TECK productions presents:

"Confidence"

A story about the life of Judge George "Tookie" James

The First African American Judge in Beaver County

Come and view this documentary that is produced by TECK productions of the Mass Communications/Sociology 109 cluster.

When: Thursday May 3 12:45pm-2:00pm

Where: Mueller Theatre

Westminster College Campus

New Wilmington, PA

"Confidence"

Our documentary has been going well. We’ve made three trips out to see Judge and we have everything filmed that we want. We’ve gathered some old pictures that we are going to use in the documentary and if we need more we are going to find some old Westminster yearbooks since the Judge is an alumni. We’ve started creating our poster to advertise the showing of our documentary. We really just need to edit everything and get it the way we want it.

Fantasy or Reality...Maybe Both???...You Decide...

For this assignment I decided to watch TV shows that I normally don’t watch. I usually don’t watch too much TV so it wasn’t hard to pick. My evening started out with “Little People, Big World” on TLC. I had never heard of this show before but my roommate had it on so I decided to watch it. I also watched “Dancing with the Stars” and “The Bachelor” on ABC.

Little People, Big World, on TLC, easily exposed me to things the I do not experience in my own reality. This show is all about the Roloff family — an extraordinary family composed of both little and average-sized people. The family starts with the parents, who are both little people, they are diagnosed with dwarfism. They have four children all of whom are average size except for one. It was quite interesting to see how the family interacted with one another as well as with others. TLC follows the family around and you get to see what they do everyday. The Roloff’s live on a farm. By watching how hard the ‘little’ people worked to make their farm successful as well as raise their children, I learned a lot about their lifestyle. I have never lived on a farm or met a ‘little’ person, so this experience is something that I would have only seen on TV.

On Dancing With The Stars I ran into a cast of people who I normally wouldn’t “know” since most reality shows lead you to believe that you “know” these characters in some way. Most had achieved some sort of fame all the way from a former Miss USA, an undefeated female world boxing champion, to a former USA Dream Team Ball Player. Now I normally don’t watch this show nor do I normally go ballroom dancing with my friends, but I enjoyed the show. I am involved with dance and love dancing so this show really appealed to me. During our weekly Dance Theatre Tech classes we’ve even had a few lessons on ballroom dancing so watching it made me want to take some more lessons.

Now, I faithfully watched The Bachelor a few seasons ago during my freshman year of college. No matter how much I knew that the reality of something like this ever happening, I still enjoyed watching. I tuned in each week to watch the women fight over this man they claimed to love, that they’d only known for um about three weeks. Not to be a Debbie Downer, but how can you claim to love a man you barely know, especially when there’s hordes of other women trying to get to know him as well. Anyways, I watched the show and although I disagree with the point, I have to admit that I enjoyed watching the drama. This show defies reality as I know it. Now the fact that all of these people are searching for their true love, I can relate too. All the drama and one guy dating 16 women—not a reality that I know. The only other place I think you might find as much drama between women is either on a cheerleading squad or on a sorority suite.

After briefly talking about Meyrowitz and Baudrillard in our mass communications class, I began to see how some of their arguments make sense. Meyrowitz argues “that the very existence of television is an influence on society because it breaks down the physical barriers that separate people (Hanson, 2005, pg. 256).” For example, in Little People, Big World, I experienced life firsthand through the Roloff family. I learned what it entailed to run a farm and I also learned some of the challenges and obstacles that little people overcome everyday to live a normal life. Because of the ‘physical barriers’ in my life I never would have experienced this. TV broke down these barriers and showed me what someone else’s life is like. This influenced me so that now if I ever meet or know a little person or even someone who lives on and runs a farm I know a little bit about them, therefore influencing society. Although the barriers are being broken, the barriers are broken are through the media, which is controlled by the gatekeepers. In a sense then the gatekeepers decide what barriers are broken and what we see.

Baudrillard argues that we can no longer distinguish between fantasy and reality, especially in television. I have to go both ways on this. I can see where Baudrillard’s argument rings true. In most TV shows, the distinction between fantasy and reality is very thin. Especially to most of the people who are on the shows (The Bachelor). Another example: Grey’s Anatomy. I watch this show faithfully (even though it was not included in my prime time viewing from above) and the show seems very real. The viewer needs to take a step back and realize that although the ABC producers do a great job of making the show seem real, making these people seem like real surgeons, they are not. If you do not understand that, then I feel you are in danger. I also feel that I can argue against Baudrillard’s theory as well. In the Bachelor, at least for me, it is very clear to me that this in fact is not reality. Twenty five women all competing for a man, to fall in love with him, and marry him. Honestly how long do they think that marriage will last??

I feel that if a person has a good balance in their TV viewing they will be just fine. A person can learn a lot from TV by having their physical barriers broken down and experiencing something new (Meyrowitz). This person needs to take Baudrillard’s argument into consideration though. It is ok to learn something or experience something new from the television you watch, you just have to be smart about what you consider to be real.

The American Dream....NOT!

While reading American Sports, for my “Sporting Spirit” English class, I was learning all about how in the 1970’s people started this quest for fitness. They would jog, run, swim, cycle, walk, or play racquetball all while they smoked fewer cigarettes, drank less alcohol, ate less red meat and consumed more white meat. The most interesting thing that struck me was this sentence, “Being fat in America became the greatest single sign of personal failure.”

WHAT??? Today over half of the population of America is fat or obese. Yes, according to USATODAY 65% of adults are overweight (half of those are obese, meaning about 30 pounds or more above a healthy weight for their height). This just amazes me that only 30 years after this ‘fitness craze’ that so many of our citizens have become overweight.

The book does let on though, “Dieting had its negative side; a Gallup poll in 1986 estimated that three million Americans, most of them women, suffered from the eating disorders of anorexia nervosa and/or bulimia. If exercise and dieting failed to obtain the desired figure, the most affluent Americans increasingly resorted to plastic surgery.”

So obesity is not our only concern, today it is estimated that 8 million Americans have an eating disorder. To me, what I learned from this is that in our world today most of our citizens are either fat or they have an eating disorder. What kind of image does this promote to young children? Now wonder they grow up with distorted pictures of what they are to look like. I know that I am not obese, nor do I have an eating disorder. I wonder what percent of Americans actually live a healthy lifestyle by exercising and eating right like I do???