How Important is The Media?

In 1774 a book titled The Sorrows of Young Werther was published by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. 244 year old spoiler alert: Werther commits suicide at the end. This led to the first documented series of copycat suicides—people who empathized with Werther so much that they would commit suicide and try to mimic the exact details of his death. It was such a problem that this was nicknamed the Werther Effect, aka a spike in suicides emulating one that it romanticized in the media.

All this goes to show is that the power of the world of media should not be underestimated. We live in a country of free speech, and so technically people are allowed to create anything, but that means that all the more responsibility is placed on the creator. Because of the way that advanced technology and our consumerist culture have allowed for the spread of media, we are now constantly inundated with it, even when we’re not realizing it. Bus ads, newspaper articles, book cover, movie trailers, they’re all shortened forms of media that we might not even register that we’re consuming, but even they were created by way of a series of choices. Longer forms of media that we actively peruse contain even more choices. Is this responsibility being taken seriously?

Diversity in the Media

The term “diversity in the media” is thrown around a lot, so in thinking about the responsibility of media-producer, we must first discuss what that entails and why it’s important. It is generally used to mean the inclusion of a spectrum of human experiences, which includes thinking about race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class, etcetera. This can apply to one particular piece of media—i.e., how diverse is the cast of characters for a tv show, or it can be used to look at a section of media as a whole—i.e. how diverse are the directors of movies from 2017?

There are two primary reasons that diversity in the media is important. The first has to do with allowing space for a wide diversity of opinions. The second has to do with how the media can feed back into the “real world” to affect perceptions and opinions.

Diversity= Diversity of Ideas

Now for the White Philosophy Boy question: But every person is pretty different from everyone else, why is it that important to include people based on these specific traits? Well, sure, if you take any group of people, you probably will encounter a wide range of opinions. However, there are certain identities that inform the way that people experience the world to the point that they will have access to ideas and patterns of thought that they wouldn’t otherwise.

This can be very hard to conceptualize from the other side. Being white in America, someone could look at their own skin color and think, my identity doesn’t revolve around being white, why would someone else’s revolve around their skin color? Part of this has to do with the fact that people are not forced to think about these identities as much because a. they are not constantly reminded of it and b. they are not forced to struggle with this identity.

We live in a world where straight is seen as the default and so not identifying as that was something that I had to think about, grapple with, and that process automatically caused that identity to have a more active role in how I perceive the world. Likewise, as someone who is female bodied, there are constant reminders in my day to day life that my opinion is considered lesser and that my main value in the eyes of others is determined by my sex appeal. However, I never need to think about my whiteness. The more that any identity affects you in your day to day life, , the more that it will shape you, and thus you are allowed access to different sets of thoughts or ideas based on these identities and the way that they overlap.

If two writers have nearly identical lives but one grows up in New York and one grows up in Chicago, then sure, they could probably still write fairly different types of books—they are still different people. However, the more identities that divide them, the more different those books are going to become. A book written by a white upperclass straight cis able bodied Christian man from suburban America is going to be very different than one written by a black queer differently abled trans Muslim woman living below the poverty line in a city. White feminists cannot represent the feminist movement because they represent only a small subsection of the experiences to feminism. A government full of men cannot adequately decide on women’s healthcare because they cannot guess at that experience.

“The human experience is universal” is a sentiment that sounds very nice, but it completely erases someone’s culture, and chooses to ignore centuries worth of oppression that have been inflicted on groups of people. We do not live in a post-racial, post- gender world. It’s always important to find points of commonality between people, but it’s also important to acknowledge how their differences allow them to have different sets of ideas. So, White Philosophy Boy, by not creating spaces for voices of diversity to be heard, there are entire universes of thought that are not being allowed to come to fruition.

Media—“Real World” Feedback Loop

When the Twilight saga came out, how many preteen girls were screaming about how Edward Cullen was their ultimate fantasy. Whenever something problematic surfaces with a book, movie, or piece of media, it’s so easy to claim, “oh, it’s just a (insert piece of media here), it’s not real, relax”. And yet. At the same time we see how fanatic people can get over pieces of media. Because the Twilight saga romanticized a toxic relationship, a whole age group of girls grew up seeing that sort of relationship as the pinnacle of romance, idealizing stalking and possessive behaviors.

This is not to say that people can’t think for themselves, they can. They can decide whether or not to align themselves with the values held by a piece of media. However, there are certain groups (read: younger groups) that are particularly susceptible to being influenced by the things that they consume. Furthermore, isn’t it better to start out creating a piece of media that is responsible about the message that it puts out in the first place?

All this is to say that the media does influence perception. If we want people to see all humans as created equal, a good start to that would be to portray it in the media. This summer I worked in game design and one of the principles we were working on was, in order to change the world for the better, we must first present a model of that world. A good portion of tv shows/movies/books/etcetera don’t even bother with the diversity question at all. They’ll portray a world populated by white, straight, cis, characters. There are complaints when a single gay character is portrayed in a tv show but if shows tried to mimic diversity in a more proportional way, each show would have at least a few.

To create a more tolerant world, diversity needs to take on less shock value. There’s plenty of diversity in the real world, but it is absent in the portrayals of it. If people start out as conceptualizing the world as it is—full of a variety of people with different identities, then the whole “there are people who are not similar to you and that’s ok” thing would be a mental block that would be overcome without them even noticing it.

Media not only informs people about the existence of diversity, but informs the way that they should interact with that diversity. If we want people to stop believing in the trope of the scary black man, or the dumb but sexy blonde, or the white man who somehow has so much more knowledge than everyone else around him and swoops in to save the day, maybe we should stop writing these things. Perpetuated stereotypes can do a whole lot of damage because by nature they are not one instance of this type of character, but rather a repeated pattern. Inundation with these stereotypes will cause us to associate those traits with those groups, and thus the media informs how we perceive and interact with real life.