Review and reflect on the readings and film issues, communications homework help

Answer the questions by incorporating the articles and videos.

Media Giants seek business cost/benefit advantages and the
citizen/audience public require voice in media issues and live with
constraints on voice posed by these media industry structural trends.

• How does Disney media help construct the social reality of our children?
• Does the consumer know best? Are conventional view assumptions about consumers true?
• If consumption is social, production is also social. What is social
  responsibility in production? What instances can you identify where
  media creators have shown social responsibility with respect to
  audiences?

Article 1

New Media Giants Reading Notes

Media Giants role in production, distribution, exhibition & marketing media content that affects our social reality.

Four common Business Structural Trends in the Media Industry

• GROWTH—Media and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) companies have grown through mergers and acquisitions.
• INTEGRATION—Horizontal integration is owning diversified media
  forms. Vertical integration is owning companies at all stages of
  production, distribution and exhibition.
• GLOBALIZATION—Global expansion of markets and market economy ideas
  and practice to all regional, national, and local economies and
  societies.
• CONCENTRATION OF OWNERSHIP—Power, control, and decision making in the hands of a few

Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed by the US Congress.

• Technology innovation and change influenced structural changes in
  industry and the relationship between industry and government.
  Telecommunications is a large and growing sector of the US economy.
• Trends supported by 1996 Act  
  • Liberalization—Open markets to competition
  • Deregulation—Reduction of government rules
  • Privatization—Government operations restructured into private operations

The Media Structural Trends Debate includes the business or market
economy perspective which characterizes these trends as normal profit
enhancing practice and the public advocacy perspective which
characterize these trends as creating obstructive barriers to entry for
diverse human representation and voice in the media business.

Article 2

New Politics of Consumption Reading Notes

New Politics of Consumption is a critique of consumer culture and
argues ideology of consumption manipulates ideas of human need. As
advertising is the economic engine of most media, Schor’s ideas call for
deeper media literacy.

Schor argues for responsible consumption and describes cultural need
for intellectual analysis and critical politics of consumption. It is
important to honor individual choice, but also to seek commitment to
justice and equality. This requires education about social impact of
consumer choices.

Consumption Regime Failures

• Consumption itself is part of the problem.
• System is structured so adequate income is an elusive goal and there is perpetual perceived condition of not enough.
• Ethical issues of resource distribution justice in the global
  economy remain unresolved. This is critical now in the era of extreme
  climate change.
• Valid arguments critique consumer culture and practices.

Does the consumer know best?  Are these conventional view assumptions about consumers true?

• Consumers are rational.
• Consumers are well-informed.
• Consumer’s preferences are consistent.
• Consumer’s preferences are independent.
• There are no external effects of consumption and production of goods and services.
• There are complete and competitive markets in alternatives to consumption.

Consumption is social so a politics of consumption is needed. Here are some of Schor’s ideas.  

• Right to decent standard of living.
• Quality of life rather than quantity of stuff.
• Ecologically sustainable consumption.
• Democratize consumption practices.
• Consider politics of retailing and the cultural environment, e.g., megastores vs local shops.
• Expose commodity fetishism and contrast it with responsible utility of material things.
• Create consumer movement related to government policy formation.

Video1

No Logo Film Notes

Watch No Logo (50 minutes).

Watch the film for this lesson.

Filmmaker Info and Transcript are available online.

 

Chapter 1 No Logo: Brands, Globalization, and Resistance

• World of brands and logos for corporate market and economic powers
  has drawn challenge and protest based on responsibility challenges.

Chapter 2 No Space: New Branded World

• Process of branding product with consistency and quality.
• Substitutes trust relationship with producer with surrogate
  relationship with brand identity/mascot/ logo, selling ideas of comfort,
  achievement, appeal.
• Ideas are devalued.
• Disney is selling the American Dream, while Nike is selling sports achievement.
• Klein explores the reverence generated by logo symbols of Nike,
  The Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, and Starbucks. These are examples of the now
  common process through which companies increase profits through molding
  consumer relationships into identification with and loyalty to brand
  symbols. Cars sell relationships with people in the cars, desirable
  lifestyle. Consumer loyalty can often mask outsourced exploitative
  worker production conditions under which the products are created.
• Disney has long history of branding, creating brand Nirvana.
• Disney built Celebration Florida as a monument to public space, but serves as a cross promotional monopoly.

Chapter 3 No Choice: Brand Bombing

• Cannot turn it off, so TV takes choice out of equation, with ever present ads, product, placement, and promotional news stories.
• TV as theatre of the brand.
• When we lose the Commons, we lose the idea of anywhere being
  outside of the market. Democracy and town square is nowhere in the
  privatized public sphere, subject to corporate censorship.
• Walmart marketing strategy of creating identity of family store.
• Internalize Walmart values in their censorship and gatekeeping of products

Chapter 4 No Jobs: The Discarded Factory

• Company’s primary role is to produce brand and meaning symbolized by their product.
• Brand identity divorced form real relations of production , sweat
  shop conditions and export processing zones that are walled in, armed
  guard monitored, 80% young female labor force, easy to control, and
  removed from home and family.
• Governments offer tax and labor law incentives to foreign corporations.
• Temporary Labor Agency jobs provide service sector jobs in US,
  non-union and insufficient to support a family, provide no benefits and
  draw workers in absence of disappearing production jobs.

Chapter 5 No Logo: Anti-Corporate Activism & Reclaiming the Streets

• Pick a brand shoe and you can deconstruct its path from source to
  sale to paint a portrait of globalization and the disparity in the
  global economy.
• Investigative activism peels back the facade of the brand and shows how goods are produced.
• Labor and activist groups bring real conditions of product production and distribution
• Protection is for brands, corporations, and marketing strategies,
  not for ethical concerns and struggle for ethical production conditions.
• Truth is you cannot improve conditions by shopping.
• Institutions of World Trade Organization, World Bank, and IMF, are
  writing the rules for trade, and believe rules should be good for
  global corporations and support globalization processes uncritically.
• Movement to reclaim the Commons, and affirm that the world is not for sale.
• Reclaim the Public Commons methods include direct action, public
  voice, support for creating dialogue for positive change, labor rights,
  and human rights.
• It is about Democracy and the right to have a say in and control of our shared public resources.

Video2

Mickey Mouse Monopoly Film Notes

Watch Mickey Mouse Monopoly (52 minutes)

Watch the film for this lesson.

Filmmaker Info and Transcript are available online.

 

Chapter 1 Introduction

• Disney has dominated animated children’s film since the 1930’s and is now a global media giant.
• Dr. Elizabeth Hadley says “Disney is dangerous because it is
  sublime form of education. It is absorbed by our young people’s minds as
  entertainment.”

Chapter 2 Disney’s Media Dominance

• Dr. Henry Giroux, Education, PSU (now McMaster University). In The
  Mouse that Roared, Disney illustrates the intersection of commercial
  media, public entertainment and pedagogy.
• Disney has made a spectacle of innocence (Dr. Justin Lewis, Cardiff University)
• Disney stories have tremendous power to shape a child’s imagination.

Chapter 3 How to be a Girl? How to be a Boy? (Gender Representation)

• Gender images constructed in Disney content have changed little over decades of animation.
• Gail Dines says Ideologies are constructed in media…ideas about
  race, gender, class. We must understand media’s role in socializing us
  including shaping our ideas about gender.
• Females get rescued, males rescue.
• Little Mermaid (1989) she is ready to give up her voice to get the
  male (Dines). This contrasts with Mulan (1998) who shows a strong,
  powerful, young female heroine.
• In Beauty and the Beast, Belle reinterprets abusive behavior of Beast as her responsibility to change him.

Chapter 4 Indians, Hyenas & Chihuahuas (Representations of the Other)

• Poussaint offers that often writers write stereotypes because they
  are not familiar with the actual cultures and characters whom they
  misrepresent.
• Dumbo (1941), Jungle Book (1967), The Lion King (1994), Tarzan (1999) attribute cultural identities to animal characters.
• When you produce a discourse as powerful and widely distributed as Disney films, then you have a responsibility (Giroux).
• Pocahontas (1995) represents European invasion and militarized
  aggression without critical analysis or question. Savages is included as
  a central song. Where are children going to learn the truth in the
  environment of fantasy?

Chapter 5 Commercializing Children’s Culture

• Disney commodifies its characters as toys and this effects the way
  children play, shaping their imaginary space as a replica of media
  stories.
• Broad media empire of Disney can turn every element of information
  and entertainment content into advertising and promotion of all media
  content products.
• Dominant pervasive media of Disney and other media giants
  challenge democracy and diversity of voice, masking truth of excluded
  perspectives.
• “We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to
  make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is
  our only objective,” states Michael Eisner, CEO, The Walt Disney Co.
  (Internal Memo).
• There should be a responsibility as an entertainer to educate as well because you have someone’s attention (Sun, 2001).  

---

Reference

Sun, C. F. & Picker, M. (2001). Mickey Mouse monopoly. [Motion picture]. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation.