Social Construction of Reality Through Popular Culture

1. Social Construction of Reality Through Popular Culture Lesson 6 SOC 86 – Popular Culture Robert Wonser

2. Social Construction of Reality • Remember from earlier in the course, all reality is constructed socially. • We do this with one another in a collective process of social interaction. • One of the agents of reality construction are our social institutions, of which media is one. How does the monkey experiment shed light on the impact of social institutions on human thought and behavior?

3. Popular Culture’s Worldview • Why does the mass media exist? • Recall also who owns it… • Recall the UN-TV experiments. What does TV teach us? • The power of any institution is a soft one. It lies in remaining unnoticed. • But even though it’s unnoticed it affects how we see the world round us.

4. Popular Culture as a Socializing Agent • There are several important agents of socialization; family, peers, school and mass media. • An agent of socialization is a social institution that socializes people on behalf of society. • What kinds of messages does the media tell us? • How do they differ from the the agents of socialization?

5. What Reality does Pop Culture Construct? • Racism • Sexism • Classisim • Heterosexism

6. Early Cinema How (have) Film Portrayals of People of Color changed?

7. Video Games • For Females: • Less likely to be playable characters to identify with • Half of all female characters were props or bystanders • Female characters are often hypersexualized and/or had unhealthy, unrealistic or disproportionate body sizes while male characters were often hypermasculinized. • Females more than twice as likely to to wear revealing clothing.

8. Video Games • For Males: • More likely to engage in physical aggression (52% to 32%) while female characters were twice as likely to use verbal aggression and ridicule and more than three times as likely to scream. • Tropes: • Damsel in Distress

9. Video Games as Lived Reality • “Every message is the same. I’m always either fat and ugly, or a slut.” • - Quote from “Fat, Ugly or Slutty,” a website devoted to the “creepy, disturbing, insulting, degrading and/or just plain rude” online messages sent to female players • What is it like to play video games?

11. Racial Diversity and Stereotyping in Video Games • More than half of all human characters are white, nearly every video game hero was white. • White female characters also outnumbered female characters of every other racial group. • Games especially created for young children featured only white characters.

12. Latinas and Native Americans were virtually nonexistent, while Latino characters only appeared in sports games and were almost always involved in physical harm and pain. • Few Asian/Pacific Islander characters, and rarely player-controlled, usually wrestlers or fighters and usually antagonists. • Most African American males were portrayed as competitors and most African American females were non-action characters. Females were far more likely to be victims of violence. • What messages do these games convey? Consciously, subconsciously? What do they say about who is valued and who isn’t by society?

13. Reify Beliefs of Society