Jake’s Weblog

Overall, I think that the danger in gaming these days is not necessarily the violence portrayed, but the addictive qualities within them.  It’s very easy to just place yourself into another virtual universe, in much the same way that some claim drugs can transport the mind to another place.  To those with troubled home lives, or who feel they have little value in life, I think it’s easy to see how massive RPG’s like World of Warcraft could be addictive.  They go to these places to become beautiful, to have a social life, or for a million other reasons.  In reality, though, they are forsaking their real existences for a virtual one.  On a personal note, I was at least somewhat addicted to games like the Elder Scrolls series and The Sims for a while.  I don’t consider myself addicted, necessarily, but I used to be a very frequent user.  Even though I play these games less now than I used to, I still get an occasional craving to play them.  The rewarding aspects are so appealing, and disenchantment with life for one reason or another makes it easy to crave an escape route.  If you bomb a test or your girlfriend breaks up with you, etc. you can always escape to the land of Morrowind, where you’re Thrugg, the Level 41 Nord Battlemage, and you can kill a Golden Saint with a single swipe of your enchanted axe.  I finally decided to take it out in a more constructive form – writing.  I found that by writing fiction, I was even freer to explore my own path than in gaming worlds.  I was the director, the producer – I could play God, if you will.  Plus, I was creating something that if I kept with it might be able to get me some money.  I currently am about halfway through a novel of my own, working on it when I have the time.

            This, I think, is the direction that we as a society need to take.  When kids devote all their spare time to video games when they should be out hanging out with friends, they miss lessons they won’t get in the classroom.  In some areas, I still have the social skills of a fourteen year old.  It is a bit of a losing battle in a sense, though, since the game designers are trying to produce a hit product, and with increasing technology, the final products will only continue to be more impressive.  My main concern, though, is that we will become so focused and dependant on electronics for our entertainment, that we will miss out on the fundamental parts of being humans.  Of course, they said the same thing about comic books in the 1950’s, and kids still turned out all right.  So maybe I’m right, and maybe I’m wrong, but what I do know is that there are way too many kids who need to get off the couch and do something constructive in this country.

For this week’s class material blog, I’ll be discussing minority portrayal in television.  Some would give the argument that in today’s times, minority groups are still incorrectly portrayed in television in a variety of stereotypical fashions.  In the sense that they are portrayed stereotypically, I definitely agree.  Stereotypes are present everywhere – shows like “Sanford and Son,” “Martin” and others portray African Americans in a stereotypical fashion. 

In the reading in Taking Sides, Donald Bogle views the portrayal of African Americans in an almost purely negative light.  He basically pigeonholes all African Americans into one of several stereotypical categories.  He is especially critical of “Martin,” claiming that each character has its own little identity in the world of sterotypes.  Sheneneh wears dramatically overdone hair extensions and skimpy clothing, according to Bogle.  Mama Payne is a classic example of the “mammy” character in Bogle’s analysis of African American portrayal in television.

On the contrary, I tend to side more with John McWhorter in viewing the supposed stereotypes less seriously.  This is meant to be entertainment, not to degrade African American culture or any minority culture.  I think that the stereotypes are portrayed in these television shows such that it is intended as humor.  America has reached a point now where we realize that these stereotypes are meant to poke fun and do no harm.  Inevitably there will always be some sticks in the mud, but I think that overall the television industry has done a good job of portraying all stereotypes across the board.  “My Name is Earl” and the work of comedians like Larry the Cable Guy, Bill Engval, and Jeff Foxworthy portray the typical “redneck” image in a satirical form.  This is meant to be funny.  I think there’s a certain desire to laugh at our own little quirks and faults, and these “stereotypical” comedies provide an outlet.  There is, obviously, a line – when the stereotypes reach a derogatory level, obviously there is a problem.  The Don Imus incident, for example is a good recent example.  When we can laugh at our own faults, though, and learn to accept that stereotypes are just a part of who we all are, I think that everyone will be a little more accepting as a result.

   I recently had to partake in an activity in my English 140 Class in which we simulated the promotion of several different bands, and experimented with different advertising techniques to defend why our band was the most commercially marketable.  Afterwards a thought came to mind, and so I decided to run with it this week and see where it goes.  You see, music has seemingly taken a downward spiral in quality over the last few years.  I really see, from an amateur’s eyes, two distinct trends that define today’s music – crappiness and sex.  Look at your favorite bands from roughly a decade ago – how many of them are still around?  Not many.  Hansen and the Backstreet Boys aren’t too much of a loss in my personal opinion, but even the bigger rock groups like Stone Temple Pilots have fallen to pieces.  Guns N Roses is one of the few still around, and it’s not really GNR so much as Axl Rose and some hired lackeys.  Most of them had a ten-year run (if that) and deflated immediately after.  Why is this?  The reason is that record labels just don’t plan for longevity in bands anymore; they need a breakthrough album right off the bat, and so won’t let a band with a lot of potential develop its sound thoroughly.  The albums that do get through sound like crap, based around one or two hits and about eight tracks of fluff.  I honestly can think of only three bands I would label as “good” that have formed in the past few years.  They are Wolfmother, Velvet Revolver, and Jet.  I would also like to point out that Velvet Revolver is the only American band of the three, and it is composed of the former members of Guns N Roses’ original lineup with Stone Temple Pilots’ Scott Weiland on lead vocals.  A perfect example of this new wave of crappiness is Hinder’s Extreme Behavior – it sounds like crap.  I think just about every song on there involves some depressing, heartbreaking love ballad with cheesy lyrics and mass-produced instrumentation.  At least “Lips of an Angel” was a hit.  Yes, I admit it, I like “Lips of an Angel” – oh wait, I’m sorry – I liked it until they played it about 70 million times on the radio.  That’s the other thing; these companies find a hit to promote the album with, and then they completely kill it with continuous radio play.  But the record companies these days are focusing all their energy on making a bunch of little bombs that burn out fast before they get a chance to grow; it’s all about making money.  The days of decade-spanning career bands are virtually over; the Aerosmiths and Led Zeppelins are gone.  I guarantee Hinder will be done in ten years; probably in five.

   To cite Hinder’s debut album for my next case as well, the front cover displays a scantily clad woman in a very seductive pose…I wonder how many teenage boys bought the album for that reason alone.  The lyrics in the album often entail sex and drug abuse as well – in the case of “Get Stoned,” it entails both!  The simple fact is that in today’s world, sex sells.  Not necessarily a good or bad thing, but with so much of our music focusing on such…pleasurable…activities, what kind of affect is it having on the people listening to it.  Consider also the Pussycat Dolls and Fergie.  I guess some people find artists like this attractive – to me they just look like sluts, but you know, whatever sells albums, I guess.  I’m politically liberal, so I guess to the conservative definition, I’m supposed to think all this is OK.  I personally don’t have a huge problem with any of this content; I just think it’s an interesting point how over time, an artist’s success has become less about talent, and more about money and sex appeal.  It’s really pretty sad.

   The music industry these days has a great deal of responsibility on its shoulders in the realm of censorship, and just how far it is willing to let First Amendment Rights dictate what goes on within the industry in terms of lyrical and graphic content.  As the music industry has gotten even broader in terms of what is socially acceptable in music, graphic images and lyrics pose a greater problem.

   Some would say that such things are merely symbolic – I remind you of Nazi Germany – this might be an extreme example, but propaganda from the Nazi party allowed one charismatic man to take a highly educated nation and turn it to his will.  We’ve seen in the past how music can make some cultural changes.  The British Invasion of the 1960’s and psychedelic rock helped usher in the days of flower power and a hippie heaven.  Nirvana’s single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” almost single-handedly launched the grunge movement, and bred a new generation of Americans who were dissatisfied with society.  In short, words have power, and they must be used wisely.  There is, admittedly, no easy way to tackle the problem as a whole – controlling what an artist can produce is an infringement of their creativity, and controlling who can listen to what is reminiscent of the Soviet Union in many respects.  The parental advisory system is also faulty – it essentially has the blocking ability of a sticker on an album.  We need to do a better job of ensuring that young children are not exposed to this material.  I believe the artist still has the right to produce the material – some of my favorite albums are labeled as having explicit content.  It’s just a question of age that should be a concern in the industry.

In response to the film This Film is Not Yet Rated and its critique of the ratings system of the film industry, I think that there are elements of it that are necessary to the well-being of the film industry as a whole, but that there are elements of it that are disturbing to me personally.  For one thing, it has been in the hands of the same man for the past several decades, and he holds his employees to strict secrecy.  To me this seems to suggest that something is being hidden which isn’t meant to be revealed, at least by the people in charge of film ratings

As for the ratings system itself, I think that it is necessary to the industry to ensure that the film’s audience is restricted as much as possible to an audience that can handle the content of the film.  You wouldn’t want your five year old, for example, to watch Superbad.  The system itself is flawed, though, in that DVD releases and the internet enable underage children to gain access to content they shouldn’t have access to.  As for the directors who produce these NC-17 movies and then complain that they get the rating, all I really see are directors trying to push the envelope of the system and complain for the sake of complaining.  In most cases, the movies border on pornographic; do we really need that kind of image even in a mature audience?  Is it really necessary to the overall quality of the film to see 40 “pelvic thrusts” as This Film is Not Yet Rated describes them?  Get over it.  Showing racy content to portray a particular emotion or feeling in the movie is one thing, but most NC-17 films go too far from what I’ve seen.  In addition, look at the amount of R Rated films these days – the numbers and amount of violence is going up.  300 for example showed plenty of artistic, slow-motion shots of decapitations, severed limbs, and more blood than a slaughterhouse.  Do we really need this amount of violence?  Look at Rome – they watched live killings at the Coliseum, and their empire fell apart.  Are we becoming so desensitized to sex and violence?  I can’t answer that, but the gratuity in which it’s portrayed in today’s world can’t help, and I think that it’s important we have the ratings systems to help control who views what films.  I believe it’s important that directors be able to make a film exactly how they want to make it, and maybe some marketing pressure could be taken off of NC-17 films, but I share the opinion of one of the interviewees on This Film is Not Yet Rated in that a ratings system will not stop people from seeing a good movie, and it will not draw people to a bad movie; if the film is good, pople will come; if it’s not, they won’t.

My class material reaction for this week is on the picture of American caskets from the class blog site, and the government’s right to censor war images and media in general.

            The picture in question shows several rows of caskets loaded on what appears to be a cargo aircraft, maybe a C-130, each of them covered by American flags.  American soldiers are scanning over each, making sure that the flags are in place.  In my personal opinion, images like this are vital to the American media.  Personally, I’ve been against the war in Iraq from the very beginning, and I think that it’s important images like this are shown to the public – that this is the consequence of America going to war.  Maybe it will make us think a little harder before blindly giving support to a war with no foundation or purpose.  While I admire the fact that our troops have gone to Iraq with the intent to help the people there, I think that our president’s motives are a great deal different than liberating the Iraqis, and I have believed since the Iraqi invasion began that Bush’s professed “War on Terror” is a war that will never be won.  Some might argue that these images should not be shown because they are too graphic for the public.  But I ask, then, what is your reality?  This is real.  To not show them would be giving the public a false sense of what the Iraq war, and war in general is really like.  This war is the center of a great deal of controversy any way it is approached, but one thing that should not change is whether or not it is portrayed exactly as it is.

The newspaper; there’s something sophisticated and refined in scrolling through a volume of thin, gray newsprint.  Though years ago this form of media may have been highly popular and informative, the 21^st century, it seems, has other plans in store.  From its earliest origins in ancient China, to modern issues featuring Paris Hilton on a daily basis, the newspaper has evolved into a useful tool in finding the news of the day, and yet, its future is also in question.

One of the biggest threats to the future of the American newspaper was the advent of the computer.  With access to news AND internet chess just a click away, many are now resorting to online sources to get their information, whether it be an online newspaper, or otherwise.  Free of charge, a their fingertips, is a newspaper in a more agreeable format.

The growing distrust of the sensationalism of the media may be another attributing factor to the declining newspaper industry.  Sensationalism, however, is nothing new to the profession.  It can be both entertaining, and/or a stretch on the truth.  Yellow Journalism in the 1890’s led to American involvement in the Spanish-American War.  Because of the spin that Joseph Pulitzer and Randolph Hearst placed on their material, the public was perhaps led to believe that the situation in Cuba was worse than it really was.  Similarly, the attention placed on today’s pop-culture icons draws both appeal and discouragement in the public eye. 

The newspaper itself may never really die out as a form of media, but the prospect of it declining is certainly possible, and also unfortunate.  The American newspaper today is not the same as it was during its advent, though whether or not it still functions as a tool worthy of keeping around is something only the readers can decide.