to film production at that time.

I really liked this film as I learned a lot about the history and how motion picture really lifted off. I don’t think we realize how much we learn and focus on movies and short mini series. We spend a lot of our free time on. Netflix or Hulu or any other streaming site and we sit for hours and watch these movies and series. Films and motion pictures consume so much of our time.

Today’s norm is so much different then yesterday’s norm. Online technology keeps on advancing everyday. The potential of advancement in our lifetimes is too big of a concept to even grasp yet. I feel like a lot of credit needs to be given to social media for these enormous leaps from technology. Social Media has changed our whole world. From very little contact coming from technology in the beginning of my life to now, where everyone communicates online. Only about fifteen years later. 

Social Media has recently become relevent in modern day society. When it first started to take off, Facebook was the head of the run because they were the first social media platform that really took off. Nobody ever saw anything like that until Facebook appeared and completley changed the game. After that, new platforms really started to come in, such as Instagram, snapchat, myspace, Tumblr, Twitter, and now more recently TikTok. All of them are a little different from eachother. A few of those platforms primarily focus on communication while the other platforms primarily focus on entertainment and “Likes” “Follows”, everything to keep your “status” up. Social Media allows you to create whatever kind of version of yourself that you want. Which is a negative about the whole concept. Since this is the case, I feel like you can’t really trust anything that you see on social media. Pictures, videos, stories, you can never be sure what is true and what is not. 

Social Media and present day entertainment isn’t just viewed from your phone. It can also be viewed on the Television or even listened to on the radio. There was a huge roar in television entertainment had its run of “Trash TV” which were shows that were overall pretty dumb and cringe, but the catch was that you couldn’t look away because of how entertaining it was. The Jerry Springer show is the top show when talking about “Trash TV”. His show was based around confrontation and really personal/awkward problems. Usually the show would escalate to someone crying or fighting or some kind of plot twist to make the audience react. Dr. Phil is also one of these shows. It’s really bad publicity but the people love it. When watching “The Outrage Machine” it went into the subject of Outrage TV where people go crazy on camera for attention and publicity. You see this more now on social media with interviews or funny videos to try and achieve the same thing. The Fame. A lot of people will do a lot of things to get really rich and famous. Some people are okay with trying to ahieve that goal in front of a live audience and cameras broadcasting to millions of people world wide. 

Overtime, Social Media will keep advancing and become even more apart of our lives. Jobs and lifestyles are starting to appear from social media. That will only inspire people to make it bigger and better. Social Media will be an impactful thing for most if not all of our lives. 

The world wide web is one of the most impressive and astounding things that humans have accomplished. The internet completley runs our lives right now. Everything that has to be done currently with COVID forces the world to be placed on the internet platform together. The network that it has created brings everyone together and makes it so much easier to communicate not face to face.

Technology has changed the world so much just in the past decade. Some changes have been very positive and some changes has been very negative. The Internet exposes the entire world. This is great because you can find out anything you want to know by just typing www. This can also be a very scary thing, however. Once the Internet started blowing up and people started realizing how much you can see, privacy became a really talked about issue and not only did this freak people out but it made people know that the internet wasn’t something to mess around with, you have to be very careful. I have had the internet my whole life. I don’t know any different. My parents however were grown adults when technology really started kicking off and the internet blew up. That must’ve been so weird at first from not having any sort of contact like that, to then being able to find out anything just by typing. Now, we are going to school through the internet. People are working their jobs from the internet. The most successful entrepreneuers are mostly online on the internet. It has completley changed the standards of norm. You can live from the internet.

Our screening this week was The Digital Nation. It really talked about the truth of technology and the internet. It first aired on February 2nd, 2010. Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff are the two main people on the show. They really go into detail about the risks and possibilites of the internet. USing other people experiences and stories to break down what is happening online. It is such an advanced and complex concept that people don’t even try to understand, but there are things we need to know about the web. I really liked the film, it really opened my eyes to what is really behind the www. We are adapting and moving towards the internet world slowly as a whole but it also does talk about how bad it potentially can be for you. There is so much lost time spoent on the internet and online. It is one thing to be making money and being very productive and efficient on the web, but there are also people (mostly younger generations) that just oprefer to be online rather than do anything else, problems usually occur from that rather it would be educational or social, those are important times in a kids life. Too important to be spent on a screen. There are even third world games online where it is just a simulation to pull you from reality. An example that mostly everyone knows is SIMS. SIMS is fun but the truth is, it just a virtual reality that doesn’t benefit you in anyway. Internet will always be apart of our world from now on, it has davanced too much to ever decline again. We just can’t let it control us.

We continued to discuss the world of Television this week in our Wednesday class. Theres is so much to talk about when on the topic of TV and how it has changed our world. TV stars are some of the most influential people one our planet. They have all of the attention, so they also have a platform to speak on and share their opinion. TV has shot up like a rocket overtime. Like every technological advancement, it took time for the TV to really lift off even though it was mind blowing from the start. it became a household object which meant everyone was watching the same thing, the same people, the same platform and TV service.

We focused more on the power that Woman brought to the world of Television. A lot of older shows were focused on men but then Women started entering the game of TV and then never looked back. We watched a film from the “Pioneers of Television” called “Funny Ladies”. I think we watched this film because of the one very pivotal actor in that film. Lucille Ball was part of the first wave of women that really got their feet when in acting. I Love Lucy is one of the most iconic TV shows of all time and she was the star. It’s a very old show and it has been for a while being in all black and white. However, even though it is old, everyone knows that show. I am only 19 years old and I have known about that show since I was a small child. We then had to watch a film and read about a girl named “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. The episode we had to watch was called “Hush”. The whole concept of the show was really good. A group of mystic “ghouls” called “The Gentlemen” steal everyones voices leaving everything silent. It took a very unique approach to this episode which made me very intrigued. It was even nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a drama series. In the end of the episode Buffy fights and eventually wins everyone’s voices back by destroying the “voice box”

Television will only keep getting more advanced and better. The more into the future we get, the more efficient the idea of the TV will be. It’s so hard to even guess what kind of changed will happen to the TV. With VR becoming a popular feature to watching things, who knows what else could happen. very exciting to think about. We can’t forget though that the past history of TV paves the road for the future. TV will forever be a impactful object in our lives. As we get into the future, TV might become a mandatory thing. There will always be people who don’t use a TV but I’m really not sure how long we’ll be able to confidently say that. From the beginning of TV watching the first Moon launch to now, millions and billions of dollars are put into shows every year. I don’t see this field of work stopping or even slowing down anytime soon.