Media affect our lives. From time to time, media are somewhat reflecting the way we live, even the political and social environment. In fact, the media industry exploits the masses by producing formulated media contact that appeals to mass audiences, they tried to preserve the political and social status quo, so how they are dominating the social ideology?
In the early 90s, “Jurassic Park”, a movie talking about dinosaurs was in theaters. That movie used 3-D animation, brought those extinct huge creatures on the screen realistically. Soon after the movie began to play in the theaters, it became very popular, lots of television programs involving dinosaurs were on air, some TV stations replayed that movie for many times, many places in the U.S. were holding dinosaurs exhibitions, our Bay Area did have, too. Dinosaurs related items were everywhere; dinosaurs became our popular culture for some time in the 90s.
So what were the reasons that people would accept extinct creature as popular culture? In fact, “Jurassic Park” did not only talk about the dinosaurs only, but also did reflect some issues existing in our human world. It is of course an extremely common and ancient conceit to use animal species to stand in for human beings, or particular kinds of humans. The dinosaurs seem to represent to us is a whole alternate model, an elaborate projection, of a racially-varied “society” not unlike our own. On the one hand, “dinosaurs” refers to hundreds of very difficult and distinct species, just like the category of “mammals”. On the other hand, in our popular fantasies we use the term “dinosaurs” as though they were a single species, do have races and ethnicities. Also the movie wanted to tell the audiences that a theory – there are powerful and weak in the human world, not only in the dinosaur world 65 million years ago, powerful should rule the world, which is a firm and eternal theory. In other words, “Jurassic Park” can be read as, among other things, a critique of identity politics and those elements of leftist or progressive thought, principally regarding minorities and the Third World, which fetishize the differences of the exploited while conveniently forgetting that these identities depend for their very existence upon a history of exploitation and cultural hybridization. Furthermore, the movie also suggested that the fortunes of ethnicities, just like those of the dinosaurs, are inextricably tied to the fortunes of the capitalist system that brought them into being: once summoned into existence, they must earn their keep to survive. Thus the politics of identities and “multiculturalism” are being themselves the product of capitalist exploitation: imperial domination yields to domination by the “free market”, in which all identities are just so many laborers and consumers with particular qualities and interests to target and exploit. Since it could bring the issues we facing about, people felt that movie was reflecting the realistic, that was a way how the media tried to preserve the status quo.
That has been interesting, over the past 15 years, school boards have cut physical education programs. In 2005, only about 1 in 4 students in the U.S. attends a daily P.E. class. What exactly means on these numbers? Actually, students didn’t want to go to P.E. class just because they were affected by the media, so how the media played the key role on that? There were 18 movies from 1990 to 2000 that portrayed physical education teachers, and those movies did have three main common themes. First, P.E. teachers were portrayed as only to cheering, chiding or deriding the students for lack of ability, they only told the students what sport activities they were going to do, but rarely shown teaching. I know some P.E. teachers, even today are just talking, not doing; some P.E. teachers finished taking the role, requested the students to do some warm-up exercises, then he or she will let the students do anything they want to do, as long as they are not breaking the school and class rules. They sent out a clear message exactly as a realistic reflection to the audience: teachers should be found in the classrooms, not in the gymnasiums. The second one, P.E. teachers are bullies; I have ever had that similar kind of experience in P.E. class, too. In fact, in those films those involving P.E. teachers, most of the P.E. teachers enjoyed humiliating and verbally and physically embarrassing their students. I still remember how I was embarrassed by my middle school P.E. teacher; just because I did not do sports exercise well. He yelled at me madly and slapped me “YOUR BRAIN HAS DIED!” I felt that was most embarrassing I had ever experienced, I have no idea why many P.E. teachers would like to embarrass students. And the last one was about sexuality. There was a vast difference in how male and female P.E. teachers were depicted. In those films, female P.E. teacher always being portrayed as lesbians, while the male always as sex-obsessed heterosexuals. That was a kind of media impacts, we can see another example how the media are dominating the ideology.
In conclusion, the media are able to keep the status quo over the mass audiences because they are producing the formulized media content, many of them reflect the realistic, and so people would accept them. However, since not every people can interpret the message that media send out, the same kind of media could have a very different kind of impaction.
Sources:
Sartelle, J. (1993, May). Jurassic Park, or Sympathy for the Dinosaur. Retrieved from Bad Subjects: Jurassic Park, or Sympathy for the Dinosaur: http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1993/06/sartelle.html
Dominick, J. R. (2007). The Dynamics of Mass Communications, 9th Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.
