Kimberly Mecham

A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words

When thinking of tidal waves in the our world, each one is met by one unstoppable force. The media. Some good some bad aspects, its influence is never doubted. Whether to attack, defuse or inform whatever the cause, it is near impossible to escape the reach of it in our age. One of the loudest problems being voiced is with our youth. Un unstoppable force in itself. A great start I found was, The Young and The Digital; What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime Anywhere Media Means For Our Future. The book discusses the beginnings of Myspace and the motives behind it. Created by an ex musician, the site was created to spread the word on new bands and collect your favorite music. Models and aspiring artists used the page to network. The site became popular to pretty people. In very little time, Myspace was attracting youth like no other. Teens were gathering to share more than music. It became more and more social and more and more popular. In two years it had exploded and become something other than what was intended. Of the site, Chris DeWolfe says, People are starting to realize the holy grail of internet is community . The real potential for the internet that we were talking about 10 years ago, is just now beginning to materialize. In the Chapter entitled, Digital Gates; How race and class are shaping the digital world, the author cites an essay written by blogger Danna Boyd in 2007. Danna discusses her observations in using social media that different races use different sites. Facebook seems to be for white middle-class while Myspace is used primarily by Latinos, blacks and working-class. Even in the safety of our pixels we are being profiled. Evidence suggests a pattern in human behavior.

In an effort to be connected to all corners of the world, we turn our focus from our own corner. In their book entitled The Networked Nonprofit, Beth Kantor and Allison Fine discuss the positive effects of a connected world through the web. Listing Haitian relief and breast cancer research funds as examples, they address strength in unity through mouse clicks or phone taps. They go on to say the great thing about social media is that anyone can participate. Beth and Allison are discussing donation and cause support. While we have indeed made tremendous strides in raising awareness and money to cease disease and abuse, there are many arguments on the negative side. In 2013, attention has shifted from Myspace, to the more organized Facebook. Facebook is said to be preferred for its privacy feature. Friends must be requested and accepted and potentially blocked. Sounds like a good thing. This is perhaps a step in the right direction with only associating with people you have met. However, there is a certain mood with online communication Many studies have been and are being conducted regarding teen usage of media as an addiction. Social media is one of the basic food groups now. Technology is a subject taught in school and a college program. Intimate knowledge of computers and internet use is essential to most jobs. In the name of the future, we purchase computers and train young people on using them. Studies show that 13% of the US population are teenagers. With this in mind, 56% of our population has a Facebook page. Numbers are higher than they have ever been and rising. With this comes new problems to face. Health of youth is a constant issue. More time is spent guzzling Monster energy drinks and staying up into the night playing violent video games then is spent on sports or even just being outside. Vocabulary is being redefined according to acronyms, communication is slipping. While it is easy to speak your mind to an inanimate screen, the lack of body language expressed and speed of face to face dialogue is beginning to show. Hiding behind a screen, any thought can be aimed and fired at whomever we please. Unfortunately, not always love and admiration is voiced.

There are countless films depicting lynch-mobs and bullying in times when it was accepted and even encouraged. One in particular, in Django unchained, the lynch-mob is the comic relief. The scene becomes absurd when the characters become frustrated with the fact that the holes in their sheets have been made too small. In our history, we have gone from lynching as a holy right, to an offensive unnecessary depiction of a painful past and have landed in a time when anything can become slapstick. As the motives and forms of media continually change so do we and our expectations. The problems we are facing with media, its dangers and overuse, are typical of our day. The only thing constant is change they say. Every few years, with new inventions, world events and political changes, new problems arise. We learn about them in history books and the lips of teachers. However, a not so uncommon phrase in class is, Have you guys seen? rather than Have you guys read..? A picture is worth 1,000 words and a picture with words is priceless. Film has been used as a teaching tool since its infancy. Im not strictly referring to the crackling biology videos or even the bowl-cut Romeo movies in English class. Lessons are learned everywhere, whether we want to learn them or not. In our pixelated society, there are electronic images everywhere. Now even in the grocery store there are small screens showing adds next to the peanut butter isle. Film is powerful! The scary thing is, we dont know what weve learned from it until a generation goes by. As a species, humans are very impressionable and we love few things more than making impressions on each other. Without ideologies there would be no incentive to make films. Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narbon discuss this further in the essay entitled Cinema/Ideology/Criticism (1969) by stating that film is a result of being a material product of the system. It is also an ideological product of the system. Films are made to mirror society, society curved to mirror film, which is the real irony. They each depend on the other before moving and yet we have both come so far. It is a dance of wills that has gone on since the days of Chaplin and will carry on into the next Bruce Willis movie. In the movie The

Purge, a new government has created a system where one night a year, anarchy reigns and actions have no consequence and in only a few years, the event is embraced by most as a religion. The agenda on most minds is murder and one family inadvertently gets caught up in a life and death struggle in an attempt to avoided being the purged. There are several speeches in the film about the logical aspects of The Purge but the more chilling are the spiritual. Beautiful people with a crazed look in their eye rant about how they need to kill in order to be clean. After seeing the film, the issue that stuck out to me was that in only a few short years, citizens of this country were presented an idea which was then put into effect and then completely embraced. The new normal is as fickle as tectonic plates, smashing, slipping and shaking in order to create new landmarks.

Choices in each of these areas convey particular kinds of messages and exert particular kinds of impacts, which eventually, with repetition over time and across space, become conventions. Formal conventions maintain considerable power, especially when they are not recognized as conventions, i.e., not read critically.
www.uwec.edu/ranowlan/representation_ideology_film.html How does this happen? Earlier in this paper I wrote a picture is worth 1,000 words. I repeat it now because I feel this is a valuable piece to the mystery of human behavior. If we can see it happening, if we are presented information with the right lighting and smooth as molasses voice, we are likely to swallow anything. Politicians are this way. Election season is full of heartstring jerking commercials and patriotic posters. Sides can be easily switched after a candidate lets his calm exterior slip. On the same coin, our faith in a man is strengthened if we see him or her walking through a slum holding the hand of a child. This does not say much for our species, impressionable. We often complain about the state of things when through little slips here and there, we are the ones to guide the tone. We see movies that make us comfortable and

shy away from the weird, until later when they become important. This adds to the films that are relevant. Culture decides society, society writes scripts. A film riddled with great dialogue and imagery, is V for Vendetta. In this film, based on a graphic novel, a masked man strives to get the peoples attention in the midst of a quarantine totalitarian country. V, as the hero is known, tells a bleak story of how corrupt politics and fear corral the people into a position of helplessness. After breaking into a television studio and pirating the controls, the terrorist plays a speech, chiding and at the same time, empowering his people.

.the truth is there is something terribly wrong with this country, isnt there - cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression? And where once you had the freedom to object to think and speak as you saw fit,you now have censors and surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting submission. How did this happen? Whos to blame? Certainly there are those who are more responsible than others. And they will be held accountable. But again, truth be told, if youre looking for the guilty you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldnt be? War, terror, disease - there were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you!

We elect, consciously or not, symbols to make everything ok. We trust what they say, we support what they do in order to feel more comfortable at the end of the day. Knowing that while we are sleeping, the heroes have the con - politicians, celebrities, our imagination. What we perceive as heroic changes from year to year. It takes a tsunami, a bomb, an airplane or two and we chose a new thing to be afraid of. With each threat a savior rises to protect us. Heroes and villains are born every day in our ever changing world of cops and robbers.

Another point of irony is that we are basing our actions, appearance and behavior on people we know nothing about. In his book, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, Richard Dyer discusses the illusion of celebrity and shell that we see. He also talks about media stirring our curiosity on what is real. What are these heavenly bodies really like? How we feel is no less real than how we have manufactured that appearance or than the we that is doing the manufacturing. It can be argued that we project our feelings onto our idols, putting them onto pedestals. Then we are crushed and fascinated when they fail to live up to the height. Studying this material has been a great lesson in empowerment. Learning how much power we give to the elements around us. It reminds me of a Native American story in which a young man is coming of age and being given advice from a wise man. The elder informs the young man that in each of us is contained two wolves. One holds all the goodness and hope and vies for light and nobility. The other is a darker wolf who seeks after ugly emotions of hate and greed. The concerned youth asks the chief, which one wins? The reply is, The one you feed.

Bibliography 1. S. Craig Watkins. Young and the Digital 2. Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narbon. Cinema/Ideology/Criticism (1969)

3. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly bodies: Film stars and society. Routledge, 2013.
4. www.uwec.edu/ranowlan/representation_ideology_film.html 5. Cinemaandsociety.org