Question Description
Im working on a Writing exercise and need support.
THIS IS A SECTION
FROM THE TEXT BOOK : Holtzman,
L., Sharpe, L. (2014). Media
messages: What film, television, and popular music teach us about race, class,
gender, and sexual orientation. (2nd ed.) Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
The Processes of Selection As we investigate our informal
and formal experiences and media messages about human diversity, some of the
material will seem familiar and consistent with what you have already learned
and know, and that is likely to feel fairly comfortable. At other times, the
information not only may be unfamiliar but also may challenge some of your
long-held beliefs and values and feel fairly uncomfortable. This discomfort is
called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the emotional or psychological
discomfort that occurs when we receive information that is inconsistent with
attitudes and beliefs we have held to be the truth (Baran and Davis 2009,
146). According to the theory of selection, this psychological discomfort is
often so dif?cult that many of us seek a way to relieve the tension and return
to a more comfortable consistency in our beliefs.
One of the ways people seek a more comfortable position is
through selective exposure . Through this process, people frequently make
choices about how they spend their time and with whom as well as the media they
consume. Generally, most of us do our best to expose ourselves to information
and messages that are consistent with our preexisting attitudes and beliefs
(Baran and Davis 2009, 146). Leon recalls a summer job he had as a teenager
working with a pair of school custodians, Mr. Chambers and Mr. Jones. The two
of them always listened to the local jazz radio station as they worked. At
?rst, Leon hated the music. He preferred rhythm and blues, pop, Motown, Stax-Volt,
anything but the horrible stuff the custodians liked. But outnumbered and
powerless, he became a captive audience to this unfamiliar genre. One humid
afternoon toward the end of a particularly grueling day of moving furniture and
cleaning ?oors, Leon was sent to the school library to unpack a large shipment
of books. As he headed down the hall, he heard the sound of an acoustic bass
thumping out the hypnotic rhythms of A Love Supreme, by John Coltrane. One of
the custodians had left his radio in the library. Leon reached for the radio
knob so he could switch to one of the R&B stations he liked, but he could
not bring himself to do it. There was something so enthralling about what he
was hearing that he had to keep listening. It was as though the music was
speaking directly to him, calling him by name. For the rest of the afternoon,
he worked to the sounds of drums, bass, piano, and saxophone played in ways
that he had never heard them played before. When he got home that evening, he
lay across his bed tired and a little sore, but instead of falling asleep, he
tuned in to the jazz station and listened deep into the night. He continued to
listen to it the next day and the day after that. By the end of the summer he
had developed what would become a lifelong love of jazz. Leon did not realize
it at the time, but in that brief period during his formative years he had gone
through an experience that created suf?cient cognitive dissonance to disrupt
his pattern of selective exposure and permanently alter his musical
interestsexpanding his capacity to appreciate a diverse range of musical
genres.
Another clear-cut example of selective exposure involves the
television news programs people choose to watch. In the age of cable and
satellite TV, viewers have an almost endless variety of options for news
watching. During the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, it became
increasingly clear that people who were politically conservative leaned in the
direction of FOX News and people who were politically liberal or left were much
more likely to get their news from MSNBC. The news programs they watched were likely
to provide selected information and a spin on big news stories that were
compatible with the viewers political beliefs, allowing media consumers to
remain comfortable.
Another one of the selective processes is selective retention,
in which what we remember the most and the longest are the things that either
are consistent with our beliefs or are the most important to us (Baran and
Davis 2009, 147). Most of us dont forget breakups of major relationships in
our lives, because they were signi?cant to us. However, our brains seem to
cooperate with the desire for consistency and allow us to forget things we have
read, viewed, or experienced that offer a plausible, reasonable, and credible
challenge to our own beliefs. Selective perception is a strategy we use to
reduce the psychological discomfort when our beliefs are challenged. Through
this process we actually change the meaning of the information or messages we receive
so that they are compatible with our own ideas and convictions. Linda remembers
quite clearly an incident of selective perception that occurred when she was
teaching second grade in a school in which all the students were black and she
was one of three white teachers. One of her seven-year-old students came in
from recess crying. After some incoherent words in between tears, Linda pieced
together what happened. Wanda said that another little girl had taunted her and
teased her by saying that Linda was white and Wanda hit her, starting a ?ght.
Linda said, Wanda, you know I am white, to which Wanda replied, No, youre
not, Ms. Holtzman. Youre not white, youre light. Wanda preferred to think
that Linda was a light-skinned African American woman. Wanda really loved her
teacher, yet in her short life span most of her experiences with white people
and most of the things she had been told about white people were negative or
hurtful. Wandas selective perception was to make a translation in her own mind
that allowed her to reconcile her affection for Linda and her distrust of white
peopleshe just changed her teachers race.
The selective processes can be very powerful, but they are
not foolproof or beyond our own conscious will. The extreme discomfort of
cognitive dissonance can set off an automatic launch sequence into selective
retention, perception, or exposure, or we can try something different when we
feel this dissonance. We can pause. We can lean into the discomfort and allow
ourselves to feel it. We can recognize that we do not need to make a choice of
what to believe right in that moment. This pause can give us the chance to use
analytical thinking to evaluate the discomfort and to consider the two sets of
information with an open mind and an open heart. This process can move us from
an automatic mode toward a process that encourages us to stay awake enough to
evaluate the credibility of the contradictory information and to make a solid,
independent decision about what we believe.
Cognitive dissonance is a concept and an analytical tool
that is used in both human diversity theory and in media theory. If we are not
aware of the process of cognitive dissonance, we will not have the
consciousness to observe our resistance to new information and ideas, nor will
we have the wherewithal to make independent decisions. If we are aware of our
psychological discomfort and resistance to new ideas and images of diversity,
we are no longer going down the highway on cruise control; we are in much more
control in the drivers seat.
THE INSTRUCTIONS:
- Examine possible criteria for defining modern
popular culture. - Reflect on how modern popular culture (and its texts)
contribute to your sense of identity.For example, what elements do
you accept, reject outright, or struggle to reject? (One way to address
the final option is to expose one or more of your guilty pleasures
– popular culture texts that you enjoy but wish you didn’t for some
reason.)
THE ASSIGNMENT:
- Compose a 1- to 2-page paper in which you do the
following: - Determine a criteria for defining modern popular
culture. - Describe how popular culture has in some way defined
you, or describe how you “refuse” to be defined by popular
culture. - Support your assertions by making at least 2
references, in proper APA format, to your course readings.
