New Media: Gender, Culture, Technology » August 26th: Consider Media-ted Arguments

August 26th: Consider Media-ted Arguments

Plan for the Day

Richard Conniff’s “In the Name of the Law”

This reading was more amusement, but, as you think about it, where (out there in the world) do you read/see/hear arguments that compare one group or another to NAZIs? If you’ve never noticed this, tell me what you think after reading David Mervin’s piece from yesterday.

  • “Godwin’s Law…holds that the longer an argument drags on, the likelier someone will stoop to a Hitler or Nazi analogy” (emphasis mine, para. 2)
  • Discussions of genocide…why don’t speakers go back further and point to the genocide of indigenous cultures in the Americas?
  • Prepackaged, ready-made arguments: “These little laws [e.g., Godwin’s Law] allow us to sound intelligent without having to do any homework” (para. 3)
  • What other prepackaged arguments do you hear?
    • You can never trust the government.
    • Taxes hurt businesses and economic growth.
    • Environmental regulations kill jobs.

Meredith Whitney on the Crisis with the Contemporary Male

The article is written by Alena Botros, but she’s using Meredith Whitney’s argument and finding data that might support the claim that the American male is in crisis. Here are some questions for us:

  • What exactly is the crisis she’s lamenting?
  • Who or what is to blame for this “crisis of the American Male”?
  • What does she claim is the “bigger picture” of this supposed problem? What will it lead to?
  • What values does Meredith Whitney (and presumably the source, Yahoo! Finance) have?
    • What is she privileging directly and indirectly?
    • What assumptions does she have about the economy and culture, specifically family?

The author of the article does try to locate information that contradicts Whitney’s arguments, but she doesn’t address everything. Consider the following quotes from Whitney:

  • para. 4: “…a portion of young, single men ‘haven’t had sex in the past year and don’t seem to be bothered by it.'”
  • para. 6: “Mid-2000s video games, in Whitney’s mind. ‘You have an ability to feel like you’re gaming with a group of friends or community, but you’re really just at home alone,’ she said. ‘And so the socialization of the young American male really started to break down significantly around that time.'”
  • para. 7: “‘Unless you’re creating a household, there’s no reason to buy a house,’ Whitney said, touching on household formations and birth rates.”
  • Did anyone read the comments?

It might be worth looking at the Pew Research study cited, specifically the table “Since 1940, year when young adult demographic…”

Future Assignments

Time permitting, I’d like to talk a little bit about your future essays, so you can be thinking about them early. If I didn’t mention it already, the Miterm and Final exams are on the reading and class discussion. The note should help you refresh, but there’s no substitution for careful reading.

American Culture

I have other course pages devoted to this listed below, so check them out for more information. Don’t worry about getting this all at once; we’ll be exploring American culture all semester, and you’ll be arguing for (or against) what seem to be essential American qualities in your writing. Although it might seem that American culture in monolithic, it isn’t. However, we will often focus on the hegemonic aspects of American culture.

More Discussion on Our Semester’s Topics

Locating American Values

Because this course is a theoretical exploration of how we can locate a society’s values by “reading” its texts, we ought to think about what those values are. This page asks you to think about American values–it’s from a different class, so don’t get too attached. The goal of this next exercise is to identify values that we might be able to “read” in technologies from American society.

Are You Normal?

According to the US Census Bureau…

2022 and 2024 Updates (read critically and closely)

Keep up With the Reading

You readings for the semester are on Canvas. We’ll discuss David Mervin’s “The News Media and Democracy in the United States,” and I want you to read The Declaration of Independence. You will probably be very surprised. These are short readings, but our readings will get longer after this week.