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Reflection

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At the age of 16 I am surrounded by the media everywhere I go.  This unit helped me take notice of appeals that sway me in one direction or another.   On days I don’t have practice or other extra curricular activities I get home and relax on my phone for an hour or two.  Because I am scrolling through millions of posts, fully entertained by the excitement I often get caught up. I get sucked into the virtual world that is my phone, and when I finally get to my homework I dread it.  When I force myself to do homework I am unplugging myself from the media, or so I thought. This unit has taught me that the media is everywhere. In the music industry artists make pop culture references, if the news is on I’ll hear commercials, I can’t really escape it. Through keeping this media blog I was able to create a timeline of my relationship with the media.  I have documented observations from the news, including opinions, and personal statements. With the blogs I can see how aware I am of
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Pet Social Media Stars? Part 2 My Opinion

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Its crazy to think that social media is used enough for pets to profit.  I can’t decide if thats a good or bad thing. On the up side its a great way for you to have an extra source of income.  Owning a pet has its expenses and if they are instagram famous those costs could be covered.  Plus owners would be offered plenty of free pet products that brands want them to put on their account.  New jobs are also created as pet managers are “needed” to manage the legal side of contracts. However I feel like this could also be a sign that we are using social media too much.  Is it ok that we rely on these virtual animals for happiness? Rather than going outside to see these animals in real life we click on an app to scroll through pictures.  I feel like throughout this unit we have talked a lot about the effect social media has on women and men. It can create an unrealistic expectation for its viewers of what their life should be like.
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Pet Social Media Stars?

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Social Media seems to be the place where you can find anything.  I recently read an article off of the CNBC website titled “ Pets are the new social media influencer, and this Harvard Law grad represents many of them”.  The article is written by Erin Barry and talks about how well pets perform on social media. Barry talks about how the pet influencer business has become large enough to the point where the animals have more followers than a lot of humans.  These furry stars need representation to navigate their popularity. With pets tending to perform better on social media the pet influencer market has become the biggest.  Everyone loves their pets, they make you happy, so when people see the pets with a certain brand they associate that happiness with the product. The social media accounts don't just have pet products, they have a variety of brands including movie studios, hotels, and cleaning products.  If these furry influencers have an audience of around 1 million fol
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Men's Mental Health?

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A silent crisis in men's mental health has been determined by a variety of researchers. Psychology today writes " In the current economy, many men are finding it difficult to fulfill a breadwinner role, leaving them without a powerful sense of pride, purpose and meaning in life" (Whitley).  This connects back to the messages discussed in "MissRepresentation".  Men are raised with the expectation that they need to fill the role as head of the family, and provide for everyone.  High rates in suicide have been observed in groups that are perceived as rejected by mainstream society.  This leads to feelings of alienation and isolation.  Men are also found to have a high substance abuse rate in comparison to females.  The article states " Research indicates that many men engage in substance abuse in response to stressful life transitions including unemployment and divorce" (Whitley).  50 percent of marriages end in divorce, and only about 1 in 6 men have
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Thoughts on "MissRepresentation"

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The documentary titled "MissRepresentation" was written and directed by  Jennifer Siebel Newsom.  " The film draws back a curtain to reveal a glaring reality we live with every day but fail to see – how the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls makes it difficult for women to feel powerful and achieve leadership positions" The Film brought attention to the high standards women hold for other women.  Looking back at it I can see different situations where this happened.  The whole 2016 Presidential campaign was an example.  The documentary talks about how if women stuck together to back rather than bash Hillary and other women in positions of power, we would see more women in power.  The article gave the example of battles in congress.  One of the politicians talked about how the women agreed that if it was just them they could have solved the issue within minutes.  The whole idea of the media putting women against other women is conc
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Thoughts on "Merchants of Cool"

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In the “Merchants of Cool” documentary we watched in class this week they people discussed the advertising market for teens.  Robert McChesney is a media critic, and in the documentary he gave his opinion on the effect the media has on our emotions. He states “ Well, it really promotes the sort of world in which you don't think anything matters, unless it serves your material gain. Why be honest? Why have integrity? Why care about other people? That's for chumps. It's all about taking care of number one. The dominant institutions in society, the values they send out is, ‘We're just here to make money off of you. We're just here to take advantage of you.’ The message that goes out to everyone in that system is, ‘Yeah, everyone should be everyone for themself. Just take care of number one. Why should I care about that other person, you know? What's in it for me?’” (McChesney).  As a teenager I feel like our society has been changing to this materialistic worl
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The New Britney Spears

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In class this week we watched a Frontline documentary titled “Merchants of Cool”.  This is a documentary on the market of teenagers, a growing industry worth billions of dollars.  In the documentary they talked about female influencers that are the most popular amongst teens. In the video Britney Spears was named as the most popular, but because the documentary was made several years ago there have been several changes to who is in with the teens. Here are some influencers that I think influence our generation now: Kylie Jenner At twenty years old Kylie Jenner has over 100 million Instagram followers, a baby, and a net worth of over 50 million.  She started off on her families reality television show “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and has been in the spotlight ever since.  Her wealth comes mostly from her cosmetics line which was worth 386 million in 2017. The whole Kardashian family has had a large effect on pop culture.  It seems that everything they have the whole wor
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