Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Medias impact on society
Medias impact on society
Medias impact on society
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
My article deals with the study of society and social interaction of the Middle Class and how they survived on a Nickel and Dimed. In our text (n) 2, (pg. 42, paragraph 2) the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich brought the two stories together by research, that it is, impossible to make it on minimum wage work. The journalist observed in her study the mindset of the working Middle Class people, their persistence to make ends meet, to take care of their household, family and the will to make thing change. The “Middle Class” an aimless expression applied to those who is not on the system of welfare. In the United States certain development changed the past three decades, due to after World War II, the benefits of growth, and money making flow to
Truman Capote uses the Clutter family to represent the rising middle class of the 1950s America by describing their way of life, based on how they live, what they have, and how the community views them. The Clutter family is a perfect and typical example of following the American dream. The Clutters own their own home, they have a car, and they earn enough money to live comfortably and peacefully on a daily basis. Mr. Clutter, the head of the household, helped achieve this American dream for his family by graduating college and getting a degree in agriculture and getting a wife and family. The middle-class people are neither classified as rich nor poor.
In the article, “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor”, Bell Hooks, Gloria Watkins penname, conveys three important things about the lower class: The ways people of lower class are treated in our society, how the mass media portrays them, and how people of lower-class see themselves. People who are poor or near the poverty line are often not represented properly in our current society. Furthermore, when hooks attended Stanford University, she noticed that many of her peers and even professors would make judgements about the poor. In addition, while many of her peers could go home during the breaks, Hooks couldn’t because she could not afford to visit family.
The result is a “class system based on widening gaps in income wealth, and power between those on top and everyone below them” (Johnson 44). Although many Americans despise their lot in life, they have little choice but to work for the oppressive system. Capitalism produces oppressive consequences in which the class system provides little to no security to those who are not in the top ten percent. Bambara does not hesitate to call the reader’s attention to this fact through the ideas of Miss Moore. Sylvia narrates that Miss Moore is “boring us [the children] silly about what things cost and what our parents make and how much goes for rent and how money ain’t divided up right in this country” (Bambara 146).
the author Nicholas Kristof discusses how the working class is suffering and are not getting the desired exposure. He explains the situation using the anecdote of his friend Rick Goff, a tone that is somewhat biased, and concrete description portraying the sufferings of the working-class Americans. Nicholas Kristof has been associated with The New York Times since 2001. He has studied in both Harvard and Oxford and has
Carelessly, the working middle and the high class people always forget about what the poor working class has to do in life to survive. In a passage from the novel, The Working Poor Invisible In America, David Shipler compares the poor working class wages to the amount of food they are able to buy. Shipler is able to creatively inform the audience using description, exemplification, and cause and effect what the life a poor working class citizen does everyday. David Shipler shapes an image in the minds of all of his readers with his selective word choice. As a result of not having the money to pay for food, parents are forced to let their children starve, and as a result those children start looking “listless”.
In this society, working class are valued due to their hard work ethic, especially those working class who made a living by their sweat equity without a college education, because they struggled economically which also means not every working class can have that success . On the other hand working class are known as lazy people, failures, uneducated people. In American popular culture, according documentary Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class, by “Leistyna” working-class people are often portrayed as losers, however the documentary focus mostly on under-representation of working class people and their concerns and stereotypes use to portray their intersectional identities. If you go to work and do your job then go home, and have no or little control or authority of your work, you belong to working class,
The depictions and attitudes towards people who are generally viewed as economically and culturally lower than the perceived norm can be explained through social interactionalism and the concept of Otherness. During the 2000s, working class individuals who gained large amounts of wealth through the Australian mining boom were depicted as being culturally inept and accused of spending money incorrectly by the media (Pini et al, 2012). This is due to the cultural authority of the middle class and media using the class differences of these ‘bogans’ to generate an image of them as an Other, this image is further recreated as individuals interact with the image and replicate it in further social interactions, thus committing symbolic violence against the working class (Pini et al, 2012). It could be argued that this backlash to the financial improvement of the working class comes from a position of insecurity, seeing that the economic class hierarchy was being challenged the middle- and upper-classes used the distinct cultural differences between them to maintain the strict stratification of the classes. This cultural authority is further exemplified by the fact most Australians identify themselves as middle-class (Huang, 2023).
However, because Life was mostly focused on the middle class, they encouraged other classes to become middle class. “…although the editors presented class boundaries as definable, they also showed how standards could be adopted; thus defined, they also became permeable, as once boundaries were marked, they could be crossed” (Webb 28). By solely focusing on the middle-class lifestyle, Life created the true middle-class ideal: a family living in a large suburban home. This ideal spoke to many middle-class Americans as it presented an opportunity in the middle of economic hardship.
The poor are lazy and have nothing to offer: this seems to be the mindset for most of society and media. As bell hooks (1994), a prolific writer, wrote Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor, (an excerpt from “Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations”, published in 1994) , she argued that the representation of the poor portrayed by society and the media is far from actuality.
Television help to develop many cultural norms that societies experience in everyday life. In the 1970’s viewers are introduced to a revolutionary change that became popularized and broadcast in most American homes. That type of television discusses civil issues that focus on topics that influence media dissimilarities such as racism, poverty, sexuality to sexism. These particular television shows pave the way for any show that one can view today that exudes diversity. Family Situational Comedies introduce an interesting, unique and unbiased point of view that presented the lives of different families you could actual find in America who weren’t perfect and face real struggles.
In Bell Hooks’ essay, “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor”, Hooks addresses and clarifies the misinterpretations that people have of the assumptions made of the poor, how poor individuals are viewed in human culture and how the poor are represented on television. She helps the audience understand how these assumptions are wrong. Hooks begins her first point by addressing the false assumptions that are made every day about poor people through expressing her own experiences.
Over the past week, I was tasked to choose between one of two articles that all of the incoming freshman at Union County College in preparation for the up and coming school year. This decision will forever change the way the incoming students will do before stereotyping a certain race, religion, or sexual preference. One of the articles I had to choose from was called, “Don’t Let Stereotypes Warp Your Judgments” By Robert L. Heilbroner, while the other one was called, “Black Men and Public Space” by Brent Staples. Both articles were somewhat similar in the fact that they both talk about how the typical person, in most situations, stereotype people in a bad or even a good way. The articles also talk and teach that stereotyping is bad and
There are many controversial topics that we see on a daily basis through the media. Some of the topics that we are exposed to are race, stereotypes, sexism and sex. These things seem to be a key factor in how media makes its presence felt. Whether it is through T.V. shows, how stereotypes and race are still a common trend in present day movies. I believe that stereotyping is everywhere you look movies and T.V. in particular but also music.
Upon receiving a salad, burly and masculine Parks and Recreation character Ron Swanson says “There’s been a mistake. You’ve accidentally given me the food that my food eats.” This response, while fictional, drives the societal response which often comes with food and our gendered perception of it. The norm for men is to eat meat and large amounts of it. While women, generalized as the submissive gender tend to order a salad while out at a restaurant.