Temple University

Fall, 2018

MSP 3421 (002) Technology and Culture

Steve Schwartz

October 31st, 2018

 

How the Media is Changing Gender Roles in American Society

Throughout history, gender roles have been a constant in every society. As defined by Planned Parenthood, gender roles are “how we’re expected to act, speak, dress, groom, and conduct ourselves based upon our assigned sex” (Planned Parenthood, n.p, n.d.). As time has gone on however, these roles are changing. For example, in the 1950s, men were expected to be providers for their family, and women were expected to be homemakers. In contemporary society, it is no longer expected for people to conform to these ‘traditional roles.’ In particular, the gender roles of women have undergone extreme transformations. One major reason for this change is the way the media has portrayed people. Society has become far more progressive since the 1950s, and the media is a significant reason.

The media has in ordinate amount of power in shaping public thought. It is able to sway public opinion in any way they want to. According to agenda setting theory, the media determines the importance, or salience, of items. For instance, if they take a certain stance on a subject such as abortion, those who watch that channel will start to think that way about abortion. As a part of this, the media is responsible for shaping societal norms. It does this not only through news, but through scripted television shows, movies, advertisements, and more. Since most of the world is connected to media outlets in some way, the way the world thinks is essentially controlled by those who control the media.

In every society that has ever existed, gender roles have been present; people like to be organized, and an easy way for people to do that was to organize roles or tasks by genders. However, gender roles are not uniform across different societies. In American society, the male gender role is consistently that of provider, or taking on characteristics of being “confident, competent, powerful, and in high-status positions” (Wood, 32, 1994). Further, “men are seldom shown doing housework” (Wood, 32, 1994). Women, however, “are depicted as passive, dependent on men, and enmeshed in relationships or housework (Wood, 33, 1994). However, this is not the case in every society. In some South Asian countries, women are assigned the role of provider, win men taking on a much more prominent role in housework. With this is mind, it can be stated that gender roles are a social construct, rather than universal laws that are set in stone. As stated above, gender roles are merely expectations, not requirements for how to act. Further, since they are a construct, they are able to be molded and changed over time.

Through the media, gender roles are perpetuated ad nauseum. Turn on any family sitcom, and defined gender roles will clearly be present. In the golden age of television, women were portrayed as not much more than homemakers, whose job was to be a full-time mother and wife. They were not expected or encouraged to try and carve out successful or lucrative careers. Rather, they were expected to stay at home and keep the house tidy. As time has gone on and society has become more progressive, the way these gender roles are portrayed has changed. Men are still portrayed in all the successful positions they were but are now are starting to take on some of the roles that were previously assigned to women. The way gender roles for women have changed is much more significant. Less so they are only being portrayed as homemakers, and more often they are portrayed as doctors, lawyers, or other positions of power or success. A sure sign of the changing times is the recently released movie Wonder Woman. Produced by Marvel in 2017, Wonder Woman is just like any other superhero movie, except for the fact that the main hero is a woman. To release a movie with a woman in such a prominent role 60 years ago would have been unthinkable, since women were discouraged from seeing themselves as anything other than a homemaker. Further, in addition to being cast in prominent roles, more and more women are writing, producing, and directing shows and movies.

Having more women in these prominent roles inspires younger women and girls by showing them that they are capable of doing anything. This is not only the case in movies and television, but in advertising as well. A magazine called Sport England ran a campaign called This Girl Can, which instead of featuring women in what is perceived as a standard of beauty, featured regular, everyday women. By breaking established stereotypes of beauty and roles in society, younger women and girls can be empowered by seeing that people just like them exist in society and are also capable of considerable success.

The changing of roles in society is an important step forward in reaching gender equality. While true equality may never be reached, adjusting the gender roles of women to reflect the times is an important step in that direction. By empowering women, society moves closer towards true egalitarianism, which would permanently shift how society functions as a whole.

 

 

Reference List

Do you support gender roles? Retrieved from https://www.debate.org/opinions/do-you-support-

gender-roles
Lantagne, A. (2014). Gender Roles in Media. Retrieved from

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/allison-lantagne/gender-roles-media_b_5326199.html

Planned Parenthood. (n.d.) What are gender roles? Retrieved from

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/sexual-orientation-gender/gender-gender-identity/what-are-gender-roles-and-stereotypes

Roderick, L. (2017). How the portrayal of women in media has changed. Retrieved from

https://www.marketingweek.com/2017/03/08/portrayal-women-media/

So the harder a wife works, the cuter she looks! Retrieved from

http://mollytreanor.blogspot.com/2013/01/these-are-some-of-1950s-sexist-adverts.html

Wood, J. (1994). Gendered Media: The Influence of Media on Views of Gender. Gendered

Lives: Communication, Gender, and Culture. pp.231-244. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Retrieved from https://www.nyu.edu/classes/jackson/causes.of.gender.inequality/Readings/Wood%20-%20Gendered%20Media%20-%2094.pdf

Wonder Woman Movie Poster. Retrieved from http://gothamcityesq.com/entertainment/women-

only-wonder-woman/attachment/wonder-woman-movie-poster/

 

Temple University

Fall, 2018

 

MSP 3421 (002) Technology and Culture

Steve Schwartz

September 27th, 2018

 

In today’s society, memes are one of the most popular forms of communication. As the internet has grown, the presence and spread of memes has grown with it. Memes are typically thought of as pictures of anything from cats to US presidents with a joke caption. However, the cultural presence of memes goes far beyond funny pictures on the internet. Memes have been around for a very long time, predating the internet by millennia. Like most things, memes are not just what they seem; there is much more depth to them than meets the eye.

To truly understand memes, it is important to define and provide a history about them. The term ‘meme’ was first conceptualized by anthropologist Richard Dawkins, taken from the Greek ‘mimeme,’ which means imitate. Dawkins defined the meme as “a unit of cultural transmission.” (Brennan, 245, 2015). Essentially, a meme can be anything that transmits any item of culture. In another Media Studies and Production class, Media and Society, Professor Barry Vacker incorporates the meme into the foundation of his class. He enlists the knowledge of Susan Blackmore, an English professor. Blackmore expands on Dawkins’ definition by saying “memes can be located both internally…and externally, in any of the many recordable versions” (Abel, 101, 2014). With these definitions in mind, it is easier to see that memes are not just a product of the internet, but a longstanding part of humanity. Take for instance some of the earliest bits of human culture, cave paintings. The reason why cave paintings are not contained to only one cave is because the idea spread to other humans, thus making cave paintings one the earliest memes in history.

In contemporary society, memes have become primarily digital and are generally thought of in this frame. Internet memes started to become more prominent with the creation LOLCats, a meme style that combined pictures of cats with overlaid text, termed lolspeak, that was written as if the cat pictured was thinking/saying it. Since then, internet memes have branched out into nearly every territory imaginable; internet memes now draw upon music, movies, television shows, along with many other facets of pop culture. As internet memes have grown in popularity, they have become more accessible to the average internet user; there are many websites that allow anyone with an internet connection to create and share memes. The growth of memes is comparable to a runaway train: they became more and more popular without any signs of slowing down

While they have more or less found their home within the realm of pop culture, memes have found a very important place in the world of politics. A common cry about the relation of social media to political discourse is that people tend to stay within an ‘echo chamber,’ only hearing opinions and arguments that they agree with and not hearing or listening to anything from the other side of the aisle. By only listening to one argument, people become close-minded. A result of this is that it has become very difficult to start political discourse just by bringing up an issue; people will stay fiercely loyal to their beliefs and opinions.

In 2012, a protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street began. What was different about this movement is that it involved and incorporated memes into the message it was trying to send, that corporate greed had gotten way out of hand. What these memes did was generate counter memes from different viewpoints, generating discourse. As these memes made their rounds on the internet, traditional media networks were also reporting on the protest, providing criticism about the main goals and objectives about the protests. The use of memes in the Occupy Wall Street protest was the subject of an article written by Ryan Milner, who stated “all these critiques were in line with complaints posted across traditional media outlets, suggesting a deep interconnection between the arguments occurring on meme sites and the broader discourses occurring during these protests” (Milner, 2370, 2013). What this shows is that in terms of generating political discourse, the use of memes is as if not more effective than simply starting a conversation in real life/on social media.

 

In an increasingly digital age, memes are becoming a dominant form of communicating with one another. While memes have been around since the dawn of humanity, they have only gained mainstream popularity in recent years. The rate at which internet memes have become popular is truly staggering, as other advances in technology and pop culture have moved much more slowly. By being a medium that is accessible to anyone with an internet connection, memes are revolutionizing the way people communicate with each other and generate discourse. There are even groups of people (my primary group of friends) that are able to communicate with each other solely through the use of memes. As for the future of memes, their popularity and uses in society will only increase, as society becomes ever more digitally advanced.

 

 

Reference List

A lolcat image using the “im in ur…” format. Retrieved

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat#/media/File:Lolcat_in_folder.jpg

Annoying College Kid-Occupy Wall Street. Retrieved

from https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/189413-annoying-college-kid-occupy-wall-

street

Case Study: #OccupyWallStreet. Retrieved

from https://www.micahmwhite.com/occupywallstreet/

Abel, C. (2014). Architecture, memes and minds. Manchester University Press. Retrieved

from https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1mf717q.13

Brennan, K. (2015). MemeLife. University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved from

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt14jxw02.21

Milner, R. (2013). Pop Polyvocality: Internet Memes, Public Participation, and the Occupy

Wall Street Movement. International Journal of Communication, 7(2013), 2357-2390.

Miltner, K. (2014). There’s no place for lulz on LOLCats”:The role of genre, gender, and

group identity in the interpretation and enjoyment of an Internet. First Monday, 19(8).

Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5391/4103

wavywebsurf. (2016, December 12). The Evolutionary History of Memes [Video file].

Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf_MXH0sUwE.

 

Here is a link to a video that I think does a good job of explaining the evolution of Internet memes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf_MXH0sUwE

For this assignment, I chose to focus on something that is personal for me-marching band, and how technology is improving it.

 

I have been involved with music since I was nine years old when I first learned how to play trumpet. My involvement continued through middle school into high school, when I joined my high school’s marching band. I have been involved with marching band for the past six plus years, in both high school and now at Temple. One major difference between my high school’s marching band and the Diamond Band at Temple is that we use technology during rehearsals, as opposed to high school where rehearsals were strictly paper based.

 

In terms of music, having it available on our phones allows us to more efficiently mark spots that are problematic which allows us to more quickly fix them. If we were to use paper copies, it would involve us having to take the music out of our flip folders, mark the music, and put it back in the flip folders. This saved time allows for rehearsal as a whole to run much more efficiently. There are of course people who choose to use paper music as it negates any technical problem that might occur with a cell phone, but the vast majority of the band uses digital copies of music.

 

As for drill (the formations that we make on the field), the entire band is required to have a copy of it in electronic form. Paper forms of the drill are much bulkier as they require a binder, are lot less eco-friendly, and doesn’t allow us to see the drill in real time. With the electronic form of the drill, we are able to see how formations move, our individual pathways to our next spot on the field and are able to learn drill in a much more convenient fashion. It is also eco-friendlier, as paper and the resulting waste are removed from the equation.

 

Compared to my experience in my high school marching band, the Diamond Band is much better off using technology in rehearsal than not. By making rehearsal inherently more efficient, we are able to get more done in a faster time, which allows us to have a better performance come gameday.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton