A Summary of Media

      This semester I have really enjoyed taking media. What started as a filler course became one of my favorites, as we discussed issues that I found myself caring about. I started taking part in class discussion because I was interested in the topics. Particularly feminism and the representation of women in the media because I found I could connect myself to these problems. It sometimes seems as though I’m the only one who is offended by women in the kitchen jokes ect. but hearing everyone share their opinions shed a new light on the issue. Along with discussing these topics, I absolutely loved the video projects we were assigned in this class. I consider myself to be somewhat of a creative person and the openness of these assignments really allowed my group members and I to think outside of the box and have fun with the videos. Overall Media has been my favorite class this year and I would encourage all younger students to take it if they have the opportunity. 

Drunk Teenagers in the Making

           Producing a music video was a challenge Angus, Kristen and myself decided to take on this past week, and I, unfortunately, was stuck editing it. I must say it was the most difficult project I’ve taken on using iMovie and I have learned a lot about the program. The reason this project was so difficult was the fact that I had to coordinate the lyrics and the movement of the people’s mouths. Sometimes it just didn’t match up and I was forced to delete the whole thing and use random footage we hadn’t planed on using, or do the best I could to make it look like the people were somewhat singing the lyrics. When editing I found that I had to slow down and speed up a lot of footage, sometimes speeding up a clip will change the way you look at it. My favorite part of the video is the end when the hall is filled with people and the footage is speed up. Because of the speed things seem more hectic and fun. Overall this video was a challenge but I enjoyed learning more about iMovie and I also respect music video producers a whole lot more now!

Over Priced Marriage

         Weddings are supposed to be an intimate celebration of the marriage of two people but it seems like TV channels like TLC and movies like Bridesmaids, Bride Wars, Wedding Crashers ect. Have turned them into almost a competitive sport. We watch movies that show people competing for the best wedding that will top all of their friends and impress everyone. Weddings have turned into a way to show off how much money your willing to spend and how much time you put into planning your magical day. This is all because of shows like 4 Weddings in which brides compete to win honeymoons and judge each others weddings on things like food, venue and dress. Isn’t this making your special day a little to commercialized? With all this attention around the wedding industry, it has grown substantially. Retailers are taking advantage of the fact that weddings have so much emotional meaning they can charge whatever they want for the dress that brings tears to your eyes. Other than the competition aspect of the wedding, they are being marketed as the most important day of our lives. I agree that it is a huge event and a very major milestone but the way they have been built up is a bit ridiculous. Not everyone can have a wedding like those shown on TLC’s 4 Weddings and we aren’t all willing to pay $5 000 for a dress. So have we done the same thing to weddings as we have done to Christmas and over commercialized them?

#Twitter

                 Twitter is one of the biggest most hip websites out there and takes social media to a whole new level. On the “Twitter-sphere” you can be following what Kim Kardashian is doing in Ireland this week, and what your neighbors opinions are on the MTV Movie awards all at the same time. Twitter is a good way to communicate to large amounts of people about important issues in the world and get many opinions, and other peoples thoughts on the topic. However, people don’t always use their 140 characters for good. More often than not, my twitter timeline will be filled with song lyrics and @BadLuckBrian jokes. Twitter has the potential and is sometimes extremely useful for spreading news really quickly and getting it to reach a lot of the younger generation, but mostly people tweet about movies and make witty/funny comments in hopes of upping their followers. Among all the jokes I think there’s hope for twitter to grow and become more of a place to share news stories and spread opinions and ideas. But for now, it’s a little bit of that and a lot of jokes, pointless hashtags, and privileged teenagers complaining about their #firstworldprobs. 

Backup Wives

Polygamists have been in the news a lot over the past year after the première of TLC’s ‘Sister Wives’, a show that follows a family of polygamists while they add a new wife and her children to the family. Most people in the western world have the same feelings towards polygamy, the thought of one man with multiple wives seems wrong and unnatural to most of us. It is actually illegal in almost all states including Utah where the biggest populations of American polygamists live. However polygamy is legal in around 50 countries world wide, most of them being African or Muslim. I think the major problem with polygamy is that people just don’t know how to define it. Is it a religion or a cult? It can easily be defined as a cult because it’s extremely different then the norm and completely immoral in our culture. The idea of polygamy is offensive to feminists and in a lot of cases the relationships are abusive. Not to mention how far back it sets women’s rights! What gives the men rights to have multiple wives, leaving women unequal and jealous. Back to the TLC show, it really makes polygamy out to be harmless and everyone is just one big happy family with everyday problems. They are choosing that lifestyle with their own free will, but that’s not the case with a lot of polygamists and being forced into a plural marriage is common in many countries. So we all know that’s not right and shows how poorly women all over the world are being treated, but what if you chose to be in a polygamist relationship? Some would say it’s the same as choosing to be in a same sex marriage, just a different lifestyle. You can probably see the controversy over the topic and I don’t think it polygamy will be legal in Canada anytime soon.

The News Cycle

                  Well looking online for some interesting news to write about, I noticed a complete lack in anything that could actually educate me on the issues today is facing. Those articles are out there, but I found I had to dig through the useless articles like “Awe inspiring recipes”. This really has no relevance to anything so does it really need to be front-page news and why is it right beside an article on a mass murderer? On the other hand, I am a teenager, and to be completely honest I’m not that interested in “CP Rail union, Tories battle over collective bargaining”. I didn’t even open the article because it has nothing that interested me in the title. And that would be the problem. A huge group of Internet users are teens and young people like myself, many of whom have the same interests and those interests are not politics. So are the people producing the media and news to blame or is it our increasing lack of interest in real problems. I’m a bit ashamed to admit that although world issues interest me, as I’m sure they do most people, I don’t go looking for them or read the news to find them. This could be because the media industry has given us so much else to focus on such as the Kardashians and Brad Pitt and all the drama they bring to the table. I think this is a, what comes first the chicken or the egg, type situation; what came first the lack of interest in the issues or the lack of issues being shared. Where did this cycle start?

Transgender Miss Universe

                  I’m sure everyone’s heard about the Miss Universe Canada controversy that has been in the news for a while, but now that all the drama is over I wanted to take a look at the outcome. The story is, transgender contestant Jenna Talackova was kicked out of the competition because of a qualifying rule that stated all contestants must be a naturally born female. She was later allowed back into the pageant, as she received overwhelming support on many social media sites and gained many fans. Of course along with fans she got a lot of negative attention as well. Beauty pageant contestants have to fit a very rare criterion of extreme beauty. They have height and weight limits and overall there’s a very small select group of women who make it to the top of this industry. York’s Gilbert said the pageant is trying to “fit everyone in a pigeon hole.” And that the world’s view of transgenders is very negative. I think that there is lots of room to open up beauty pageants to more people and different types of beauty, so why not let transgenders compete, and open up this pigeonhole. However Gilbert is correct in saying there’s a negative aura around transgenders, which may have been the real reason the pageant kicked her out in the first place. But if we don’t start treating transgenders as equals and as the specific sex they have chosen rather than some sort of weird male/female combo, people’s opinions will never change. When the competition did allow her back in, they ultimately decided to look at Jenna as a female as opposed to someone who used to be male and I think that this is the outlook the rest of the world is starting to adapt.