Reflecting BCM110

From media concepts, ownership and raunchy children and I still think having to introduce myself was the hardest post to do.  In these past 7 weeks I have learnt more than I ever did at school, because I’m interested. Researching and delving in to these topics to discover information I never knew existed have made angry, upset and most of all happy.  I’ve definitely gained different perspectives on some topics, reading other classmates blogs and opinions is also great, in a way it’s a public sphere. (Told you!).

Where to start… I think Albert Banduras’ Bobo Doll Experiment angered me quite a bit as I thought how can he make a solid argument  that children would copy an adult doing a particular behaviour or action when Bandura has put them in an extremely controlled environment, he set out his ‘experiment’ so that he could get the answer he wanted. This type of behaviour is  also seen in my week 5 blog post as The Biggest Loser producers put the contestants into a controlled environment to achieve their set goals.

I am a lot more skeptical of the media as I’ve learnt and experienced how easy it is for the media to persuade and morph the audiences opinion to feed their stories and reports.
Being able to write down my opinion and thoughts has helped me a lot, I am usually a very opinionated person but writing down my thoughts has helped me be less bias and more factual rather than just stating my opinion without any evidence to back myself up. 

BCM110 lectures are without a doubt my favourite lectures, there’s never a dull moment thanks to Sue! The people I’ve met, the information I’ve learnt and the experiences so far are unforgettable. Blogging is something I’d like to keep doing because it’s had such a positive impact on myself and showed me a whole new way to express my thoughts.

Sexy, Susceptible and Sixteen

“Corporate Paedophilia is concerned with commercial exploitation of and predation upon children, not only as naive consumers of the products corporations peddle, but also as tantalising lures used to promote consumption by others.”

In 2012 Witchery launched a clothing brand for girls aged between 8 and 14 called 8fourteen.

“Meet Bethany, surfer girl, vegetarian, style obsessed”
Their advertising campaign  involved “meeting the personalities” which was two 45 second videos of 2 girls giving a few details about themselves. Innocent enough right?
The overall tone of the videos was flirty and romantic, shot in black and white accompanied with acoustic music in the background. The girls are supposed to be modelling and promoting the new clothing range yet they are only wearing one outfit for the video and the camera is mainly focused on the face and body language more than the fashion.

The sexualization of children, mostly girls is a growing epidemic throughout the media. The Australian Physiological Society (APS) says “Research has shown that the exploitation of children, particularly girls, as sexual objects has a detrimental effect on adolescent development, increasing the risk of depression, eating disorders and low self-esteem.  The unrealistic depiction of children in a sexualized manner is not only harmful to girls and women but has wider consequences in the community.”
Children’s attitudes, desires and in return their behaviour  can be shaped by the media through advertising. Children have trouble distinguishing television advertising from other program content, in recognising the persuasive intent of advertising, and in understanding the language of advertising.

Is this the right way for our youth to be depicted? Do we really need to sexualize children at all, is this the only way to sell the products?

The weights on for The Biggest Loser

The extremely controversial television show The Biggest Loser has definitely been brought into the public sphere over the past few years about the treatment of the contestants in relation to their health and well being while on the show and what happens when they don’t have a personal trainer there every day of the week to tell them how to eat and train when the show finishes.   Former Biggest Loser contestant Andrew Costello tells news.com about the extremes the popular television went to, to keep the audience watching each week. “In my series a weekly weigh-in was NEVER filmed after just one week of working out. In fact the longest gap from one weigh-in to the next was three and a half weeks. That’s 25 days between weigh-ins, not seven. That “week” I lost more than nine kilos. I had to stand on the scales and was asked to say the line, “wow, it’s a great result, I’ve worked really hard this week”. The producers make losing excessive amounts of weight in 1 week achievable, so when people who want to do this watching from home try, and don’t get these results, they give up.

The Australian Communications and Media Authorities’ (ACMA) 2014 television investigation chart has done an investigation on The Biggest Loser as they found “Provocation of dislike and presentation of participants in reality TV concerning weight loss”. Not only do the contestants get treated poorly on the reality TV show, but so do the audiences, we are dragged in with their sob stories and feel sorry for them and sort of just think it’s okay for them to be 70 kgs overweight, we are saying it is okay for them to be unhealthy because of what they have been through.

There has been debate on whether The Biggest Loser is any good at all, Pete McCall a San Diego based exercise physiologist says “There seems to be no rationale for exercise program design. Clients are pushed to their limits, which places them at risk of injury and over training. From the episodes I watched, there was no mention of how to design an effective, efficient workout.” Kevin Moore, a 2013 contestant and the heaviest member The Biggest Loser has had on the show was rushed to hospital after doing a work out because he had an irregular heartbeat. Kevin Moore was used as promotion throughout the lead up to the 2013 show as a tactic to generate viewers and create favourites. Another way for channel 10 to push the ratings.

The Biggest Loser has brought a great deal on controversy into the mediated public sphere and will continue to do so unless the exercise plans change. As former Biggest Loser contestant Andrew Costello states “I would say that about 75 per cent of the contestants from my series in 2008 are back to their starting weight. About 25 per cent had had gastric banding or surgery… I lost 50 kgs, but have put 25 kgs back on since the show… Anyone can lose weight in a controlled environment; I’d say it’s almost impossible not to lose weight on the Biggest Loser.” Although there are some good qualities as it shows people if you work hard enough you will achieve your goals, it is in no way as easy as losing 9 kgs in 1 week. Get real Biggest Loser.

 

 

 

 

 

Free the media! Does it even matter?

Whoever or whatever keeps controlling the media to shape my views and opinions, stop! Stop now! On the grounds that… it’s working! If you watch the news or current affairs on TV or radio or however you receive it, chances are, your own attitudes, morals and opinions have also been shaped by the media. “Whoever owns the media owns the message” this quote from Elizabeth Harts’ Case Study 6 is very powerful. It’s also very true. The powerful individual company that controls the media, potentially can brainwash the consumer. “Notwithstanding variables such as economic, cultural, social and political conditions, a nation with only five media owners
probably has less freedom of expression than one with twenty-five, because you would expect the twenty-five to represent a greater variety of views”. Having only 5 media owners would also mean less freedom of speech as the media outlets would limit the opinions and attitudes spoken by the public about the current news issues. Having a more diverse amount of media owners would better the consumers as it would mean revealing them to more of a variety of opinions. Which brings me to privately owned media. Privatised media has positives and negatives but I think privately owned media is more accurate for the consumer because they can write about what they like, it’s not censored  or altered. Privately owned media  is constantly under threat because they could lose the market  share to a competitor so they constantly have to be producing and broadcasting the best.
Although the ownership of the media is laid down by the Broadcasting Services Act 1992  and over saw by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Australia still has high concentration on media ownership. According to Reporters Without Borders in their 2013 poll Australia is coming 26th on the list of countries  for freedom in the press. Considering we are a first world country with a Commonwealth government that is pretty poor. “This year’s index is a better reflection of the attitudes and intentions of governments towards media freedom in the medium or long term. “ This shows Australia still has a way to come until freedom of speech and opinion in the media is properly recognised.

No matter what company or person owns the media people will still watch it, read it and listen to it. So I guess it doesn’t really matter if the media is free or not, because it will never die, people will always want to hear about current affairs, true or not.

Vietnam Execution

Eddie Adams, Feb 1 1968, Vietnam Execution, image, Famous Pictures, 20 March 2014
http://www.famouspictures.org/vietnam-execution/

For this week’s blog on semiotics, I have chosen the photograph Eddie Adams took during the Vietnam War of a Vietnamese general in Saigon holding a gun point blank at a suspected Viet Cong.

There are many denotations surrounding this picture, at a glance you feel sympathy for the suspected Viet Cong (Nguyen Van Lem) and wonder exactly what he did to deserve such an immoral and degrading death. The look on the soldiers face behind the shooter (Nguyen Ngoc Loan) looks as though he is smiling, like this type of violence happens every day, which it would in war. The clothes Nguyen Van Lem is wearing are simple like he is just a civilian, which gives the feel that he has been wrongly accused. The fear and desperation on his face as he’s just given up and waiting for the blow to his brain is what gave this picture the Pulitzer Prize. “No war was ever photographed the way Vietnam was, and no war will ever be photographed again the way Vietnam was photographed,” Adams says.  As you feel anger towards to shooter and towards Adams for not trying to reason with the man, the connotations of this picture tell a completely different story.

“Two people died in that photograph: the recipient of the bullet and General Nguyen Ngoc Loan” – Eddie Adams.

General Nguyen Ngoc Loan had allegedly been told that Lem had been caught having murdered not only South Vietnamese police but their civilian family members and Loan was just doing his job to save the lives of innocent civilians. After Loan pulled the trigger, he walked up to Adams and said, “They killed many of our people and many of yours.” The disgust and hate Loan and his family received from the media and anyone who saw the picture but did not know the story behind Lem and his high ranking as a Captain of the Viet Cong troubled Lem for many years. Adams never came to terms with the fact that the anti-war movement and media saw this photograph as proof that the Vietnam War was unjustified. He believed that this picture only told part of the truth. In An Unlikely Weapon, Adams said he found the attention given to this photo disturbing: “I still don’t understand to this day why it was so important, because I have heard so many different versions of what this picture did, like it helped end the war in Vietnam.

Eddie Adams photograph Vietnam Execution is so iconic it’s the first image that popped into my head as controversial. There are many connotations and denotations surrounding this picture as well as many different views. Depending on what information you’ve read or heard will completely change the way you see this photograph and how you feel towards both men.

Media, accessory to murder

The ‘media effects’ model, where to start?

Well first of all, the way I see this model is as a scapegoat for all the underlining problems behind the reasons as to why people commit violent crimes. David Gauntlett in his article “Ten things Wrong with the ‘Effects Model” points out that even after so many years of experiments and testing this theory, there is still not enough evidence to suggest the media has the power to cause people to act out in such violent ways. “It has become something of a cliché to observe that despite many decades of research and hundreds of studies, the connections between people’s consumption of the mass media and their subsequent behaviour have remained persistently elusive”

Something that I found hard to watch was a YouTube video that Professor Sue Turnbull showed the class called the Bobo doll experiment (link posted at bottom). Albert Bandura conducted a controversial experiment, to study the patterns of behaviour of young children after seeing a video themselves of an adult hitting the bobo doll aggressively to then see if these children would copy the adult. Bandura concluded that the children who watched the video of the Bobo doll being aggressively hit were more likely to act in an aggressive way themselves.

Although this experiment has helped move studies from just academic psychology, to cognitive psychology, the basis of the theory is skewed in the way that he set out his experiment to get the result he wanted. Media to an extent can have an effect on the way people act and perceive violence, however, it is not the main factor as to why the public chose to act violent.

References

David Gauntlett 1998, Ten things wrong with the media ‘effets’ model, David Gauntlett, 15 March 2014
http://www.theory.org.uk/david/effects.htm

Bandura, 1961, Albert Bandura Bobo Doll experiment 1, podcast, 25 September 2012, Youtube, 15 March 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YclZBhn40hU

omg uni

My baby

Hey everyone, my names Elise. I’m nineteen years old and I am currently doing my Bachelor of Communications and Media. Since as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to be on TV (I know how typical) but I decided a few years ago I didn’t just want to be on TV, I wanted to change the way people see things and how the news is produced. I want to be a news reader maybe an international affairs correspondent. I can’t go a day without watching something from Louis Theroux or Hamish Macdonald. 

I love animals more then anything else, if I wasn’t doing this i’d be a zoologist. I think one of the best pets I’ve ever had was my duck Archie, I raised her from a duckling and she thought I was her mother, followed me everywhere, cutest pet on earth. Music is definitely my favourite pastime, anything from punk rock to metal. After finishing uni I want to go travelling, mostly to mexico for a few months, then wherever it takes me. 

I’m super excited to get started in this course and explore all the things UOW has to offer me.