Writing Homework Help

Drawing from your readings AND the videos, answer the following questions. Make sure to provide specific examples. Use your own words to define terms. Feel free to draw upon discussions with your classmates as well.

What is the role of the mass media in culture? Are there negatives as well as positives? Provide some examples.

To start the thinking process…

Culture and communication are intertwined. Through language, culture exists, and through culture, language exists. For example, in Sri Lanka, there are specialized tools used in the cultivation of rice, which is the staple food of the culture. As such, these tools have names in Sinhala that are specific to our culture and have a special place in our culture because of the significance of rice. Likewise, Iceland provides a strong example. It is perhaps an overstatement to say that Icelanders can still read the old Norse sagas as they were written over a millennium ago, but it is true that Icelanders have carefully preserved their language over the centuries, and Icelandic is the least changed of the modern Nordic tongues. This has to do with the Iceland’s isolation from mainland Europe as well as the government’s long-time agenda to preserve the language and protect it from outside influences. To that end, a government committee works to create unique Icelandic terminology for new things, such as sjónvarp(“vision projection”) for TV, rather than incorporating loanwords into the language.

Culture can be unique from one person to another. However, we often generalize for the purposes of studying culture—it would be rather impossible to study every member of a particular culture after all! A good example is we watched a documentary on honor killing today and after we watched the video, one of my former students mentioned that Baptists and Muslims may not see eye to eye. This illustrated how even when we learn about the issues of objectivity, subjectivity, and generalization, we are so programmed to think in terms of subjective generalization, that we find it difficult to break those modes of thought. It is completely natural for us to generalize groups. It is the human nature. We sometimes try our best to leave our prejudices behind; however, is it possible?

We learn “our” cultural values from day one. Even as babies, we recognize our parents’ voices, learn about who is family and who isn’t, learn what foods to eat and what not to eat, learn what language to speak, often begin to attend religious services, engage in ethnic events, and otherwise are immersed in a culture into which we were born. As we grow, we may expand our notions of who “we” are and who “they” are, delve into foods outside the culinary traditions of our own background, convert to different faiths, learn a different language, relocate to another country, and marry into a different ethnic group—trust me, I have done most of these things, and doing so is becoming more common every day.

Take a look at this video on Japanese pre-School. Look at how they learn “their” culture from a very young age.

Early childhood education in Japan: My nursery is different (Learning World: S3E35, 2/3) (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. (Links to an external site.)

Their staple food: rice. Parents must send a “bento” at least twice a week, so kids will learn how to appreciate their parents; kids do physical exercise every day, because good health is important in their culture.

While many social institutions play significant roles in shaping our culture and our identities, media plays a huge role even once we have reached adulthood. We have to be careful in how we engage with media, because as many of you pointed out in the first week of the course, journalists are SUPPOSED to be objective and that is how many perceive them to be. However, few of them truly are. Some are mercenaries plying their storytelling abilities to the highest bidder, as evidenced by those who jump from organizations with significantly biased perspectives to another organization with the opposite slant without batting an eye at the fact that they have pretended to subscribe to the previous ideology: i.e. ‎Megyn Kelly, Glenn Beck, Joe Scarborough, Dave Rubin, and Bob Novak. Others are nothing more or less than political activists masquerading as impartial journalists but spouting nothing more than political party talking points for the Left or the Right. And, we, the consumers, tend to gravitate to which ever media outlet reaffirms our own subjective viewpoints, reacting in kneejerk fashion to anyone perceived to be offering an alternative perspective. If we have such difficulty in gleaning information about our own culture through the biased media, imagine how much more difficult it can be to learn about someone else’s culture through that same slanted lens: right-wing media painting all Muslims as terrorist, left-wing media portraying all conservatives as racists, and each outlet bashing the perspective portrayed in their rival’s network.

Hope this will be helpful. Happy learning!