REFLECTION
Personally for me this text was an eye opener. I have heard many times before of young children stories, movies, TV, and even things such as magazines and comics have contained subliminal messages. The truth to the matter is at a young age one does not have the knowledge and information to understand truly what is going on or what is to be meant by certain actions, phrases, or pictures that occur on television, in movies and in stories. This is where I can personally reflect and say that when I was younger and used to do all of these things I did not notice certain messages that were being portrayed. I did not realize that (as Christensen puts it) we as a society are being conditioned of how to accept certain things such as race, gender, sex, how to act, hot to live, how to dream. It makes me think about how it has possibly shaped children who have the knowledge to understand what is going on. It makes me think of the question of "what if I understood the message?" and how that would make me a different person today. Now that I am older and have the knowledge to analyze and interpret what is happening in a given situation it is quite shocking that a wide variety of children's entertainment has been transformed to allow children to develop a distorted image of others. These distorted images come in the form of racial, gender, and social equality where not everyone is treated as equals. As kids we cannot fully grasp and wrap our minds around these complex societal depictions because we were to young to have experienced them yet. I felt Christensen's article perfectly reflected that of which teaches us how to act within society and we may have possibly been manipulated all this time by different T.V. programs and other media entertainment. I believe Christensen is spot on with her analogy of how society is being secretly manipulated through various forms of entertainment and I believe this should be important for everyone to know about in order to develop respect for others in our culture.
Points to Share/Discuss: Subliminal messages in a variety of children's entertainment can certainly cause them to develop attitudes and emotions towards certain people, culture, sex, or religion. How can this problem be tackled now in order to prevent further conditioning of beliefs in young children?
Connection to another text: This text I believe clearly relates to Johnson and Privilege, Power and Difference because children are growing up thinking there are "bad guys" as depicted in the movies and that American society values SCWAAMP. In reality we must address these problems straight on to find a solution to the problem that exists.
I enjoyed reading your blog. I found everything you said interesting because it is true. As kids, we had no idea what we were really watching. We just say it as a princess and her life basically. We never paid attention to if the princess was a different skin color, was part of a different culture, etc. We just saw her as a princess and we paid attention to how her life was. We never pick up on the racism and sexism in the cartoon until someone says something about it. We then realize and say something like, ooooh the princesses were all white until The Princess and the Frog came out.
ReplyDeleteReflection was a great choice for this particular article because I thought it presented a topic for those who were born in the 90's could relate with. Cartoons were probably a big part of a child's life in the late 90's when all the great cartoons aired but at that time as kids we really didn't pick up on the different images portrayed. Cartoons and other things on T.V. do present a distorted image it just takes analyzing to see that and I thought your points reflected that clearly as well as the different things T.V. tries to teach.
ReplyDeleteI loved your blog Brandon. You did a great job analyzing Christensen's article. All 90's kids can relate to these cartoons. As kids you don't realize that the white person in a king because he is white and powerful; you just think that he is powerful. You don't realize that the colored people are servants for the white people, you just go along with the cartoon or movie because that was how that producers wanted it to be. Children don't realize that producers may be doing it on purpose "secretly manipulating" us. I agree, how can we stop this from happening? or is it just going to keep happening because that is how it and society are run?
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your reflection to Christensen's argument on how media is "secretly manipulating" children. As a child, I was definitely "secretly manipulated" or brain-washed in other terms by media who favored the principles of SWAAMP. I never really realized this until I became older and more aware of the societal issues surrounding me. It definitely is an "eye-opening" issue that will need to be acted upon.
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