In his book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Neil Postman argues that media has had more negative impacts in our society than positive ones. We have always been influenced by different mediums but “we are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by television, not by the printed word.” (Postman, 1985, p. 28)
Media technology has transformed public life into entertainment, “television has gradually become our culture…we rarely talk about television, only about what is on television,” (Postman, 1985, p. 79) and what is on television is nothing but perfect bodies and luxurious lifestyles that for most common people would be impossible to achieve. The message that the television is given us is that we should be like them.
The media can play a positive role in a Democracy if used positively. On page 126 of “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Postman mentions that media’s “main business is to please the crowd,” so we have the power to control mass media. We are given entertainment because that is what we are asking for, they (different forms of mass communication) keep telling us what to buy because we listen to them but if we start perhaps diffusing a video on social media demanding that we want to be shown accurate information that constructs our society not the type that destroys it, we will get it. As Postman mentions, it is true that television is “a source of comfort and pleasure,” (p. 28) but we also have to see the importance of being educated and that it is not all about entertainment. We could balance our needs and wants.
In her essay, “This Is What Happened When I Drove My Mercedes to Pick up Food Stamps,” Darlena Cunha mentions how her successful middle class life changed drastically to being poor, “even then I couldn’t quite believe it. This wasn’t supposed to happen to people like me.” Cunha came from an affluent family and was well educated, from her frame of reference, how we see and understand events influenced by prior knowledge and assumptions (Ortiz), white educated people were not supposed to be poor. Media influences our frame of reference, unfortunately we take what media gives us as an absolute true forgetting that most of the time we are not shown the whole story.
When I searched on google and Bing for images on poverty, most of the images that came up where pictures of black poor people in Africa. The television shows us videos of people in other countries who are poor and then in the United States we mostly hear about minorities being poor, not white people. Interestingly, many of the images that came up also showed very skinny children with little clothes. This is the idea that we have about the poor, we associate
malnutrition, not having clothes to being poor because is what we normally see in the media.
Darlena Cunha is giving us valuable information that can help us shift our frame of reference. She explains how she was stared at and criticized for receiving government help and still buying root beer, “the funny thing about being poor,” she says, is that “everyone has an opinion on it, and everyone feels entitled to share.” We expect poor people to have nothing and to not be able to afford luxuries, like in her case, soda. Cunha and her husband managed to keep their Mercedes which they had already paid off and didn’t want to sell it because they knew that that car was reliable and selling it to buy a “crappier car” will be more expensive in the long term. When she had to drive her husband’s Mercedes to get food, she felt embarrassed because she “had so internalized the message of what poor people should or should not have that I felt ashamed to be there, with that car, getting food. As if I were not allowed the food because of the car. As if I were a bad person.” As Ronald Takaki mentions in “A Different Mirror,” poor people “want to get off welfare but find themselves forced by low wages to remain dependent on government subsidy.” (p. 398)
In a democracy, we need mass communication to be informed. Through mass communication, the poor can be informed of the different laws, their rights and the different programs that are available for them. As citizens they have the right to participate in our society, to let their voices be heard by telling the government what works and doesn’t work for them. To do this, they need to be educated and mass media can help with that.
“Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.”
- Living Wage. [Cartoon]. Retrieved from http://www.csmonitor.com/var/archive/storage/images/media/images/0831-minimumwage.jpg/8562091-1-eng-US/0831-minimumwage.jpg_full_600.jpg
Cunha, D. (2014, July 8). This is what happened when I drove my Mercedes to pick up food stamps. Washington Post. Retrieved July 20, 2014, from http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/08/this-is-what-happened-when-i-drove-my-mercedes-to-pick-up-food-stamps/
Frame of Reference. [Cartoon]. Retrieved from http://www.adailycartoon.com/Grafix%20/Panel%20Cartoons/frame_ref.gif
Keefe, M. (2009, March 27). Evolution of Communication. Retrieved from http://www.intoon.com/cartoons.cfm/id/68559
Ortiz, D. (2014, July 3). Frame of Reference. Humanities 150. Lecture conducted from Cascadia Community College.
Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. New York: Viking.
- [Photograph]. Retrieved from http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1549747/thumbs/o-POVERTY-facebook.jpg
Takaki, R. T. (1993). A different mirror: A history of multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.