Popular Products

Instead of looking at popular examples of our topics in media, we examined different forms of products people have made portraying our topics. Some of these kinds of products can be memes, YouTube videos, advertisements  or political cartoons. We could see throughout the examples my classmates presented, a lack of a sociological view in most cases. My examples were mostly memes that people have made that were mostly just offensive. For some reason, I found the reoccurring theme that it had to be offensive in order to be funny. Some of my classmates had some very interesting political cartoons. We could see through those examples that there was a little more knowledge and thought that went into them. A lot of these sources were lacking any form of sociological knowledge. I believe that a lot of the content we see online or around us, is very pointless. When I was trying to find products about those with intellectual disabilities, I had a hard time finding something with substance to it. This was when I really noticed just how much uneducated. idiotic things we are constantly exposed to. Some advertisements even used the idea of stupidity to make their point! One of my products was a cartoon someone drew of a family looking at a house near a psychiatric hospital. The mother is saying "but what if the wind changes and my kids all catch schizophrenia?" This cartoon can be taken in two ways. A knowledgeable person would look at this and say. "wow that's horrible and she clearly doesn't understand that schizophrenia is noncommunicable." On the other hand, someone that doesn't get that idea would think. "oh no! If I move into a house near a psyc hospital, I'll need to go into one."Of course this is not the case but unfortunately, there are still people in this world that don't realize that. So overall, we need to be careful of how we interpret things, make sure we actually look at underlying messages, and overall, don't believe in everything on the internet. 

Popular Media Sources

For this weeks blog post, the class all searched for examples of our topics in popular media sources. As sociologists, we analyzed the way certain media sources portray different social issues. You can see throughout the different forms of media the different impacts they have on viewers. In a lot of the social topics, we were given the contrast of videos and articles being used. I found these two sources to give information in their own way which in turn causes different audiences and emotions to be effected. Videos tended to have more of an emotional connection to them, especially the video we watched on the foster care system. This form of media is often used to show more of the personable side of stories. Articles on the other hand are how people get all of the data across to the public and giving more facts. While some articles were able to find a happy-medium to the stories presented, a lot of the time they are missing crucial parts to reasons behind the story, the data, or the emotion. They also tend to be one-sided stories that don't take into account the opposing sides' perspective. For a sociology major, we can often see these pieces that are missing but for an average person, a lot of the time, they don't get all of the information. 
We have always been told, "don't believe everything you read on the internet," and this can be applied to all other forms of media. While we would like to think that we are getting accurate data from the news and online, we have to be cautious and look at more than one source for our information. This is how sociologists research because we know that there are always more than just one perspective on social issues.