September 22nd
September 22nd Media Discourse and the Deconstruction of Crime Myths: (Schissel) -media representations of youth crime illustrate the power of decontextualized accounts and the ability of the media to represent the unusual as usual -when analyzing crime accounts, notice the initial written and visual message that appear -Postman argues that the: •
News of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It is quite precisely a media event. We attend to fragments of events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well suited to fragmented conversation
•
That the medium dictates the message is worth repeating here because it raises the fundamental crisis confronted by the print medium. Television in fact, sets the standards for viewer/reader likes and dislikes
-the message simple: youth crime is endemic, it is unpredictable but characteristic of a certain kind of youth and it requires dramatic and stern intervention -the first category of stories includes depictions of unusual youth crimes that appeal to people’s sense of despair by concentrating on the potentially and horror of violent behaviour and bystander apathy -this type of depiction provides a reverse morality play that appeal to our sense of righteousness and our fear of an amoral world •
Most importantly, such accounts provide constant and pervasive messages about the connections between morality and social position and, though they may attempt to be even-handed and objective, they lapse into social censure
-if ten year olds, who in our estimation are too young to have had the chance to become corrupted, are capable of this behaviour, then so are we all -this second category of depictions illustrates how media reporting tends to remove crime from its socio-economic context and to recast it in moralistic and emotional frames of reference -Murder suspect article mostly concentrates on the family’s pathology, the suggestion of broken homes headed by women and the implication that gangs are the core of the criminal world
•
The article ignores the socio-economic context in which the child and his family dwell, the economic reality of social welfare agencies that are financially unable to carry out their mandates and the reality of industrialized societies that discard people to make a profit
•
Both articles leave the reader with a sense of foreboding that nothing is to be done and that stricter crime-control measures, while not solutions are the only possible reactions. The reader is left with reason for panic
-the litany of crimes is presented here as typical of a culture of terrorizing teenagers and this message is reinforced by a picture of typical young males “prowling” in a mall, versus simply “hanging out somewhere” -one of the most blatant techniques the media use to build an image of offensive youths is that of declarations, often endorsed by professional experts, that children are inherently evil and that youth misconduct is the result of uncontrolled natural impulses •
The ideological message is that these inherently vile beings need strict family discipline or, failing that, require strict institutional intervention
-in terms of the effects of media images of marginalized youth, although there is an argument that people do not passively accept what they see and read carte blanche, they may, in fact, use accounts and representations in their own ways •
The first suggestion is that youth crime is erratic and unpredictable and by implication, is threatening to everyone
•
The second suggestion we see in the profiles of the 3 murders is part of its attempt to unpack and construct the psychic lives of the young killers
•
The preamble to the three cases studies presents the problem of youth crime in language laden with sinister references to the unique predatory nature of the young killer. Further the introduction offers a litany of inexplicable killings by children that have raised public pressure to reform the Young Offenders Act
•
Overall the article does present a compelling case for a continual attempt to understand and deal with youth killers. What the article transmits, however, is a sense of helplessness in the face of increasing homicides by youth. At the same time they make it appear that there is no alternative to youth crime other than tough law and order
Practices of Looking: (Sturken/Cartwright) -through looking we negotiate social relationships and meanings. Looking is a practice much like speaking, writing or signing. Looking involves learning to interpret and, like other practices, looking involves relationships of power -there are both conscious and unconscious levels of looking •
We engage in practices of looking to communicate to influence and be influenced
-we live in cultures that are increasingly permeated by visual images with a variety of purposes and intended effects -we invest the images we create and encounter on a daily basis with significant power-for instance, the power to conjure an absent person, the power to calm or incite to action, the power to persuade or mystify -the images we encounter everyday span the social realms of popular culture, advertising, news and information exchange, commerce, criminal justice and art •
They are produced and experienced through a variety of media
-representation refers to the use of language and images to create meaning about the world around us. We use words to understand, describe and define the world as we see it and we also use images to do this -a language like English has a set of rules about how to express and interpret meaning and so, for instance, do the systems of representation of painting, photography, cinema or television •
Debates about representation have considered whether these systems of representation reflect the world as it is, such that they mirror it back to us as a form of mimesis or imitation, or whether in fact we construct the world and its meaning through the systems of representation we deploy
•
In this social constructionist approach, we only make meaning of the material world through specific cultural contexts
-language and systems of representation do not reflect an already existing reality so much as they organize, construct, and mediate our understanding of reality, emotion and imagination -representation is a process through which we construct the world around us, even through a simple scene such as this, and making meaning from it
•
We learn the rules and conventions of the systems of representation within a given culture
-the rules and conventions of different systems of representation vary, and we attribute different sets of cultural meanings to each -no matter what social role an image plays, the creation of an image through a camera lens always involves some degree of subjective choice through selection, framing and personalization -positivism involves the belief that empirical truths can be established through visual evidence •
An empirical truth is something that can be proven through experimentation in particular through the reproduction of an experiment with identical outcomes under carefully controlled circumstances
•
In positivism, the individual actions of the scientist came to be viewed as a liability in the process of performing and reproducing experiments since it was thought the scientist’s own subjectivity would influence or prejudice the objectivity of the experiment. Hence machines were regarded as more reliable than humans
-to explore the meaning of images is to recognize that they are produced within dynamics of social power and ideology. Ideologies are systems of belief that exist within all cultures •
Images are important means through which ideologies are produced and onto which ideologies are projected
•
When people think of ideologies, they often think in terms of propaganda
•
However ideology is a much more pervasive, mundane process in which we all engage, whether we are aware of it or not
-ideology is manifested in widely shared social assumptions about not only the way things are but the way we all know things should be -visual culture is integral to ideologies and power relations. Ideologies are produced and affirmed through the social constructions in a given society, such as the family, education, medicine, the law, the government and the entertainment industry among others
-we live in a society in which portrait images are frequently used like fingerprints, as personal identification -we use many tools to interpret images and create meanings with them and we often use these tools of looking automatically, without giving them much thought
News of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It is quite precisely a media event. We attend to fragments of events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well suited to fragmented conversation
•
That the medium dictates the message is worth repeating here because it raises the fundamental crisis confronted by the print medium. Television in fact, sets the standards for viewer/reader likes and dislikes
-the message simple: youth crime is endemic, it is unpredictable but characteristic of a certain kind of youth and it requires dramatic and stern intervention -the first category of stories includes depictions of unusual youth crimes that appeal to people’s sense of despair by concentrating on the potentially and horror of violent behaviour and bystander apathy -this type of depiction provides a reverse morality play that appeal to our sense of righteousness and our fear of an amoral world •
Most importantly, such accounts provide constant and pervasive messages about the connections between morality and social position and, though they may attempt to be even-handed and objective, they lapse into social censure
-if ten year olds, who in our estimation are too young to have had the chance to become corrupted, are capable of this behaviour, then so are we all -this second category of depictions illustrates how media reporting tends to remove crime from its socio-economic context and to recast it in moralistic and emotional frames of reference -Murder suspect article mostly concentrates on the family’s pathology, the suggestion of broken homes headed by women and the implication that gangs are the core of the criminal world
•
The article ignores the socio-economic context in which the child and his family dwell, the economic reality of social welfare agencies that are financially unable to carry out their mandates and the reality of industrialized societies that discard people to make a profit
•
Both articles leave the reader with a sense of foreboding that nothing is to be done and that stricter crime-control measures, while not solutions are the only possible reactions. The reader is left with reason for panic
-the litany of crimes is presented here as typical of a culture of terrorizing teenagers and this message is reinforced by a picture of typical young males “prowling” in a mall, versus simply “hanging out somewhere” -one of the most blatant techniques the media use to build an image of offensive youths is that of declarations, often endorsed by professional experts, that children are inherently evil and that youth misconduct is the result of uncontrolled natural impulses •
The ideological message is that these inherently vile beings need strict family discipline or, failing that, require strict institutional intervention
-in terms of the effects of media images of marginalized youth, although there is an argument that people do not passively accept what they see and read carte blanche, they may, in fact, use accounts and representations in their own ways •
The first suggestion is that youth crime is erratic and unpredictable and by implication, is threatening to everyone
•
The second suggestion we see in the profiles of the 3 murders is part of its attempt to unpack and construct the psychic lives of the young killers
•
The preamble to the three cases studies presents the problem of youth crime in language laden with sinister references to the unique predatory nature of the young killer. Further the introduction offers a litany of inexplicable killings by children that have raised public pressure to reform the Young Offenders Act
•
Overall the article does present a compelling case for a continual attempt to understand and deal with youth killers. What the article transmits, however, is a sense of helplessness in the face of increasing homicides by youth. At the same time they make it appear that there is no alternative to youth crime other than tough law and order
Practices of Looking: (Sturken/Cartwright) -through looking we negotiate social relationships and meanings. Looking is a practice much like speaking, writing or signing. Looking involves learning to interpret and, like other practices, looking involves relationships of power -there are both conscious and unconscious levels of looking •
We engage in practices of looking to communicate to influence and be influenced
-we live in cultures that are increasingly permeated by visual images with a variety of purposes and intended effects -we invest the images we create and encounter on a daily basis with significant power-for instance, the power to conjure an absent person, the power to calm or incite to action, the power to persuade or mystify -the images we encounter everyday span the social realms of popular culture, advertising, news and information exchange, commerce, criminal justice and art •
They are produced and experienced through a variety of media
-representation refers to the use of language and images to create meaning about the world around us. We use words to understand, describe and define the world as we see it and we also use images to do this -a language like English has a set of rules about how to express and interpret meaning and so, for instance, do the systems of representation of painting, photography, cinema or television •
Debates about representation have considered whether these systems of representation reflect the world as it is, such that they mirror it back to us as a form of mimesis or imitation, or whether in fact we construct the world and its meaning through the systems of representation we deploy
•
In this social constructionist approach, we only make meaning of the material world through specific cultural contexts
-language and systems of representation do not reflect an already existing reality so much as they organize, construct, and mediate our understanding of reality, emotion and imagination -representation is a process through which we construct the world around us, even through a simple scene such as this, and making meaning from it
•
We learn the rules and conventions of the systems of representation within a given culture
-the rules and conventions of different systems of representation vary, and we attribute different sets of cultural meanings to each -no matter what social role an image plays, the creation of an image through a camera lens always involves some degree of subjective choice through selection, framing and personalization -positivism involves the belief that empirical truths can be established through visual evidence •
An empirical truth is something that can be proven through experimentation in particular through the reproduction of an experiment with identical outcomes under carefully controlled circumstances
•
In positivism, the individual actions of the scientist came to be viewed as a liability in the process of performing and reproducing experiments since it was thought the scientist’s own subjectivity would influence or prejudice the objectivity of the experiment. Hence machines were regarded as more reliable than humans
-to explore the meaning of images is to recognize that they are produced within dynamics of social power and ideology. Ideologies are systems of belief that exist within all cultures •
Images are important means through which ideologies are produced and onto which ideologies are projected
•
When people think of ideologies, they often think in terms of propaganda
•
However ideology is a much more pervasive, mundane process in which we all engage, whether we are aware of it or not
-ideology is manifested in widely shared social assumptions about not only the way things are but the way we all know things should be -visual culture is integral to ideologies and power relations. Ideologies are produced and affirmed through the social constructions in a given society, such as the family, education, medicine, the law, the government and the entertainment industry among others
-we live in a society in which portrait images are frequently used like fingerprints, as personal identification -we use many tools to interpret images and create meanings with them and we often use these tools of looking automatically, without giving them much thought
