Beyond Scared Straight

            For my last media review I decided to touch on “at-risk youth” which was covered in one of my classes when we had guest speaker Karen Foster come in. The subject really caught my attention and I found it very interesting, so I thought I would look into a show on TV called Beyond Scared Straight.

            When youth commit crimes they don’t understand the consequences that come with their actions because a lot of the time they’re too young to grasp those facts. A lot of these young kids are getting in trouble because they’re showing off or trying to prove a point to their friends, or they don’t understand how illegal certain things are and how much trouble they can get into because they’re not educated on the legal system. Usually what the legal system does to deal with these so called “bad” kids is they throw them in a detention center or jail where they’re going to come in contact with other people who have done crimes worse than they have, and by the end of their sentence they are not going to be better off like every one seems to think.

Anti-Gay Ideology

Anti-gay Ideology

I was reading the news a few weeks ago when I stumbled across an article about thousands of people in France protesting against same-sex marriage and a new bill that would extend rights to same sex couples.

Around 15-20,000 people showed up, took time out of their lives just to protest and say how they don’t think it’s right for same sex couples to be able to adopt, and how it’s not fair for the child. It shocks me that with this day and age, some people of society are still concerned with the fact that people of the same sex can love each other, get married and have children if they want to. It also shocks me that there is SO much anti-gay hate crime in our world! I then decided that this relates a lot to what we talked about in my sociology class about “ideology” which, to quote Stuart Hall is “the mental frameworks (languages, concepts, systems of representations) which different classes/social groups deploy in order to make sense of the way society works”.

Consumption

Consumption

            Everyday it seems that our new favorite gadgets (ipods, iphones, cameras) are coming out with newer versions that everyone has to have, because if you don’t have the newest coolest version, than you yourself are not cool. In the documentary The Story of Stuff there is a lot of points brought up that not a lot of people associate with their consumption of their “favorite goods”: in the past decade we have used over 1/3 of our natural resources that we cannot get back, just so we can have more clothes, cars, gadgets and things that make us feel better about ourselves (if only for a certain amount of time.)

Sex Education

Ontario has been catching some slack from certain members of society and certain parents lately for introducing a new sex education curriculum for all schools to better educate their children. Within the old curriculum from 1998, in grade 1, children would learn the major body parts, grade 4 they would learn stages of human development and in grade 8 (which is the most they would be learning) they would explain abstinence and consequences of having sex. With the new curriculum that was made in 2010, children in grade 1 would learn to identify body parts (penis, tesiticles, vagina, etc.), grade 4 they would learn about the changes during puberty and what goes a long with it (gender identity and sexual orientation) and in grade 8 they would learn about what affects decision about sex (curiosity, religious beliefs, etc) and understanding gender identity. 

Killing Us Softly - 4

From the beginning of time it seems that woman have been put on this earth to please men, look good for them, and base their whole lives around them. We are told to look good or else we can’t attract a man; we have to have perfect hair, the perfect body and the perfect clothes because things like our personality aren’t important. The documentary Killing Us Softly 4 brings a lot of these ideas (and many others) into light. Coming from someone who has always struggled with body issues, confidence issues and eating problems, this documentary brought a lot of things into focus for me that I was never aware of. 

 

A different perspective

Here is a blog that one of my friends made for our Social Theory class, take a look :)

http://socialtheoryatsmu.blogspot.ca/

At-risk Youth

At risk youth is a term used to describe young adults who don’t have the best conditions growing up or don’t have the best conditions in their life as of now, which puts them “at risk”. Future problems of the at-risk youth would be things such as poor mental health, criminality, drug misuse and teenage pregnancy (France, 2008). Even if a couple of risk factors are present in their life, they are deemed as a risky individual. Risk factors, in this formula, might include childhood poverty, dropping out of high school, living in a rural area, having a single mother, or being a visible minority (Foster, 2011 p.127). At risk youth are usually pegged as the bad kids who aren’t going to go anywhere in their life, who enjoy their frowned upon lifestyle and don’t want to change. They may also be seen as choosing this lifestyle purposely, not because of their unfortunate circumstances that they’ve been dealt with. This is usually the opposite of the truth, most at-risk youth are more motivated than other kids their age who aren’t in the same situations, to change.

Panopticism

The panopticon is a type of jail that has a main tower that looks upon each one of the cells in the building. Each cell is completely open and you have no way of hiding from the person who is watching you in the tower. The person who is on watch in the tower cannot be seen by the inmates because of the backlight that shines, therefore they never know when they are being watched and by whom. With the panopticon it doesn’t matter who is in power and watching you “any individual, taken almost at random can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants” (Foucault). Foucault also says that with the panopticon, physical confrontation is avoided. I think panopticism in the description that Foucault gives, is about being watched constantly and not knowing who is watching you. You have to present yourself in a favorable way and stay out of trouble because you don’t know if you’re ever going to be caught doing something wrong.

Ideology

            Stuart Hall refers to ideology as “the mental frameworks that different classes/social groups deploy in order to make sense of, define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works”. By this he means how society/different classes or even large social groups have different aspects and ideas about what they think is the “norm” for living in your everyday life.