Stoner - Culture Shock

I especially enjoyed Professor Stoner’s presentation on her work with culture shock and how it is affected with new media of today. I am half Middle Eastern and have gone to the Middle East several times in my life to visit family members. My cousins live in the countryside and constant Internet and even power for that matter are not something taken for granted as they are here in America, especially in a big city like Chicago. That combined with my non-international phone plan definitely created a feeling of culture shock. Since we do not go often when we do it is a summer at a time and so Professor Stoner’s outline of the time frame for when culture shock will occur, being after the honeymoon stage, struck close to home. The honeymoon stage is all too easy to relate to, you are in a foreign country and it’s exciting to see family and to see what has changed, things you’ve forgotten about, things you haven’t seen before, etc. Then, all too soon it seems, the culture shock stage, realizing the reality of your cut off predicament, comes along. I realize I would actually miss checking Facebook, keeping up with my friends and family at home, amenities and conveniences even from home became something you thought a lot more about even though they were taken for granted before.

            Occasionally I would get my “fix” of Facebook time when the Internet would be up and the power would be on long enough to get on the computer and stay on. It really made me think of how different the experience would be if I really, truly was cut off completely from Facebook would I have gone a bit more stir crazy? Eventually I did make it to the adjustment stage but it becomes a different way of being adjusted than at home. Where at home I am adjusted again by having my phone attached to my hip and my laptop easily accessible, etc. I would find myself spending more time reading or going out and exploring. It makes the arrival home seem like a shock yet again. Once I had my phone again I was almost annoyed that I was being texted, as if my friends were trying to bother me, it all did not seem like anything to me at the time but when Professor Stoner brought the topic up I thought back to this immediately and it seemed to makes sense suddenly.

            Although I would clearly have no background in studying this topic from my personal experience I would have to say that it seems like even though I did in fact have limited Facebook access it almost seemed to make the culture shock worse. Instead of feeling like it lessened the blow, like “oh it’s so nice to be connected to my friends back home!” it was more of a “I wish I didn’t know everyone was having such an amazing time while I’m stuck here with my family”. So while I cannot speak from any experience not having Facebook, I felt that I almost wished I didn’t even have that limited access because it served, to me, as a reminder of what I was missing out on.

Professor Rojecki - Political Comm.

Professor Rojecki’s lecture (“The Tea Party & the Politics of Insecurity”) shed light on politics, in part how we choose to watch, read, or hear the news (selective perception) but also because of how, via any platform, the news is framed to almost manipulate us. Along side this is what content is actually being covered in the news. This becomes a communication issue because when we are watching the news, what makes it okay or “normal” for us to want to watch news about things that should not even be issues in the first place than demand news about things that should really matter.

The media is now a place where our habit of selective perception can be fulfilled and political communication and media are a great example of this. When someone is a democrat or republican they will be more likely to tune into a left or right winged news station, respectively. This correlates with Professor Rojecki’s mention of a decline in accidental audiences.

Rojecki discussed closer to the beginning of the lecture that 2/3 of the population believes that our nation is in decline (rather than showing progress). This flows into insecurity; if we experience insecurity about our problem solving and the ability for our nation collective make progress then a lean towards decline only makes sense. If we are insecure about our nations progress then this can also tie back to selective perception. That can be a kind of defense mechanism, if we watch what we agree with then our beliefs are reinforced and insecurity or anxiety are seemingly reduced.

Story Telling

As discussed in lecture, symbols can be anything from letters and words to objects. Professor Barnhurst specializes and focused his lecture on the sociology of young minds. In doing so he asked the class to write out notes about stories and then broke down how story telling works. Symbols are a major factor for breaking down the story telling process. Barnhurst explained that people start with the abstract, for example: “I have a story to tell you!” These simple words, or symbols, before a story prepare a person for what is to come. Barnhurst explains that if you just started telling a story without announcing in some way via use of symbols that you are in fact going to tell a story, people would be confused. It would also seem pertinent to take into account distance while speaking.

Story telling has these basic elements to it but the language and symbols you would use for the audience and the content of the story would be affected. If it is a deeply personal one, intimate distance is used and so on and so forth up until public distance. This reiterates how closely intertwined verbal and non-verbal communication are, that is it not simply an either or but that how we physically present ourselves affects the story’s interpretation (another step in story telling which actually, unlike the rest of the steps, occurs simultaneously with all previous steps discussed by Professor Barnhurst).

These next two steps of story telling, complicating action and resolution, are most closely relatable to framing. Framing is how we use symbols to convey our messages and stories in ways that are most beneficial to us and / or to the situation. When the complicating action aspect of the story comes into play we are typically saying things like, “you won’t believe what happens next!” Everyone knows they have exaggerated a story a time or two either to make it more interesting for the listener, to appear cooler or not crazy, to impress or to defer and so on. Regardless of the reasoning when in this step of story telling it would almost seem like a give that one would frame to benefit themselves or others.

Resolution, the final step (besides the overall step of interpretation), provides the “what happens next” of the story. This is also relatable to framing because we all understand the feeling of thinking of a great comeback much later after an argument or a flirtatious encounter and thinking, “ugh why didn’t I say that instead?” Sometimes, without even realizing you relay the story to a roommate or a friend or a parent and you may alter just what you said, framing the story, to incorporate your much better, much too late comeback.

Overall the steps of story telling are so basic that we hardly think twice about the pattern involved. We forget or fail to realize that we are choosing our symbols / language and framing them in such a way to not only convey the story but in a way that allows for the proper interpretation from the first step to the last.

Girls Have Cooties

Professor Meraz's lecture focused on the gendering of the Internet. I think it’s pretty safe to say that people have experienced some form of gendering or sexism in their lifetime, whether consciously intended and/or perceived or not. We all go about our lives with notions of what men “do” and what women “do”, they seem to be imbedded in our very upbringing. How many girls can honestly say that growing up they weren’t bought Barbie dolls while any male siblings/friends were playing with toy cars and robots? I know I couldn’t. How many male children do you know of that are bought little kitchen sets? Easy Bake Ovens? Those were like gold to a female child, I just about had a heart attack when I opened up one of those bad boys for Christmas one year. I am not passing judgment of what children necessarily want, or even focusing on children in this situation, but merely using this as an example of what we are learning from our parents and what they have learned from theirs; so much in life becomes genderized and it translates into the workplace, education, personal lives, etc. Meraz gets the lecture going by bringing up “The Incredible Shrinking Pipeline” and defines this term as one referencing “the decreasing percentage of women in the computer science field.” I want to reference a story Professor Meraz brought up at the end of lecture about a girl who was leaving the classroom (opting to drop out) and was followed by the professor down a stairwell. The professor’s intent was innocent and one with the goal of trying to understand where she was coming from and what he could do to help her stay in the class and succeed. Short story made shorter, she was frightened by his aggressive approach. The point of this story was that there really are no female role models in male dominated positions such as computer sciences and online blogging.

There are decreasing percentages of women in the field because it is easier to go where your gender is, so it seems. It is easier growing up to have an Easy Bake Oven like the rest of your friends than showing up with a toy car and being excluded. Even these two examples of childhood toys can be related to the video game phenomenon that Professor Meraz addressed. She used the video game “Diner Dash” as example of the types of video games geared towards the female population. That is that those types of video games encourage domestic activities, working, taking care of something or someone, basically perfecting multitasking and not relaxation, which is something men’s video games are geared towards; entertainment and unwinding. The Easy Bake Oven is a miniature of what domestic behavior is, in society, to come while the toy car is representative of the male entertainment and relaxation.

I especially liked Professor Meraz’s examples of women who made huge impacts on the Internet and blogging sites/usage and how despite their efforts they were framed in the news and media in such a way that made them appear to be the typical damsel in distress, reaching the conclusion of a new blog site, etc. only by the means of their knight in shinning armor. We discussed framing in class with the infant being bitten by rats and how different ways of wording the story lead us to point blame, offer praise, and take action against different people(s) each time. The framing of stories about these ladies is prime examples of this. Mena Trott, a woman who essentially came up with the entire concept of Movable Type – the second blog site (Blogger being the first) – was hardly credited with anything at all because the framing of the story of her and her husband Ben’s success portrayed her input as being insignificant and almost irrelevant in comparison to her husband’s development of the site.