Final thought... kinda

So this will be our second to last post for the month. For those who don’t know Brian and I started writing this blog for a class that we were taking. This doesn’t mean that the blog will cease for all three of you who probably read it but it does mean that the blog will slow down for a little while. Since we are both full-time college students our work will begin to pick up once again but we will try to continue posting at least once a week.

The point of this blog was and is to find out how media affects our social lives as well as our economy. When we first started writing we used Laura Pappano’s book “The Connection Gap” to help put our ideas in perspective. Both Brian and I being the huge electronics consumers that we are, we did not agree entirely with what this author had to say. Pappano’s main belief as I understood it is that we as human beings have to cherish the small connections that we share with people. She says that even if we don’t recognize it, these small connections with strangers, this is what makes up the human experience. She argues that in our day in age of multi tasking that technology seeks to eradicate these loose connections that we have with people.

What I have tried to argue throughout all of my own post is that with all the new technology that we have to let go of this rigid understanding of what social connections are and start a new definition. I believe that we can still have meaningful connections with people in our technological society without sacrificing human connection. I don’t think people really value the connections that we have with the cashier at the local grocery store or the toll booth clerk. The time spent with those people is so miniscule that it pales in the time spent with more meaningful individuals for it to have an affect on us. Instead I believe that technology allows us to expedite our time so that we can spend more of it with our loved ones.

I do believe that along with technology also comes our fair share of problems, like any social shift there will be trials and errors before people get it right. We have to learn how not to immerse ourselves entirely in technology to the point where we cannot separate reality from technology. This seems to be the main issue faced in my previous post about deaths caused by videogames as well as Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. In these cases people used gaming as a substitute for real life experience. This is a danger to social connections because instead of trying to coincide with technology they are using technology as a real world experience. When one does this and does not live the real world experience it creates issues for that individual and they no longer know how to live or behave in the real world.

The question that remains is whether the scale of real world versus technology is balanced or not? Can we as people who have learned to survive in a technological society still survive without technology? Both Brian and I have discussed how we just use technology and media as an extension of ourselves and it is a tool to accomplish what would take us longer than usual under our own devices. We want to test this to see if this is actually the case. That is why starting tonight at midnight we will take ourselves off the grid and disconnect from the media for a period 24 hours. This may not seem a long time for most but for Brian and I this is an eternity.

Both Brian and I honestly don’t know what the outcome will be. We are not sure if we’ll be able to make it 24 hours with no TV, music, internet, or any kind of media (we are allowing books just for the sake of keeping our sanity). We are both in a strange predicament because we happen to also be in rural Maine so it is not like we can just go out to a Starbucks and spend the whole day there. To be honest, I am dreading this experiment. The way that I usually spend my day is by waking up, putting on some light jazz, and check my email. As of recently I have substituted the light jazz with episodes of South Park but it is pretty much the same thing. I even go to bed at night with the TV on just so I can fall asleep.

Before we even begin the experiment I had to spend all day and yesterday immersing myself in the media and getting work done just so I don’t fall behind and miss out while I’m involved in our experiment. What I predict will happen is that Brian and I will spend all day tomorrow getting chores done around our place as well as visiting friends and talking with them. I’ll probably also read a book that I’ve been neglecting to pass the time. All and all though I have to say that I will fail at this experiment. For those who know Maine, you know that if you don’t ski then there is nothing to do. Well, I don’t ski so I really don’t know how to spend my time here. It should be interesting to see whether Brian and I are affected at all by this experiment and to see if we establish more connections with our loved ones. We’ll be back again for our last post of the month to tell you all how it went.

Killer video games

We all know that it’s said that videogames kill, they cause us to kill others and act violently. We discussed this in the post about videogame violence, but what about violence done to ourselves because of videogames? If you’re not familiar with the story there was a man in South Korea who died from online gaming after playing for 50 hours with no breaks. Are people becoming so addicted to video games that they are literally dying from it?

The story of the 28 year-old Man dying in an internet café may seem a little extreme but as I looked more into this I found that there or more incidents of people collapsing from prolonged videogame playing. One tragic story that I ran across was of 21 year-old Shawn Woolley who shot himself minutes after playing Everquest, the same online game that the South Korean man had died from. Shawn Wolley’s story is a little different though, the article I read explains that Shawn Woolley had quit his job, isolated himself from his family, and on Thanksgiving morning of 2002 Shawn had shot himself to death.

I think videogame addiction is real, personally, I don’t play games that you have to invest hours and hours in. I love videogames and there are plenty of games that I have days of my life invested in. I think for Final Fantasy X I have at least 60 hours logged in for that one game. This pales in comparison to most gamers but to me that is two and a half days of my life that is gone. I do have to admit that I’ve never sat down for a 50 hour marathon of videogames but even though I know some have died from it, it does sound somewhat enticing.

The question remains then, do videogames kill? There is no straightforward answer to this question. Like any addiction is it the substance that kills? Or is it the people who abuse the substance that kill themselves? As I have said before I think people make their own decisions. Videogames might have an addicting quality to it but I would not compare it to the addictiveness of an opiate. If the people who play these games realize that they have spent at least 24 hours in one session playing a game maybe they should reevaluate what they are doing with their lives. Easier said then done I guess.

Elite Media and Mainstream Media

Today JD and I will be talking about mainstream media. Some NBC commercials have recently shown the NBC symbol followed by all the other companies under GE. It is interesting to think that NBC a part of this major conglomerate. Noam Chomsky also points out this fact, speaking of other major media outlets, stating “what are the elite media, the agenda-setting ones? The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on.” By elite media, Chomsky is speaking about the structure of media. That media is broken up into the mainstream and elite media. Essentially, he believes that the mainstream media is used to distract the masses while the elite media is able to carry out their own agendas.

A real interesting point in his article ties into an earlier post on advertising. That is messages are constantly being sent to us. Chomsky talks specifically about the New York Times and how they are not in the business of selling newspapers, but in fact selling an audience of people to advertisers and also to those who wish to get a set of particular ideas to the public (ideas which conform to the elite media’s desires). Furthermore, the people reading the New York Times are people in positions of power. The New York Times is one of the major news outlets and is the many people go by to find out what is happening in the world. By seeing what is happening in the world, I mean that it is what the elite media believes is important for us to know. Heath Ledger’s death has been headline news this week, and one has to wonder why that is. Most of the news about Britney Spears is similar, but I think Ledger’s death has brought on a lot of attention. I was browsing the NY Times webpage and found that this was a front page story for January 23^rd. Also, there were 1100+ comments for the story after less than 24 hours. There were so many comments that moderators had to stop allowing people to comment. However, an article called “The Path to Super Tuesday” had no comments even after 20+ hours of being online.

When applying this idea that our attention is being diverted from the real issues at hand, there are many examples of this, and how this theory rings true. Celebrity news, sports, even technology are all topics which can be done without. Yet people are so drawn to these topics. I subscribe to the BBC news feed, which basically shows the stories of each day. There are a surprisingly large number of sports related items on a regular basis. Chomsky often uses football as an example as a way for the elite media to get rid of those who might get in the way (not a direct quote). We have questioned the importance of celebrities already, but it seems that the elite media is attaining success in distracting the masses with reality TV, sports, and celebrities.

Cars and Women

In a previous post Brian and I discussed this idea of product placement and how advertisements can be somewhat invasive. With this aside we would like to discuss the images we do see and how we perceive them. As much as I would like to think that advertisements don’t have an effect on me I can’t ignore the evidence and I can see that they do. Companies know that these advertisements in one way or another affect the people who are seeing them. Are companies being careful with how they portray people who are seen in these ads? In a class that Brian and I had taken together we were asked this very question. We were shown how in most advertisements the white women were always shown as smiling and happy, not only is she smiling but she was also the center shot. I believe the ad was for the store Fifth Avenue, but that was the gist of it, white women, in the center, smiling and happy. For those of you who are reading don’t worry I’m not going to turn this into a “black versus white” topic but I do want to point out some of the claims and if I personally believe them to hold any truth.

In this class that Brian and I took one of our assignments was to look through magazine ads and see if we found any trend. Some of the trends that I did find were interesting. For example I found that a lot of ads that were geared toward men use sexy women to sell the ads. I’m sure that this comes to no surprise to most but I think this is relevant. One ad in particular that I showed was this ad to the left. As we can see the product is “The Car MD,” we can see that the main focus isn’t even the product but is the sexy women with no pants on. The Car MD is actually at the bottom of the ad, so the first thing that a person will look at is the woman and then the product. Are men so gullible? Are the ad companies trying to deceive us by taking advantage of our weakness for the opposite sex? I think that they are. Even when I was looking through magazines this ad automatically popped out to me and probably would have under normal circumstances. This is just one of the many ads that depict women as objects of desire as a means to sell another product.

People aren’t dumb either. We all know that this is what the companies are trying to do but we allow this to happen. Why do we allow this to happen? I think the reason is that we, like myself, would like to think that we make up our own minds and that ads have no bearing on us. While for the most part I think that is true I also think something else is happening. We see these images of women in ads and it does have an affect on us if we want to accept it or not. For the women who see this they might hold such images as an ideal for what constitutes what “sexy” is. After all if this woman can be in an ad then she must be beautiful right? For the men who look at this ad I think that this particular ad sends two messages to us. The first message being that like cars women are something to be “had.” It’s almost like they are trying to sell us a three step process, the first step is buy a mustang, second step is get the Car MD, and finally the women will come to you.

The other message that an ad of this nature sends to men is that it somewhat mocks women in a professional position. I wonder how many men after seeing this ad hold all female doctors to this standard. The point that I am trying to make is that whether we want it to or not these images hold some weight in the real world. The images we see we do bring them with us and use them in the real world. Whether or not the images make us buy the product is another story but we do interpret the pictures even if it is on a subconscious level. In turn it is up to the companies to be responsible for the content that they put out there.

Gender and Advertising

For today, we will continue to look at gender, specifically in advertising. I believe that part of this conversation came up while we were discussing our last topic on gender. Talking about the protagonists of certain titles, I wondered why some games have female protagonists when games are generally marketed towards male gamers. The same thing goes for ads for Axe. Oftentimes there is not even a male in the advertisement. The message being delivered to the viewer is clearly sexual in nature. What is even more interesting is the message of beauty delivered through media. As Berger points out in “Media & Society”, “these models perpetrate the notion that women should define themselves as sex objects to be gazed at and lusted after by men and not as active, forceful individuals” [179]. With this quote, I would go on by saying that men are equally sexualized in this manner in many advertising campaigns. I saw an Abercrombie bag the other day which may serve to illustrate this point. One side of the bag had a female and the other side had a male model. Both of the models were wearing very little, which did not make sense for a clothing store, but that is beside the point. Here we have an example of both males and females being sexualized in order to sell a product. In what ways are the male and female models different? Both are desirable, screaming sexuality. However, women’s sexuality does seem more common in advertisements, selling cars, make-up, and even food. One important observation is that men are usually coupled with women (showing that a product will attract women) in advertisements, while the opposite occurs much less frequently. While advertisements have definitely become increasingly sexual in nature, it is hard to say whether women are used as objects more often than men in selling products.

Beyond creating false images of women and sexuality, advertisements depict women as being weaker where “women were more likely to appear frustrated than men, were recipients of help and advice (typically from men), and were not physically active” [Gilly 76]. These claims are based on research done in the 70’s and 80’s. Roles in society have changed with males and females becoming more equal, however, there still seems to be some discrepancy between what is shown on screen and what happens in real life. Mary Gilly goes on to quote from another study that “women and men in society today clearly are far different from their portrayed images in advertising. As sex roles continue to change and expand at a faster rate than advertisers’ response, the image of sexes in advertising is not keeping pace with the change. In fact, the image reflects the status quo of a time gone by” [77]. This then brings up the question that is change is occurring despite advertisements reflecting a different society from the past, do advertisements really have an effect on society and the ideas of sex roles? Are advertisements slowing down the process of gender equality? There is a definite possibility that advertisements are hindering progress. Ads use women to sell things that are thought to be “female products” that aren’t really gender specific. For example, every ad for any type of cleaning product usually includes a woman using the product in the house, taking a deep breath and smelling how fresh everything is. This ad tells a lot about expectations within a culture. Here, we find that women are put in the role of the housewife (for lack of a better term, but this term itself underlines the fact). Males are rarely put in this position, usually put in power tool commercials. The products which these commercials are advertising are believed to have some truth in them. I would assume that people would believe the effectiveness of a cleaning product more from a woman than a man. While the ad may not insinuate that the female should be the one cleaning, it works with our preconceived belief of the housewife role.

Where are the females in video games? I’m not just talking about females in video games but females in the whole industry. Of course the industry has female characters in mass abundance but most of them aren’t the type of heroine that I would want a daughter of mine to idolize. For those who are not sure of exactly what I’m talking about, I turn your attention to a little game called Dead or Alive. For those who are familiar with the game we know that though it is a decent fighting game people don’t play it for this reason. I think I’m not alone when I say that DOA invented the jiggling breasts that so many basement nerds covet.

Once again Brian and I had one of our many discussions for this weeks post. I believe he decided to discuss females in the industry while I wanted to discuss more about videogames. In our discussion we discussed the idea of men being sexualized in games as well as women. I have to say that it is somewhat daunting to me that it is not discussed at as much length that men can be sexualized as much as women. I am not trying to take away from the struggle that women face at all but I just want to make clear that it is not a struggle that women face alone. While I believe that women are highly sexualized and objectified I make the claim that men are too and it should not be ignored. What provoked this discussion was our favorite Heroin Laura Croft from Tomb Raider. I was going to write in my first paragraph of this post that I would not want a daughter of mine to idolize a character like Laura Croft. I was going to make this claim because what first popped into my mind was the fact that Laura Croft likes to run around in the jungle with abnormally large breast and abnormally short shorts. Then I thought to myself would I mind my son looking up to the male equivalent who I believe is Indiana Jones? I have to say that honestly I would love it if my son decided to be an awesome archeologist who went on wild adventures and always got the girl in the end. So why can I not want the same thing for my daughter? What is the difference between Indiana Jones and Lauara Croft? I don’t really think there is a difference. Indiana Jones is played by a sexual icon, Harrison Ford, he is also brilliant, and even though he doesn’t use guns it does not take away from his badassness. Laura Croft is the same as Indiana Jones, she is a sexual icon, very brilliant, daring in her adventures but unlike Indy, Laura Croft decides to use the twin pistol method.

On Women in the Technology Industry

Gender is a very interesting topic especially in the technology industry. In a male dominated industry, it is very interesting how women enter the industry or even respond to technology online. “Given that the Internet began as a masculine technoculture, it has traditionally seemed unfriendly – or directly intimidating – to women… Nola Alloway’s (1995) research indicates that ‘even three-year-old boys in pre-school insist that the computers are the boys’ territory, and the girls are verbally and physically driven away” [Green 184]. First, I will give an example of how women in the technology industry are perceived.

From the various tech websites that I frequent, the claims are that technology seems unfriendly to women are only validated. Here is one from Kotaku. The first 5 comments give a general idea of how a woman in the technology (and possible worst, the gaming) industry is perceived. While I was growing up, it was not uncommon to be playing an online game and for all the guys say “you are a girl?” or “it’s a girl!”. I myself was found myself rather surprised that a girl would be playing a rather technical game. After all, it has been shown that women tend to gravitate towards puzzle type games. Trying a search on Google for “games girls”, JD and I found the top results were “cooking games, adventure games, dress up games, makeover games, skill games, fashion games”. Anyone notice a pattern here? On the other hand, we have other women in the gaming industry who talk about how there has been change over time. Within the industry, Elspeth Tory (a project manager for Ubisoft) says that men in the industry are much more accepting of women. However, it is the public eye which makes being a woman in the industry more difficult.

JD and I talked about what fuels these misconceptions about women in the technology industry. What we agreed on is that to change the idea that women are not as capable as men in developing new technology, there must be a gradual change. The role of Jade Raymond, Elspeth Tory, and other women in the industry is a double-edged sword, but at the same time places them in a unique position. For Jade Raymond, constantly in the public eye of gamers, she is often sexualized by the predominantly male audience, but at the same time, her game has grabbed the attention of many gamers. In many ways, this serves as a test for all women in the industry because this is probably the first time a woman has been placed in the role of director of a video game (which no one would classify as a “girlie-game”). Elspeth Tory (interviewed here) describes growing acceptance of women in the gaming industry, but there is a difference between what peers within the industry think and what the general public thinks. Discussing this with JD, we found some statistics about women in the gaming industry. There are actually very few in the production process. I would take from Green’s quote that women are losing interest at an early age because of the fact that boys tend to believe computers are their territory. I believe that some of the problem lies in the characters in the games. As a child, I would play as Mario trying to save Princess Peach. I am put in the role of a male, to which a girl probably will not relate to as well. Until people can begin to accept women in the gaming industry, women will continue to shy away from video games. It is going to take women in high positions to begin to show that women can be gamers too. The change for women in the industry is coming though. The technology-dependent culture which we live is fairly young, starting to flourish in the late 70’s/early 80’s. Green claims that “with so many more people – including women and children – involved in the Internet, the hi-tech/leading edge area of computer use from Internet access and use per se to Web design and security” [188]. The technoculture started as male-dominated, but it looks as though change is possible in the near future.