response to questions 3/3

Response to Shelsea’s first question:

I agree with you. On the surface we are all autonomous creatures. We are all able to think for ourselves, we claim that we can make our own decisions and when the heat is turned up to high through violence and sex in movies and television we are convinced that we can just change the channel – or turn it off all together. So it would stand to reason that we are smart enough to control what seeps into our psyche.
But I beg to differ if you peel back the superfluous layers that pass for our daily niceties and freedom of choice you will see that we are all truly media driven. In other words media has so saturated our everyday lives that even
Our weight, our standard of beauty, our conception of how our peers live, even how and when to spend our money is all carefully orchestrated by media and the corporations that own it. The news spews out story after story all warning us about the newest cancer, the latest kidnapped child, or delivering death to our doorstep all to keep us in fear and to keep us buying products that we really don’t need but are guaranteed to keep us safe (i.e. GPS trackers, cell phones for our eight-year-olds,
Media messages on how to live and look even creep into those avenues of entertainment that we are viewing as a release from our everyday lives.
The best example I can think of right now is the movie The Devil Wears Prada where Meryl Streep tells Anne Hathaways character that she didn’t hire the normal type of girl but instead “went with the smart, fat girl”. The subtle weight issue comes into play again in the film when women’s sizes are being summed up as 2 is the new 4 and 0 the new 2. Hathaway states that she is a size 6 and Stanley Tucci replies “which is the new 14”. I mean do we need any clearer proof that media is promulgating an unhealthy, unrealistic version of women?
When shows like The Hills take a nineteen year old fashion design student and film her life and pass off an edited 20 minute glimpse of the glamour and glitz ,the heartache and house-hunting, the clubbing and back-stabbing we are lulled into being not only passive observers into her and her friends lives but passive observers of our own. I mean really how many fans of The Hills have really taken the time out to think about how she afforded to buy that home in the Hollywood Hills (that was priced in the millions) and then move onto her new condo which comes with a rental price of 15,000 dollars. How many actually believe that she afforded a 15 hundred to two-thousand dollar a month apartment while being an intern (even if paid) at Teen Vogue? Then there are all the nights she was out at the hottest clubs partying – underage mind you; and the designer clothes. How many of those kids that are watching right now any of the numerous reality shows and coveting the glamorous feel, the glossy look and thinking that they are going to be in that same spot the second they get out of high school?
They too will meet local celebrities and be invited to all the right parties and meet their most-excellent boss at the bar-top while they are ordering rounds of tequila shots.
How many of these kids don’t look closely enough to be able to see where the money is coming from? To be able to see that this girl would not be where she is now if it weren’t for some chance location decision back when she was a junior in high school – and that she has only advanced so far so fast because of the ties held between the networks and magazines. She is a great commodity for which the network and her various employers have made quite a pretty penny on – which of course takes me back to how she affords her life-style. The network pays her for her life; she is nothing more than an actress – living the life which has been purchased for her by the media. – In essence inventing her reality and keeping us behind the curtain of consumerism.
Her life has been packaged and compartmentalized served up to us through a very scientific information gathering process called demographics. Whether Nielsen, truckads.com or tracmedia.com they have us and whether we like it or not, entertainment and media, will always have a hold on us.