Religion in the media

Religion in the media can be showed in many different ways, some positive, some not so positive. From the “hip” or “cool” religions like Hinduism and Buddhism to the religions that are viewed in a negative light like Jehovah’s Witnesses, media has represented them all.

Hinduism is the third most followed religion and is viewed in a poplar, “cool” light in the media. We aren’t fully aware of how we have adapted and use some of the terms in Hinduism. For example Eat, Pray, Love is a Hindu philosophy inspired movie that stars Julia Roberts who revealed back in 2010 that she practices Hinduism despite being raised Christian. Julia Roberts along with a long list of other celebrities have revealed to have converted or practice Hinduism. This list of celebrities include M.I.A., and Russell Brand whose 2010 wedding to Katy Perry was a traditional Hindu ceremony in India as well as Elizabeth Gilbert who is the author of Eat,Pray, Love along with many other books. These are just a few examples of a very long list of celebrities who practice Hinduism.

In addition to celebrities practicing Hinduism, religious symbols of Hinduism can also be mass recognized. Ganesha and the Om symbol are mass recognized even if people don’t know the names or the meaning behind them. Even if people don’t know the name Ganesha they can recognize the religious figure as “oh that’s the elephant guy” though most people don’t know what he represents as a god. Ganesha is believed to be the remover of obstacles, he is the patron of arts and sciences and the deva of intellect and wisdom. He is one of the most worshipped deities which could be a reason as to why so many people know of him, or can recognize him. Now Om is a spiritual symbol that materializes in a sound. Om refers to soul or self within along with something called Brahman, which is ultimate reality, entirety of the universe, truth, divine, supreme spirit, cosmic principles, and knowledge. It means different specific things in different schools and teachings and can mean something different to each person.

Some people don’t know the depth of these religious symbols when they go ahead and get an Om tattoo because it’s popular or “cool”. Or some people get tattoos knowing their meaning but don’t know what’s respectful or disgraceful in a religion on the placement of religious tattoos. For example, Buzzfeed posted an article about an Australian man who went on vacation to India. While eating at a restaurant him and his girlfriend were mobbed and harassed by locals. He had a tattoo of a hindu goddess tattooed on his calf which some locals found offensive. They even went as far as to threaten to skin off the tattoo on his leg. He was taken to the police station and was held there for three hours with the mob still outside. He was only released after being forced to write an apology letter. Another example of religious ceremonies being used as a “cool” thing to do is Holi. Holi is a religious ceremony that has become mass recognised and is practiced in non-Hindu communities. It is even enjoyed in the comfort of our Putney community. Holi is a spring festival also known as the festival of love or the festival of colors. It has become popular in the media and has a “cool” sort of feeling associated to it since it’s fun and colorful and you get to throw colored powder at complete strangers.  

In addition, we also have adapted some words from other religions and use them in our day to day vocabulary. The major one we use is karma. Now the word karma isn’t directly affiliated with media however it is a word that you hear fairly often in conversation. I hear people say pretty often say karma to explain a bad event. Karma (in Hinduism and Buddhism) means the sum of a person’s actions in this and previous states of existence, determining their future existences. Some people explain it as “what goes around comes around”. In addition, a hindu goddess also made an appearance during a light show on the empire state building. Back in August, the Hindu goddess Kali made an appearance on the Empire state building. The image of Kali was used because Android Jones the artist in charge of the light show wanted to provide a “fierce new avatar” in the fight against pollution, and extinction. Kali is the goddess of time, creation, change, preservation and empowerment.

Now let’s talk about the most followed religion in the world. Christianity. Along with it being the most followed religion in the world 77% of the US identify as Christian.However, even though the majority of the US identifies as Christian some branches of Christianity are viewed in a negative light on social media. Take Jehovah’s witnesses for example. They are viewed as annoying or bad in the media, there are numerous sites saying how to get rid of Jehovah’s witnesses or how annoying they are. Along with certain branches of Christianity being viewed in a negative light in the media, social media also shows people’s opinions which sometimes can take this religion lightly and devalue what the religion represents. For example here are some tweets about Jesus. “Big deal Jesus, so your dad sent you here to suffer & die, that’s what all the rest of us are doing too”, “Jesus died for your sin, cos, and tan so it’s OK if you’re bad at math.”, “Shark jesus died for my fins.”, “remember teens: even Jesus once logged off for 3 days”. Everyone knows about Jesus and has the general concept of what he did. But how does it effect a religion when it is popular and people who don’t follow the religion pass opinions on the religion? And this question doesn’t only apply to Christianity but also to Hinduism as well.

Now I’m going to move on to Islam, the second most followed religion in the world. Muslims face a lot of prejudice in our media, traveling, and day to day life in the US. After 9/11 this country faced many misconceptions about muslims all being terrorists, there are a lot of stories out there about Muslims having to be been faced with additional “random” airport screening the majority of the time they travel. An example of the day to day prejudice that Muslims face is a 19 year-old high school student from New Jersey had a video of her posted on snapchat without her consent. The video was taken by one of her classmates who has put the words “ISIS <3” and then put on her classmates story. She reported the offense to her school district who investigated the situation and told her that there was no evidence of “harassment, intimidation, or bullying”

Another example of not just Muslim prejudice but racism is what happened at a New Hampshire rally for Donald Trump. A man who was at the rally proceeded to ask Trump “We have a problem in this country, It’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one.You know he’s not even American. We have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?” to which Trump responded with “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things. A lot of people are saying that, and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We’re going to be looking at that and plenty of other things” and then moved on to other questions. Obama was born in Hawaii and practices Christianity. However Trump has for a long time fed conspiracies about Obama not being from the US but instead being from Kenya. This doesn’t just show someone asking how we can get rid of an entire group of people solely based on their religion having extremists that have been responsible for terrorist attacks but also stating something about Obama has some truth to it but  overstates Obama’s relationship with the Islam religion that tries to discredit Obama’s presidency.

The first rock star astronaut

Throughout my life I have been asked by my parents, peers and everyone around me “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Now at the age of five I said the normal thing like “I want to be a rock star, and an astronaut. I’ll be a rockstar astronaut!” However, as i grew up and learned more about the world, and what money was my thought process changed. The question to me was no longer what I wanted to be when I grew up, it was what career could I pick where I would never have to really worry about money. Growing up meant that a big part of my career choice would be focused on what makes the world go round, money. My career would have to be  able to support the lifestyle I would want to live, which meant I had to think about what lifestyle I wanted. It seemed as though my entire concept of picking a career was about money. Now it seemed that my perceptions of how I wanted to live my life were a bit screwed up. Certainly money isn’t the only thing that matters, right?

Class isn’t just solely about  how much money you have, it’s how you spend it. Social class is about where you go to get an education, what brands you wear, where you go out to dinner; what cool new technology you have, the list of what money can buy you goes on and on. All of these aspects affect how you are perceived by others. It also affects how you interact with others from the same or different social classes. Being a part of any social class, in a way, dictates who you interact with, who you talk to, who you become friends with. It also can dictate who you talk to about controversial ideas. All of these things can also change how a person fundamentally thinks about the world. Our personality has lot to do with how we interact and relate to one another. In addition, the people that you talk to, and grow up around can change your perceptions, and therefore change you how you interact with others which can ultimately change our personality.

So is money the source of class? Well if you have money you can go to any school you are accepted into since the tuition won’t be a problem. If you have money you can buy any brand name clothing you want to. You can live anywhere you want, and have all the new trinkets your heart so desired. When it comes down to it all of these aspects affect your environment and the people you are surrounded by.

Most people just think of money as a currency to go through life. However, money is much more than that. It is social class; it is life.

Violent Thugs vs. Rowdy Kids

All media has a filter to which all information goes through before it reaches us. Whether consciously or unconsciously people make decisions that decide whether an agenda is pushed into the masses or falls short and becomes a quiet voice in the roaring crowd of information. In addition, when there is a conscious decision on how a story is told it affects the masses. When that tall tale gets into our popular mass media it can put subconscious ideas into our heads that can give us altered perceptions of peoples and their intentions. And we go along with these ideas, blind to what effect they have. We go around unknowing that the slightest wording in an article or in a news broadcast can and has changed how we act towards other people based on culture or face value alone.

For example, there are numerous instances where there have been riots where most of the group rioting has been white. The media, particularly the news, describes these white riots as them being rowdy, mischievous, or just booze filled college students that didn’t know any better. They try and label these people as abnormalities, and distance these rioters from white culture and simply state that they’re “bad apples”, nothing more to it. However, when there are riots involving mainly minorities as the rioters, the language takes on a big shift. Media calls them thugs, and animals. They describe them as destroying their community, and put the actions of the rioters on all black culture. Any kind of violence, especially riots, are bad in every sense; however there is a big problem when white rioters at the Pumpkin Festival in New Hampshire are called “rowdy” but black rioters, rioting in response to the failed justice revolving around police brutality are called “thugs”.

This track that media, especially news are going along has some big flaws that self feeds itself into a nonstop problem. It puts these racist ideals into the mindset of everyone who watches TV. The foundation of social actions in new generations of adolescence is created with this false perception of how people from different backgrounds are treated differently, and how we should treat them. These words that the media has given to these social groups and races come with powerful feelings and as humans we are feeling driven creatures. We jump at stories that evoke deep emotion and these emotion fueled words like “violent thug” and the people who are associated by the media with these words ring into our subconscious. We then, in turn create generalizations and, whether we like it or not, we treat others differently based on how media has portrayed them. This doesn’t just apply to the news falsely portraying rioters based on their skin color, it also applies to stereotypes.

We have all been introduced to stereotypes, and some of us seem to get a subconscious influence that these ideas are truth. Whether it’s that asians are good at math, or that all muslims are terrorists, we see these stereotypes everywhere we go. These stereotypes can lead other into treating people who “fit” these stereotypes differently, with negative or racial slurs that can make an environment feel unwelcoming and sometimes even unsafe. In addition to making an environment for majorities to harass minorities just because of their race, it also puts in place boxes that make it increasingly more difficult to pursue a life that doesn’t fit these stereotypes. For example, the percentage of the population that is colored in the United States is around 30%. However, people of color make up around 60% of the people imprisoned. Now this could be because of a lot of factors but it is mostly due to racial profiling. As a result the majority of an entire race will go to prison at some point in their lives. This affects those lives of the people who have been wrongfully imprisoned because of their race. It shuts doors to jobs, housing, education, and all other opportunities and creates a box that traps these races into their stereotypes that the mass media has created.

All of these factors and more have contributed to our conscious or subconscious feelings towards minorities. We soak up so much information everyday and when an agenda is being exposed to us time and time again our brains make a physiological shortcut that drives us towards the information we have been exposed to. And when this information is creating a negative image of minorities we subconsciously acquire a negative image of minorities as well. Then, in turn, we treat them accordingly, which pushes minorities more and more into this box of stereotypes that can close doors to better opportunities further down the road in their life. These are obviously generalizations and do not account for everyone’s personal experience. However, it does express the mass media’s prejudice against minorities and how that in turn affects us and how we treat others of different backgrounds.

You Throw Like a GIRL

Ever since the age of 5 I have heard of a saying that has spread to everyone’s ears, “you throw like a girl” or “you __ like a girl.” I wondered what everyone was seeing in girls that was so weak, clumsy, or dependent on others. However, as I grew older and was shoved into the gender  box of makeup, short skirts, and diets I learned from media that women were supposed to be a thing to look at. An object to oggle or to take at only face value. Media taught me that women weren’t supposed to be into sports or getting dirty. They were supposed to be fragile, graceful, and helpless. And as a 12 year old girl I was bombarded with images of half-naked women everywhere, from food to cars, advertisements seem to all have one objective. To sell women. Not to sell them as strong people with thoughts and hardships of their own, but to sell them for the only thing that women were good for. Sex. I’m speaking from what I understood about  a woman growing up with the media I did. I’m not speaking for everyone, I am speaking for myself and the thoughts that crossed my mind throughout my life being a woman.

I remember on the playground down the block from MCS, which was the elementary school I went to in New York, we were climbing a rock that was in the park. I was almost to the top when one of my boy friends said, “you climb pretty well for a girl.” At that moment I got a message cemented into my brain, that girls weren’t as good as boys. This idea got refined over my childhood and became more complex. Girls were better than boys with things like cleaning, and cooking, but boys were better at everything else that did not fall under this narrow category of housework or generalized hospitality. These thoughts have been ingrained into my mind and no amount of empowering can change how I grew up with my foundation of my gender making me inferior to men.

This idea of men, specifically older white men being superior than everyone else has been apart of our society almost since our society as human beings began. However, in the recent hundred years there has been a lot of change with women, and racial minorities’ rights in an attempt to get some equality. Now this change has most certainly given others more rights and more equality, but the subconscious ideal that men are better than women is so ingrained into our society it will take more than laws to change the mindset of the masses. Take television, for example, if you look at any number of tv shows and look at the female character, the majority of the time their character development is around them being a woman or an obsession with the male characters. This isn’t true for all television shows but it just shows the amount of sexism that is in our day to day lives.

Another example of the thought that women are mainly only good for their appearance is in advertisements. Most advertisements are selling sex, which isn’t surprising news to anyone, but it seems as though sex can be tied to any product. From perfume, food, cars, to insurance, everything is normally about women’s bodies. Sometimes even men’s bodies are objectified and focused on one thing, their sex appeal. Advertisements also sometimes referenced rape culture which on top of making women objects is normalizing a crime which traumatizes the victim, sometimes for life. With all of these factors in advertisements, it is no wonder that women and even men are growing up with a negative body image.

In addition to advertisements setting a standard of perfection for women, women are also being taught these other conflicting ideals. Teachers and schools have a certain expectation for excellent intelligence. Then there is the media telling us to settle for nothing less than perfection, within ourselves, our appearance and in our careers. And then there is the “old fashioned” ideals that tell us that our place as women is to raise a family and stay at home and to take care of the house and our husband. Then we have this constant push back of men being better than women whether it be in our media or our friends telling us that we run like a girl, as if it were an insult. And to top it all off, we individually have influences that our friends and parents impose on us based on their own ideals and morals. All of these factors pull women in different directions and create a chaotic thought process while growing up about what women’s roles are in society.

From a very early age I was taught that I wasn’t suppose to be equal to men. During my childhood I was taught that doing things “like a girl” was and is an insult and can threaten one’s own existence! I’m speaking humorously, of course, but the concept still stands that doing anything “like a girl” is so feared from when you are a child that you would think you would die or be forever shunned to hell for it. Once I became older the concept of what women were and weren’t better at became more refined. Women were supposed to be graceful, fragile, the image of perfection, but still have the majority of our existence be about sex appeal. We aren’t supposed to get dirty, or be athletic, we need to be dependent and helpless which is pushing an entire sex down and making all of us into what we are not. Women shouldn’t be fit into cookie cutter molds because they don’t belong in the kitchen. 1

1. my roommate (Emma P.)  wrote this line.

The Advertising age: How Media has affected Generation whY

Social media today has become a way of life for most adolescents but the concept of this globally reaching enterprise is still fairly new.The effects of this social media are still unclear. On one hand there is the global connectivity that social media gives us. This gives us more access to information all around the globe while also giving us a voice that can he heard, given the right circumstances. On the other hand there are cyber masks that lets people, especially abusers, like bullies, hide behind anonymous walls that make it easier for people to be mean and harass others. In addition, social media gives us a bigger idea of the amount of ignorance that goes on in daily life. All of these contribute to our lives and have especially affected my generation who are constantly bombarded with this pressure to back away from social media and to try to stop it because it is “bad to spend so many hours on a computer.” Previous generations tell us to go outside and talk with our peers instead of on our phones because apparently ceasing interaction with the global community is better than communicating and getting a better understanding about what is happening in today’s society. How could we as the young adults of the next generation learn about presidential debates or the migrant crisis in Bregana, Croatia by going outside and enjoying the fresh air?

First, let’s talk about the good things that social media has brought to our lives. One thing that social media gives us is access to information whenever we want it. This immediate access to information gives us different perspectives and sources that weren’t available to us years ago. Back then when you wanted to know information about global or local affairs you had limited recourses. You could either read the newspaper or watch the news but how accurate are these sources, and what information are they keeping from the public? Well now those questions seem less relevant. This is because there are so many different sources, some more credible than others, that can give you information. With so many people tweeting, blogging, and writing about events there is a mass quantity of viewpoints and sources that you can draw your own conclusions from. This is important because you aren’t getting your opinions from a newscaster, you are generating your own thoughts on the situations in the world. In addition, all of this new information gives us a new opportunity to interact with our peers in our local community. By this I mean that now we can talk to our peers about the problems that our world in facing, have conversations about our viewpoints. By doing so we are getting new opinions on issues and we can generate our own thoughts based on the conversations we have with our peers about the situation.

Another positive aspect of social media is that it connects people globally and gives people information in real time about issues that are going on overseas. Back in earlier years, around 15-20 years ago we didn’t have the platforms that reached globally where we could find issues and sources to better our understanding of the world and how it works. In addition, it also gives everyday people voices that can be heard from around the world. For example the kid in Texas that got arrested for building a clock because it was mistaken for a bomb. If we didn’t have the social media networks that we have today I, along with countless others, may have never heard the story and it certainly wouldn’t have gotten the attention that it did. In addition, when the kid was sent free and the charges were dropped he spoke to the public and stated his side of the story. While doing so he expressed his interest in going to MIT for college. By doing this he has a greater chance of MIT acknowledging him, making him stand out from other applicants. So even though this situation was not a positive one he tried to make the best of his situation and try to increase his chances of getting into college. This is a positive example of social media because if the global connections that these networks provide wasn’t there all of this may have never even made it to our local news.

In addition, I have also noticed what to me is a bad aspect of social media in the recent months. It’s the political arguments that have come up with the presidential candidates. And even though it could be a good thing since its widening the reach of people who care about the presidential race it still causes political arguments and frustration between people. In addition, talking about religion can also end up in debate or heated arguments. Arguments that may end up in you losing a friend. This also can bring up the topic of ignorance with our generation. It is easy or I should say easier to turn a blind eye to ignorance in everyday life but once you go on social media it seems that every site is bursting with ignorance. If you go to Facebook, there is just countless posts that are filled with misinformed conclusions about issues, or hate filled statements that are just confusing to some. This can put a negative view on our generation as a whole, not just to our peers but younger or older people as well.

Furthermore, all of the advancement that the social media has provided, positive and negative has had an effect on generations, specifically generation Y. This is because our social interactions with our local community and the global community that social media has provided are intertwined and brings up global relevance to our everyday lives. Generation Y, has been a part of this fast media since our childhood, for the most part. And as a generation that has been born and molded into this vast ocean of information and connections it changes our social interactions in our day to day life. By this I mean what use to be face to face interactions about reality have turned into conversations about what is relevant in our social media that day. Even in the KDU when are phones are away and the “adults” think we are better off, we still converse with our peers about the article we read on Buzzfeed, or the story we shared on Facebook. What the previous generation seems to forget is that even though our computers, and cellphones are put away doesn’t mean we aren’t interacting with social media. And in fact interacting with social media on a global standpoint as well as  in our community is good. We can talk about political and world issues with our peers and get more opinions on issues.