During this week of class, we started to discuss the U&G theory. The U&G theory is to show the amount power and influence the fans really have over media. The fans do not even realize how crucial their opinions are for media corporations. They decide whether any type of media lives or die. The theory is based off of the trends that viewers tend to gravitate towards. The viewers look for affective, social integrative, and tension free media. I personally look for affectiveness in television shows or movies. I like to feel involved with the characters and feel what they feel because then I’m more intrigued and really get into whatever is on. I tend to watch television series with a lot of twists and turns. I find it way more enjoyable to always be on toes while watching something. It’s the unpredictability that I find to be very important for a show or movie to have. It really forces the viewer to pay attention and continuously analyze everything because you’ll always be thinking what will happen next.

A strong fan base can effectively alter an entire television series or a movie. The fans are always analyzing every little thing about a series or movie because they want whatever is to be perfectly in tune for every die hard fan. It usually will be the most intense fans that always find something very crucial or very minute detail that the producers messed up. Fans literally put themselves in the fictional stories but they live it in the real world. These are the ones that truly believe the fictional worlds that are created for entertainment are how they should be living their lives. Although some fans can be overly attached, they have the power to bring an entire series back to television. It was the fans to bring back the show “Family Guy” back to Fox.

We also watched the movie “Galaxy Quest” which was about the cast of a television series called Galaxy Quest who are visited by actual aliens who believe the series was a true depiction of an intergalactic conflict and the cast is then brought onto the aliens ship to help them with their intergalactic conflict. This movie was supposed to show how crazy fans could really become. The aliens were the type of fans that truly believed the cast were their characters they portrayed and that the problems they faced during the show were real. I found the movie to be entertaining because there are fans in the real world that would go to the extents of the aliens did.

-Noah Soriano

This week we discussed how the news is presented nowadays compared to how it was presented. The Newsroom is a great depiction of how news broadcasters used to do the news. The main objective then was to get critical information out to the public in an efficient way. In the first episode of The Newsroom, it presented problems with modern day news and also showed how news should be broadcasted. In the show, the major issue discussed was what type of content should be on the news. Whether or not they should focus on actually real problems that are faced in the world or focus on gaining more viewers and simply doing an entertainment show. Many of the characters had their own opinion on the matter.

The first episode was the pilot called “We Just Decided To”, the main point in this episode was to prove to the world that real news is still out there. The main character is named Will McAvoy who is the anchor on the Atlantis Cable News and is the leader of his news team. Will is stunned to find out his ex was his new executive producer and that almost his entire original news team was leaving him to work for someone else. Mackenzie is his new executive producer and brought her own employee whom she highly recommends to work on their team. Will tries to have Mackenzie fired but his agent will not allow that so instead Will sacrifices his own paycheck to have complete control over Mackenzie. He now has the power to fire her at the end of every week depending on how she preforms. During the episode, Mackenzie’s employee begins to receive a news alert about an oil spill but Will’s old employee conflicts with the alert saying that it’s nothing to worry about. The entire team does more research on the situation to find that it is much worse than they thought. This is brought to Wills attention and they broadcast a show that night to alert the public of what the task at hand is and how it could’ve been prevented.

We also discussed how news today is completely different from when it first started. The news sole purpose was to alert the public about important incidents that are happening around them. This idea has been altered and mis-interpreted. Nowadays, the news focuses on making sure the public only knows one perspective of certain issues. The news has the power to change peoples complete ideals just from how they present situations.

-Noah Soriano

During this week in class, we spoke about the many effects that media has on human behavior. We forget how much power the media and news has to alter our everyday lives and decisions. The media is thrown at us everywhere we look and the news we also shove anything that they find outrageous but also exaggerate it to the point where it sounds irrelevant. The thing I find interesting is that with all this “fake news” thats out there, people still will believe every word of it because its being told by professionals and they’re supposed to be reliable.

Another topic we spoke about was human behavior and how it could be altered from certain situations. We watched a documentary called “The Big Picture: Human Behavior Experiments”. This documentary depicted experiments that were conducted in the 1990s. The first was the Milgram experiment where he studied how an individual would react to certain authority. The documentary spoke about the deaths related to this behavior. The death of Matthew Carrington was apart of a frat hazing incident where the pledges had to drink as much water as possible as there initiation test. Matthew was unfortunately a pledge and had to endure this initiation test but in doing so drowned from the large amount of water he consumed. The brothers in the frat stood and watched Matthew die because they thought he was just sleeping it off. This shows the effect media has on individuals. The media shows people are supposed to be cool and popular but people don’t understand that these characters that are on the media are false facade of how people act. The documentary also spoke about an experiment conducted by Stanford where normal people were supposed to be prison guards and prisoners. It was to show how far individuals would go without any rules or supervision. These guards increased their authority over time and started to take advantage of their fake power they had towards the prisoners. The prisoners started to react more and more to the fake power the guards were enforcing. They started to really believe they were in a prisoner and did whatever they were told.

The last thing we spoke about in class this week was the Agenda Setting Theory. It is the influence the media has on the public. I find it alarming how we rely so heavily on the media for all of our information because most of the time it is false. This power can lead to even more controversy in the world.

-Noah Soriano

            The film we watched in class this week, “This Film Is Not Yet Rated”, depicted the world behind the screen and how much goes in to receiving a rating. The MPAA is this highly secret group of individuals that decide what kind of rating a certain film deserves based upon each of their ideals. During the movie, Kirby Dick and a private investigator search for these individuals to find the truth behind the MPAA. They worked together to track the members of the MPAA down and discover what makes them so special. They find out that the members of this secret association are supposed to be “average” adult parents with children.

            To be honest, I never knew how difficult it was to receive an appropriate rating. I did not think a small and secret group of parents made the decision for all films. I find it disturbing that these parents have so much power. They only see things through one perspective. There are certain films that will show a powerful message but show it in a different way to get their point across. These parents will only see the negative effects of how powerful messages will be shown. I think it’s important for films to freely show real world problems and spread awareness of certain cruel things that are really happening. The MPAA will give a NC-17 rating purely for sex standards rather than violence or crude language. I do not believe sex should be under strict surveillance. The MPAA restricts film makers to create sex scenes that are ridiculously exaggerated to prove a point to the audience.

            The MPAA should not have the ability to disband an entire movie just for crude scenes that depict realistic situations that happen every day. The world has changed but the MPAA has not. They are still following false ideals. A film is supposed to present something that people have never seen before. The MPAA wants to present films based on their own false ideals that are reductant in this day of age. I find it strange how secretive the MPAA really is. They would only be this secretive if they also believed that their system is constructed on ideals that are wrong. They remain in secrecy to avoid the board members being interrupted by their decision-making from any outside influence. I think it construes their decision-making even more because this just means they are only being allowed to see through one perspective. They should be able to here other perspectives to form their own fair and honest opinion.

-Noah Soriano

The show “ER” follows the inner lives of the emergency room in a hospital and the lives of the staff. This show represented the ins and outs of a real emergency room. How each staff member must be able to handle any high pressure or high risk situation and act quickly in an efficient matter. They must also have the ability to work effortlessly as a team because one individual cannot rely on their self to handle a situation. The staff in the show face many dangerous problems while in the emergency room. The characters in the show depict different individuals who come from different backgrounds but are able to work cohesively and effectively together to save others lives.

In the episode we watched in class, there was a chemical explosion and the ER was increasingly become more and more chaotic. Many of the patients that were coming into the ER had their clothes covered in Benzene. As the chief of the ER was caring for a patient, the fumes overcame her and she collapsed. Without the chief doctor, there is now no one leading the fellow doctors and nurses. An intern found himself leading everyone. His name was Carter and he started to order everyone who wasn’t’ infected by the fumes to be treated and cared for in the cafeteria. He finds himself running everywhere to ensure that everyone in the ER was accounted for and to collect as many supplies as possible before the Hazmat team decontaminates everything.

The show “ER” depicts a different kind of perspective compared to other shows that were airing at the time. It shows what the entire staff of an ER goes through on a daily basis and how they deal with difficult obstacles. I found the show very intriguing because it keeps the audience on their feet. You never know what will happen to each of the situations they depict. This show is very unpredictable and I like that aspect in shows. When a series finds more and more twist and turns, it could be overwhelming but with this particular show it does it smoothly.

-Noah Soriano

The creation of the television was revolutionary. It allows us to receive information from an entirely different spectrum but it also has such an effect on how we live our lives. The sitcoms or movies depict an elusion of how people act in the real world. The characters in these shows try to relate to an average persons life problems. The difference being the available resources and time the characters in the show really have compared to the average person who actually needs to put the time in and put the work in day in and day out.

Both of these shows represent a group of friends that struggle with many average problems any other group of friends would have but the characters handle their problems completely different. Their problems will vanish in an instance. They’re representing the wrong ways to handle with certain problems and people will take it and run with it anyways. People take the advice from shows like these to deal with their own real life situations.

Rod Serling was ahead of his time. He was a genius storyteller. Serling took such simple ideas and turned them into complex, confusing, eye-opening, masterpieces. He created such detailed stories out of thin air. Serling was unstoppable with his writing. The influence that he had on media today will never be matched. What he did with “The Twilight Zone” was so destructive yet beautiful.

-Noah Soriano