How Facebook Changed Dating

Local journalism that made a difference

The most compelling story for me is the story about the media coverage of the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island.

For me the impressive thing about this story is that in a large part thanks to one single reporter, Karl Grossman, who covered the issue of the Shoreham nuclear power plant for a family owned local newspaper, The East Hampton Star, a grassroots movement got sparked and continually supported in taking on the big fight against nuclear power culminating in the closing of the Shoreham nuclear power plant., preventing an accident that could kill thousands of people and leave hundreds of square miles uninhabitable.

With his almost weekly published articles in The East Hampton Star over a span of almost 10 years, Karl Grossmann has inspired grassroots actions, emphasized concerns, protests and strategies and reinforced citizen’s confidence to believe in their power to stop the nuclear plant while other media outlets, local or widely-read daily newspapers on Long Island like the New York Times or Newsday either ignored the issue completely or if they were covering the issue they would not express any opinion contrary to the interests of LILCO (Long Island Lighting Company) who built the Shoreham plant or the nuclear industry at large.

Comments made by activists like “Without Karl Grossman’s reporting, Shoreham would not have been closed” or “It was a combination of word-of-mouth and reading the Start that inspired me to get involved” and “Karl Grossman was a critical factor. A few small papers helped us. The major media betrayed us” show how much impact local journalism can have in supporting a cause that is important for a certain community. The story also shows that larger media outlets, like The New York Times, have to play by the rules of their financial supporters, putting their financial well-being before a truthful and balanced coverage of certain issues connected with their supporters.

In this case, however, the ignorance of the major media outlets had no influence in stopping the local journalism, especially in person of Karl Grossman, to speak out for a cause and to help build a grassroots movement that ultimately brought about the closing of the Shoreham nuclear plant.

How can it be ensured that especially local journalism does not have to cautious about what they are reporting concerning controversial issues like this, meaning without having to fear about their financial well-being if they express critical remarks?

Globalization? – Americanization?

We see the process of globalization often as a positive force which gives us the power to cross cultural gaps, unify widely different societies, bring people closer together and integrating them into a “global village”. Thanks to the spread of electronic and digital technologies, physical distance is no longer a barrier and instant mass communications around the world becomes possible.

Seeing all the benefits and advantages of a globalized media makes it easy to forget the fact that a majority of all media is owned by a very small percentage of wealthy corporations in the wealthiest countries imposing their media content, their ideas, images, values and ultimately their culture on the rest of the world.  Local media, let alone individuals do not have the same voice as these global media corporations.

A big part of the world’s population does not even have the chance of making their voices heard or hearing other people’s voices as they are excluded from accessing the internet or other information and communication technologies resulting in isolation from globally distributed media content and information.

While the world’s richest countries have long been using such new media, most of the people in the world are just now seeing television for the first time. Even though there is an apparent global imbalance in the flow of media content and information, a global divide, we still talk about globalization, a wishful thinking of a “global village”, when maybe we should rather talk about an “Americanization” of the media all over the world.

Blog 4 – Media Effects

The most compelling theory to me is the media effects theory discussed in chapter 7. As individual citizens and as a society, we are reliant on the media to give us information about what is happening in the world around us. This goes as far as Niklas Luhmann once said “What we know about the world, we know from the media.” Since media plays such an important role in our lives, the question arose in how far we – our thoughts, our ideas, our opinions – are influenced by the images and messages we are exposed to through newspapers, television, radio, film, music, etc.

As most people accept the idea that media can influence people, the degree of that influence as well as who is impacted when how and why have been the subject of great discussion among scholars and researchers for many years. The answers that have emerged over the years range from a vision of all-powerful media with simple models emphasizing direct media influence and a passive audience (Hypodermic or Silver Bullet model) to more sophisticated  analyses highlighting the interaction of media and an active audience (Minimal Effects Model and Agenda Setting)(p. 231). As the early models left out the “active agency of the reader of the media messages” and “ignored the pre-existing ideas and orientation of the reader”, later models took into account the “ability of the reader to select, screen and judge media information.”

The model I would support, based on my own experiences and observations, is the agenda setting model, which is the ability of the media to direct people’s attention towards certain issues. This means the media may not affect what people think, but may affect what they think about, through the choice of which topics to cover and what to emphasize. What we know about the world is largely based on what the media decide to tell us. More specifically, the result of this mediated view of the world is that the priorities of the media strongly influence the priorities of the public. Elements prominent on the media agenda become prominent in the public mind. Issues that are ignored by the media will most likely not make it into the public discourse. However, as mentioned above, what people think about an issue, their thoughts and opinions, depend on many more factors than just the media message itself.

Free Press

“Free Press is a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to reform the media.” The “grass-root” organization, launched in 2002 by media scholar Robert W. McChesney and Josh Silver, works against the corporate domination and control of the media and their influence on the government to implement media regulations concerning ownership, content, technology and distribution in their favor.

As the largest media reform organization in the United States, with nearly half a million activists and members and a full-time staff of more than 40, Free Press encourages people to engage in policy debates concerning media, in support for regulations that serve and protect the public interest against monopolistic corporate practices (p. 91), that promote diversity in programming (p. 81) and that support publicly owned media (p. 91).

Consequently, Free Press frequently challenges the Federal Communications Commissions by making them aware of certain drawbacks in for example the continuing media consolidation or concerning the future of the internet with the main focus on the issue of net neutrality. What does still have to be done to maintain/achieve net neutrality and prevent the cable companies from giving users unequal access to the internet?

Ideology in Reality-TV

Television has the power to shape our perceptions of reality and the world around us by affecting our attitudes and certain ways of thinking. As in this day and age, the genre of reality television is one of the highest grossing, fastest growing, and most popular genre of shows on the air and it being almost impossible to turn on the television and not come across some kind of reality television, I decided on looking at the dominant ideologies presented to us through different kinds of reality television programs.

By looking at reality-TV shows like Survivor, The Amazing Race, The Biggest Looser, The Bachelor or America’s Next Top Model, two major ideological views seem to stand out: the belief that competition is the key to success and the perception of a certain body image as beautiful. Amongst others, shows like Survivor and the Amazing Race reinforce the idea that life is nothing but a competition that we continually engage in with each other. In the end it is always one person that wins – it’s about the survival of the fittest. In shows like The Biggest Looser, The Bachelor or America’s Next Top Model the two ideologies are combined. To be the winner of the competition and to be perceived as beautiful one has to comply with a certain body image which especially applies to women. Women are beautiful if they are thin, wear fashionable clothing, and date the right man.

The ones ultimately benefiting from imposing these ideologies on the viewers are the business people trying to sell us things we don’t really need just to stay in competition with our friends about who has the coolest and newest stuff as well as the tons of beauty products and fashionable clothing that are supposed to make us the most beautiful of all.

The dangerous thing is that the ideologies promoted through reality-TV are very powerful on us which has to do with the title “reality television” itself. Including the term “reality” suggests to viewers that what they see is a completely genuine and unbiased presentation of “real” life with “real” people. Viewers are therefore able to relate to these people and identify with them even more than with people from scripted television programs which makes the effect of the promoted ideology even stronger.

Blog #1 – Chemistry Class

Back in 2001, two years before Cathy Davidson and the Duke University engaged in the experiment to transform the iPod into an academic device, my 6^th grade chemistry teacher Ms. Gierisch introduced us to a whole new world of collaborative working and collective knowledge called the World Wide Web.

At a time when most of us were still used to the squeaky tones and noises of a 56k modem and in the rest of the school it seemed as the internet had never even been invented Ms. Gierisch showed us a new, exploratory way of learning – learning through searching, surfing and browsing the Web.  She didn’t believe in putting the information, the solution for a problem right in front of us. She knew that the standardized education method of reading through our textbooks page after page and her lecturing us to death would only bore us and we wouldn’t really learn anything. She made learning a challenge, a game where we would have to search for a solution and had to make up our own mind on how to get there, since the Web does not prescribe a clear and linear pathway through the content as opposed to a textbook.

By that she captured our attention and awoke our curiosity about all the information and knowledge waiting out there to be found by us students. As Davidson remarks “It [our brain] is engaged in a different way, when we ourselves are making the connections when we’re browsing from one to another link that interests us and draws our attention.” (p.70)

For her it was always about finding a challenge that would inspire us and help us to believe in our ability to learn something new. She showed us a way of learning that went well beyond the chemistry classroom. By exposing us to the World Wide Web with its infinite amount of information she also fostered our critical thinking and evaluation skills.  She showed us the importance of understanding what is credible and evaluating what is or isn’t good information and how to use it, in a digital age where information comes unsorted.

I think an appropriate boss-level challenge for this class is going to be the video-essay where everything we’ll learn during the quarter “will be put into an important, practical application in the world” (p. 129) that could help others to inform themselves about the relationship between media and culture. We will apply our learning in a collaborative setting and carry our knowledge further into the world.