This week we discussed many things but mostly how the media can be misconstrued today. Often times we see things about fake news and how often many things on the television appear to not be true. At the beginning of the week we started talking about the Payne Fund Studies. These studies showed how children and younger adolescents reacted to movies. Many of the kids reacted in a way most may have reacted when seeing something like a scary movie. But, these studies helped show and predict the future of how some react to media as it was preformed in the early 1900s. We then watched Why Be Good which talked about censorship in early Hollywood acting and movies. It talked about Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson who both became very big actresses and changed the way people saw them. Many just saw them as sexual symbols in acting but they really tried to just be themselves and act. Rudolph Valentino also became a big sex symbol in Hollywood at the time, one of the first males to become one as well. There were many scandals that happened like with Fatty Arbuckle and many of the scandals that ended up happening in the film industry led to the Production Code.This week we discussed many things but mostly how the media can be misconstrued today. Often times we see things about fake news and how often many things on the television appear to not be true. At the beginning of the week we started talking about the Payne Fund Studies. These studies showed how children and younger adolescents reacted to movies. Many of the kids reacted in a way most may have reacted when seeing something like a scary movie. But, these studies helped show and predict the future of how some react to media as it was preformed in the early 1900s.

Another thing we also watched this week was The Big Picture: Human Behavior Experiments. There were many experiments that happened in the 1900s. Some you could say were ethical and some you could say were not. The documentary started off with the Milgram Experiment which is very famous in psychology. Milgram studied how much someone would obey another person of authority and how far someone would go. The documentary also talked about some deaths of some people and how we have become almost immune you could say to some things that happen in society thanks to media. Media has made many people not do the right thing instead of doing the right thing. One death that they talked about was Matthew Carrington who was apart of a frat hazing scandal and eventually ended up dying from what they made him do. The guys in his frat thought he was ok but he really was drowning from the amount of water they made him drink. They ended up all pleading guilty but this just shows how people try to fit in. Media is setting standards about how people think they should act and what they should do. The show also talked about the Stanford Prison Experiment which included normal people who were then assigned the job of a prison guard or a prisoner. It was done to see how far a prisoner would go when these “guards” were authoritative figures giving them commands. Eventually though the experiment would then lead to the guards at Abu Ghraib preforming similar acts that these guards did, but way worse and too much more of an extent.

One last thing we talked about this week was Cultivation Theory and Agenda Setting Theory. Cultivation Theory shows the long term effects of what people see on the television. Much of what people see on the television may reflect in their everyday lives. People become immune and some people believe almost everything they see on TV. Their reality is then changed and we start to believe everything we see. Agenda Setting Theory is when the media puts what they think is most important at the top of the list if things to talk about. It may be true or it may not be true at all. Like we saw with the story of Justin Bieber getting arrested, the news at the time thought that was more concerning than learning about what the congresswoman was saying. Many times the media projects what they think they want us to hear first and that’s why they change the agenda.