Media Dreams

Leah McMillan & Katie Murray

What are media dreams?

• Media Dreams are imaginative flights that allow us to escape from sorrow, pain, and unpleasant realities of our daily lives

Pros of Media Dreams

Imagination

• Violent Media Is Good for Kids by Gerard Jones

• “Children need violent entertainment in order to explore inescapable feelings that they’ve been taught to deny, and to reintegrate those feelings into a more whole, more complex, more resilient selfhood”

• “Creative violence”- head-bonking cartoons, bloody videogames, playground karate, toy guns- gives children a tool to master their rage

• “Pretending to have superhuman powers helps children conquer the feelings of powerlessness that inevitably come with being so young and small”

• “The dual-identity concept at the heart of many superhero stories help kids negotiate the conflicts between the inner self and the public self as they work through the early stages of socialization

• Protecting children from their own feelings and fantasies shelters them from violence, power, and selfhood

Video Game Motive

• Can Video Games Teach Us How to Succeed in the Real World? By Lane Wallace

• Video games provide, “instantaneous feedback and continual encouragement…while also providing occasional unexpected rewards.”

• Can be considered an educational tool by using a video game approach towards learning that illustrates relevance for certain individual skills (English, Math, History, etc.)

American Values

• America Media and American Values by Everette E. Dennis (1988)

• Media are moral teachers as they preside over a communication system that binds our society together

• American media is protected by the constitution

• Media sees themselves as part of a system of freedom of expression

Science

• REEL to REAL? by Hugh Westrup (2000)

• Proof doesn’t exist that violent movies make people violent

– Sound waves

– Baby Boom

– William Belson’s experiment on teenage boys

Works of Art

• Video games are a work of art by Kyle Chayka

• Video games are considered art because they have, “sensory aesthetic experience that provokes an emotional response in its audience”

• “[Video games] are visuals and music and poetry all wrapped up into a single package”

• “[Video games] inspire us and make us feel and give us experiences unreachable within the realm of the real”

• “[Video games are] more experiential than films”

Reality

• Why Vampires Never Die by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan

• People are aware that monsters originated from story telling competitions, myths, technological revolution, scientific innovation, and spiritual humility

• Vampires/Monsters provide mystery in our lives

• Aware of the reality that we have no true jurisdiction over our bodies, climate, or souls

Cons of Media Dreams

Fantasy vs. Reality

• Can Video Games Teach Us How to Succeed in the Real World? By Lane Wallace

• Time spent playing video games reduces productivity (10,000 hours played = 5 working years)

• Since we like feedback, continual encouragement, and occasional awards, we are compared to lab rats

• Reality becomes confusing

– Video games are fun, life isn’t

– Video games have single tasks and straightforward challenges, life is multi-dimensional, multi-tasked, and complex

– In video games there’s no such thing as failure; you have endless attempts to finish a task. In life if you fail a certain task, consequences can take place as a result

Political beliefs

• The mystification of change by James Bowman (2009)

• Media fabricates and overhypes stories

• Media has the power to change attitudes and beliefs about something

Science

• REEL to REAL? by Hugh Westrup (2000)

• Results of:

– Albert Bandura’s experiment

– Brandon Centerwall’s findings

– Leonard Eron’s belief

Personifications

• My Zombie, Myself: Why Modern Life Feels Rather Undead

Viewed Violence Results

• Violence, fear- and freedom published by Edward W. Barrett (1970-1980)• Anne R. Somers believes that television is the medium for children and that it’s

hard to overstate its influence on them– Ages 5-15, an American child will have viewed more than 13,000 killings

on television– “Television imposes substitute experiences and psychological conditioning

on children”

• Gerber and Gross believed that violence equaled fear plus some aggression– They concluded that fear of violence leads to increased “acquiescence to

and dependence upon authority”– Heavy violent viewers were more distrustful and sensed to danger than

light viewers– Somers, Gerber, and Gross believed that the more we consume

telecommunications, the more monstrous/hungry our world will become in terms of wanting telecommunications

Immersion

• The Art of Immersion: Fear of Fiction by Frank Rose

• Every new medium that’s been invented from print to film to television to cyberspace has aroused fear and hostility as a result

• Television: Became immersive in the early ‘50s since it was the television era

• Movies: Immersive because of the cutting-edge technology

• Internet: Immersive because the internet redefines our expectations from stories and questions of authenticity

• Novels: Immersive since literary works are installments in newspapers, magazines, and other formats

How has violence gotten better?

• Then:

– Roman Circus-

– Witch burning-

• Now:

– Violence is now shown of television

– We don’t see or smell public violence like people did when the Roman Circus and Witch burning were taking place

Media Dream Controversy

Media Dreams Conclusion

Questions