Understanding Media

This blog will be an extension to what was posted on Moodle and will serve as my last post:


After perusing articles on Lexis Nexis through the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign search engine, I found a variety of articles ranging from “Youth-led media summit all set to challenge stereotypes,” “Bridging the cultural divide,” “Youth voice making news,” “New children's show” to “Promote Reading” and other articles that focused on parents fear with technology and the negative impact media is having on their kids. While it hard to pinpoint down one theme, given the diversity of my initial search while online, I will echo some of my fellow classmates that parents are mostly worried about what their children could potentially be exposed to online, coupled with a multitude of other headings.

For example, headlines ranged from “cyberbullying” to helping to explain how some kids construct positive images about themselves while online. Collectively, these articles reminded me of how real life issues are blurred within online media culture. Additionally, some articles that focus on digital natives and digital immigrants, basically those who grew up with technology versus those who had not.

There were thought provoking articles on the absence of role models, helping to explaining why there is a breakdown in the family structure and lack of safe places to play leading to a growing number of children learning their social values from television to lastly how kids construct their own reality, “TV Children Don't Reflect Reality”- A study of how children are portrayed on television, to be released today by Children Now, an advocacy group in California, finds a world of children, mostly white, with no apparent family ties and little interest in school, a world in which religion, financial concerns and social issues like homelessness are almost entirely absent.

Also on Lexis Nexis, there were articles explaining youth behavior to understanding and digital worlds. Additionally, without question, the portrayal and performance of race in video games is a direct result of the historical and present social and economic inequalities that operate through subtle, sometimes unintended processes, expectations, assumptions, and practices. There are so many areas (institutions, corporations, and people) to be blamed for projecting negative stereotypical “cultural authentic” representations, cues, and environmental spaces to youth through video gaming. Reading online do a decent job in highlighting this problem, but they leave the reader wishing for more discussion of strategies to counter or develop meaningful dialogue between youth and adults about what they are consciously or unconsciously learning through video games. Until there is a constant critique and analysis of race/racism and other forms of oppression in society, we should expect oppression to continue to manifest in digital media.

Overall, these articles provided me with some insight into how some youth think, what impacts/affects their behavior, and how mass media shaped identity development leading to choices of gaming/media. Lastly, there were stories that focused on the negative effects of media, and the lack of parental control of youths' web access.

Lastly, I thought the Common Sense Media was good resource for parents and youth.