Chapter 7: Gendered Narratives in Popular Culture

"Are you a character in someone else's story or are you the author of your own?" The book questions, in a section which talks about how identities are learned though popular colture. I definitely think we learn a lot about our culture and construct a lot of our reality through viewing media. This is because what we see on television we assume to be true, because we have grown up with television, it is familiar, we are comfortable with it and we can resonate with it. Along with resonating, television mainstreams ideas. In mainstreaming, media creates the norms by stabilizing and regulating views within a society. For most kids, they learn their sexual roles in society by age six, just by viewing television. As we learn and grow with the media we learn to trust in it and build our realities off of it.

The media creates a synthetic reality, that tells stories and entertains and that keeps up the status quo. The realities in which media creates are distorted views of the world because it is only the view that the media is presenting. In the theory of cultivation it says the more a person watches television, the more distorted their views will be. The television cumulatively creates a world view in which the heavy viewers believe is their present reality.

While I am aware that media and popular culture as a whole have definitely influenced my behavior over the course of my life, I am increasingly motivated to create my own authentic reality. It seems hard to do, as the book says, when we act as we are supposed to we are rewarded (and disadvanteged for the opposing). People like order and come to expect certain behaviors in situations. I think in life it is important to find the balance between being socially acceptable enough to fit in, in a society. And just disconnected enough to find your true beliefs and values in life.