The main theme of Chapter 1 is what the media is and how it works in conjunction with laws, businesses and consumers. As for Chapter 2, the view point shifts to the viewers and it discusses how the media, especially TV, is closely related to and has influence on American history and cultures.
It is surprising that the United States has been criticized as being culturally imperialistic. It seems logical that the U.S. needs to regulate excessive pornography, discrimination, and violent scenes to some extent; however, these characteristics may appeal to a diverse people on an international level. For example, “Sex and the City” has been popular among women in Japan although many of them don’t know much about other American dramas. The movie version has not been released in Japan, and it is currently under debate if it should have age restrictions to watch it in theaters. Japan is more conservative to sexual scenes than the U.S, but “Sex and the City” is popular because it includes entertaining, explicit, and unfamiliar scenes that we rarely expect in Japanese movies. In recent years, the US seems to import more media from the other countries, like anime, so cultural imperialism seems to have become more balanced.
What struck me in Chapter 2 is the media might be a subject which is difficult to define and categorize since it has different contexts and arguments depending on what data is used and who you focus on. I think that the “modeling” and “social learning theory” at times share the same meaning. The only differences are the former only targets viewers who are interested in imitating behavior from the media; however, the latter deals with behavior by observing people, and it does not necessarily include imitating others. But, more often than not, we rarely imitate people who we know or who we find on the street because they want to maintain individuality. American is founded on individualism rather than collectivism. Even if you observe someone’s behavior other than the media, he/she may have learned that kind of behavior from the mass media; behavior is, in most cases, associated with the media. Another theory that contradicts this idea is “catharsis theory”, which means “viewing violence actually reduces behavior.” This idea possibly means that “modeling” and “catharsis theory” does not exist concurrently.
4 comments:
I liked your take on how cultural imperialism is becoming more balance, and your examples with “Sex and the City” and Japanese amime. Rodman alluded to this at one point in his article with tv shows saying that a handful of shows originated in Europe. I think it’s interesting that as media becomes more freely accessible across international borders, many tv show movies and ideas are imported from other countries and adapted to that culture. In stead of simply watching the British version of “The Office”, America watches the American version. Although different cultures borrow ideas from each other there still seems to be a reluctance to completely tear down the walls.
I like how you analyze all the main point that Rodman said and gave us the example. Especially, yes, in Asia like Japan or TW, we've never really had those kind of show showing before. However, now, it becomes popular, but sometimes I wonder, if this is positive? Or it is negative?
Your latter paragraph regarding social learning and modeling theories was an interesting bit, but I feel that we actually imitate a lot more from each other *at a subconscious level* than we ever really realize (clothing!). With that said, it seems to me that most people tend to rely on social learning rather than gaining influence from particular people (modeling, also a form of pedagogy), at least as survival is concerned.
While the USA almost prides itself in its social individuality, it's very easy to detect a difference in a crowd between a group of people who lived in America for a long period of time, as opposed to those who lived in Japan. As a friend of mine once said, "Individuality is like a navel. Everybody has one."
:-)
I find the debate concerning cultural imperialism and censorship a very interesting one. I'm still deciding on the idea of censoring pornography and violent scenes from movies. Even if we censor sex scenes from movies isn't it just as easy to go onto google and search for porn? Can't we turn on CNN at any point and time and hear about sex offenders, rapes, murders, kidnappings, polygamist compounds, and Austrian psychopaths? The FCC has no problem censoring a violent movie for TV, but they don't censor the news. In my opinion the news, which reflects the reality we live in, is much more violent than many movie scenes. Maybe instead of censoring the media so young kids don't watch violent and sex scenes we should be looking a little more deeply at our own culture. I think the only way to fix our problem of modeling negative behavior is not censorship but fixing the problem at it's core. Ideals that were once important to American such as family, conversation, togetherness, and community have been corroded slowly but surely in today's world. Fixing these problems first will make it unnecessary to censor sex and violence in movies because American youth will gain become more discerning and skeptial about the images they see.
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