Week 11- “Questioning the generational divide”

Herring, Susan, ‘Questioning the Generational Divide: Technological Exoticism and Adult Constructions of Online Youth Identity” in Buckingham, David (Ed.) Youth, Identity and Digital Media, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2008

For my final Media, Culture & Everyday Life blog, I’m going to write about Susan Herring’s “Questioning the generational divide”, which I think was really interesting. She looks at the ‘iGeneration’, or Generation Y, and how our generation has come to be defined by the technologies we’ve been using since we were young. She analyses the “divide” between us and those before us, and the way in which we are perceived by the older generations.

Herring made a good point about the fact that although we are the generation defined by the use of new technologies, it is the adults who create them and profit off us. In a way, she almost makes it sound like Generation Y is being taken advantage of by the older generations. By this I mean, we are more closely aligned with the new digital media, and anything bad associated with it comes back down to us, even though it’s the adults who facilitate these means! David Buckingham had similar sentiments in the reading, stating that the “autonomy and freedom” we may experience through media is “illusory” (p290). However, Herring says that members of the iGeneration are “not yet old enough to have attained positions of influence within the media production industry” (p291). This point can be refuted by the example of the creator of Facebook, arguably the largest social networking site in the world right now, Mark Zuckerberg, who is part of the iGeneration.

As usual, news media has something to say about new communicational tools used by my generation, as well as “Netspeak”. Now, I find writin lyk dis as unbearable as your average Gen X-er, but it really isn’t as awful as some media make it out to be (http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/dpp/news/fox_5_links/Top_50_Text_Acronyms_Parents_Should_Know_052009). I don’t think anyone actually used about 99% of those abbreviations; so unless everyone starts speaking in Lolcat, nobody really has anything to worry about!

Interestingly, Herring looks at youths own perspectives on their generation. Her research shows differing opinions on new digital mediums, and how some peoples own beliefs echo those of older generations. She also looks at the effect of advertising on youth, and reveals that we are mostly “indifferent” to it. This can be attributed to the fact that we have been exposed to it all our lives, but also with programmes like The Gruen Transfer on ABC, which sheds some interesting light on the advertising industry.

In conclusion, I think the bottom line of this reading was that the youth of today are not stupid! We are often misrepresented by various forms of media, including TV (see The Simpsons episode ‘Homer Goes to College’) as well as advertising; but essentially as members of the iGeneration, we are “street wise”, “media savvy” and not necessarily “vulnerable” or “victims”.

“Want to be more than info super highway traffic… when imagination gave participation in creation of of culture and manifestation”

iGeneration- MC Lars

Week 10- “The children overboard affair”

Macken- Horarik, M “The Children Overboard Affair” Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 26.2, 2003

The weeks reading which I have decided to focus on is Mary Macken- Horarik’s, “The children overboard affair”. It’s an interesting read about how both text and image were manipulated by newspapers to portray asylum seekers a certain way in 2001 following the infamous “Children Overboard” scandal. This was done to support the governments “fiction” of what really happened at the time the apparent story occurred and to promote “racist discourse” (p251).

Macken- Horarik states that “increasingly, in western media, news is a multimodal creation” (p252). By this she means having pictures or photographs ‘complementing’ a story. A quote by van Leeuwen, arguing that “words provide the facts… images provide interpretations” (p253) can be contested as to its accurateness, particularly in relation to modern ‘tabloid’ newspapers. The children overboard story was used by the government to promote it’s policies and provided newspapers with 3 days of front page headlines while an apparent photograph of one of the incidents in question was made public.

According to Macken- Horarik, and supported by van Leeuwen, as readers of the articles about asylum seekers, we tend to “feel close” to the politicians (albeit the Liberal ones) involved in the story, rather than ‘the boat people’, as they are referred to generically as opposed to specifically, as the politicians were. Another way the audience is supposedly made unsympathetic to asylum seekers through media discourse is the lack of ‘functionalisation” of them. While other ‘characters’ of the story are referred to by their occupation, the asylum seeker is merely ‘a boat person’ or ‘chid’ or ‘parent’. Finally, the Role Allocation of each person is an important concept to understand. Macken- Horarik states that in the photograph, the boat people are ‘passive’ and the navy officer is the ‘rescuer’. This is supported by the caption of the photo, saying that she “helps a woman and child from the people- smuggling boat”.

Week 9- “Reporting War”

Lukin, Annabelle “Reporting War: Grammar as a Covert Operation”. 239- 240

I’ve chosen to write my blog this week on Annabelle Lukin’s article, “Reporting War”, as I think it’s extremely interesting the way she’s analysed texts about the war in Iraq, as well as speeches about it, through a linguistic approach. The main purpose of the article is to disassemble the ‘facts’ that have been reported about the war, and the way journalists have used language to essentially change the meaning of a sentence.

Lukin uses the words “The milk spilt” and “I spilt the milk” to exemplify the first couple of concepts she explains in the reading. The first is called ‘middle voice’, in which “there is no external agent who caused the event to happen” (p239). The latter example demonstrates “active voice”, in which “she is the grammatical agent which caused the even to take place” (p239). A third concept is also explained; the “passive voice”. These three different ways of speaking are not only used in politics and journalism, but also in everyday life. Carefully choosing which to speak in can completely change the way a sentence is construed by someone; by implying ownership to the cause of the event, to making it seem like a natural action.

Considering this is all technically still ‘fact’, it’s surely a journalist’s and politician’s dream to be able to use grammatical language like this to lead readers and citizens! It’s no wonder American politician’s (*ahem* Republicans), “have put billions of dollars” into being able to “frame” words and speeches; they could essentially say whatever they want if they just put it the right way (George Lakoff- linguistics professor). Lukin further explains this idea, of how choosing the right words to say can change the entire meaning of something. She used the quote, “Coalition forces dropped bombs on Baghdad”, as an example of ‘passive voice’, and how differently that sentence would be recieved if it were changed to “F- 117 radar- evading jets dropped bombs on Baghdad”. This was a fairly clever thing to have done, as having gone with the former sentence, they would have somewhat reduced fear amongst the public that perhaps the government wasn’t in control of what was happening in Iraq, as opposed to the technology being in control.

In conclusion, Lukin’s article presented some very good points on how language is manipulated to change the meaning of ‘fact’, and how it can be used to present different versions of ‘fact’, especially by media and politicians.

P.S. The George Lakoff quote was taken from here- <http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/27_lakoff.shtml> accessed May 14 2009.