Race, Gender and Media Reflections

 This week, my undergraduate project number 1 was due in the form of an essay analyzing a historical artifact and the way it depicts people. For my essay, I chose the Marlboro Man ad campaign, and had a fun time analyzing it. I had previously discussed the Marlboro Man in a class during my freshman year, and was able to fully analyze how it played on societies views of masculinity at the time it aired. A fun fact I found was that Marlboro cigarettes were originally aimed at women because filtered cigarettes were viewed as feminine. For the project, I was also able to interview my parents about what they thought of the ad at the time, for which they said they didn't think too much bout it when it was popular, but now they can notice how modern advertisements incorporate more diverse elements. Coincidentally enough, the topic of the class for this week was masculinity and how it plays a role in our society. In my essay, I incorporated a chapter from Lind's book, Honing Hegemonic ...

This week, our class went over the Black community in the press and how they have been traditionally discriminated against. A discussion item for the week was the Key and Peele skit "Is This Country Song Racist," and really started to get my mind going on how modern day social media and skits like this have turned casual racism into more comedic. In the skit, Keegan-Michael Key shows Peele some country songs he has been writing which turn out to have massive racist innuendos. Peele gets up and leave, but the skit is of course made for the intended purpose of making the audience laugh. After watching the video, I began to think about everything I see on social media, especially Instagram Reels, about stereotypes, not just of Black people but all races. Black people eating fried chicken, Asian people not being able to drive, Indians smelling, etc. A lot of these stereotypes are put into memes for likes and views on social media platforms as a form of comedy. While at face value...

 This past week, our class went over women in media and how their roles are affected due to their gender. The discussion item that was posted on Canvas was a "Mean Tweets" video directed towards two female sports reporters. Being a sports journalism major, I felt inclined to watch the video to see how women in my same profession might be treated differently than me, as I am a man. The video started out lighthearted enough, with the "Mean Tweets" simply being some goofy tweets that could be shrugged off by the women when they heard them. As the video went on, however, the tweets got more vile and obscene. The men who were reading the tweets to the two reporters began to ask if they had to read the tweets and were visibly uncomfortable. Some even called back to a traumatic experience the reporter had and wished it upon her again. Watching a video like that made me realize how much easier it is for women to endure harassment online, especially in a male dominated field...

In this introductory week, I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this class. I knew from some of my peers that this course was very informative to them, but I wasn't quite sure in what way. Getting to learn the foundations of Race and Gender in the Media sense and how they play a role in altering our perception of reality was very interesting, and I'm looking forward to exploring more. In the first/second chapter of Rebecca Ann Lind's book, I learned a ton of new terms that I didn't know to their fullest extent beforehand, such as discourse, dominant ideology and social psychology of stereotypes.  In my Introduction to Mass Media class, I was first introduced to the idea of media bias, media literacy, and all of the pros and cons that come with how the media frames what it tells the public, so most of this information we covered I already had a grasp on. One of the more interesting activities I found and that I wish to discuss was the Buzzfeed quiz on "How pr...