Week 7: Linking Television, Materialism and the Environment

There...were a lot of things presented this week. Mainly, I believe, about how Television has the ability to distort our realities and encourages materialistic values, which in turn, make us more self-conscious and insecure.

This week, we were to look at an article called Gramsci's interpretation of fascism by Walter L. Adamson. Antonio Gramsci was a writer and political theorist and founder of the Communist Party of Italy. He is most famous for introducing the concept of cultural hegemony and for being imprisoned by Mussolini for his ideas.

And also for being totes adorbs.

In his concept of cultural hegemony, the ruling class imposes their values on society through their culture, thus forming the social norms for all classes. The core of these imposed values is that the status-quo is beneficial and unavoidable. In a previous week, Ronald Wright stated that our society's flaws stem from how civilization began to form due to the development of agriculture, particular the trend of having power concentrated in a relatively small amount of people and the exaltation of stability and the status-quo. Particularly the return to status-quo is a goal or end result I find in a lot of entertainment media showing up in tropes like Status Quo is God and World-Healing Wave.

Next up was a research paper by our professor, titled Shop 'til We Drop? Television, Materialism and Attitudes About the Natural Environment. Both this paper and Tim Kasser and Kennon M. Sheldon's Of Wealth and Death: Materialism, Mortality Science and Consumption Behaviour conclude that larger amounts of television viewing result in an increase in materialistic values. (Materialistic in this sense meaning that the more one owns, the better off one is.) This increase in materialistic values then has further negative results such as less concern for the environment.

Professor J. Good used a national (American, I think) mail survey with a random sampling distribution, with a focus on the environment. Age of the people who responded tended to be in the 50's and 60's and most were male overall and living in suburban areas, despite random sampling. In this report, one should note the biases of age and social class in comparison to a hypothetical sample with more varied participation. Perhaps  in future research, different mediums for gathering information can be explored. She concludes that it is because of a lack of coverage in prime-time television for environmental issues, and the large presence of advertising. Since there is no promotion of materialistic values in television programming, materialistic influence can be attributed to advertising. However, differences in values corresponded with differences in viewing habits concerning the content. These conclusions were supported with mathematical regression analysis, which I appreciate seeing. But it also reminds me how I'm unfamiliar with techniques concerning the measurement of qualitative data except for dummy variables; I'm sure I would make a poor researcher.

Kasser and Kennon used a different approach, using an experimental situation game to monitor the reactions of the people involved (Study 2) and analyzing the answers of an essay question (Study 1). They based their tests on the concept that when people undergo stressful situations such as poverty and fear of death results in insecurity that manifests as materialistic behaviour. They present terror-management theory, which hypothesizes that in the face of death, people adopt prominent cultural worldviews for justification of their lives and become more defensive of their views when contested. I've always wondered what this theory was called; I come across the idea every now and again, especially when reading about religious extremism. Thus, they hypothesize that people living in materialistic cultures adopt and defend materialistic values when insecure.

There was nearly twice as many females as males in their sample for Study 1, and all were students from a small Midwestern American College. This may have resulted in a gender, age, class and background bias in comparison to a hypothetical nationwide random sample. However, none of their regressions ended up significant when determining whether or not fear of death had an effect on things like valuation of future possessions and the like. I don't know if this is relevant, but when working with equations with more than one variable in them, multicollinearity (strong relations between independent/predictor variables) may lead to lack of significance, among other things. I've personally found re-defining what you're looking for and the info you gather might also help, sometimes.

In the second study, gender was a little more evenly represented, even though females still outnumbered males. This time, the sample was gathered in a larger Midwestern college and was conducted among psychology students. The possibility of participants having different cultural background and the more even ratio of females to males help even out the bias that existed in the first sample. But the bias in this sample is different from the first; psychology students would have a little more insight and knowledge about experiments of this type. However, the relation between mortality-salience and consumption was deemed significant and people more preoccupied with death consumed more.

I'm surprised I remembered all this analysis stuff from my research classes.

After we were to look at the Greenpeace website, specifically one dealing with threats to the forest. Guess what the Conservative Lorax has to say about that, Greenpeace!

Then we looked at a transcript of a of a lecture by Stuart Hall, also called Representation and the Media. The ideas he talks about suggests that television has a lot of power, and it does this through how it represents things like race or sexuality or world events. In a way, representation gives these things meaning. It can be defined as both the presence or absence of things. And thus, television has the power to distort our perception of reality.The little bit about racism at the beginning of the transcript reminded me of the most recent episode of one of my favourite online shows:

Nostalgia Chick's review of...Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs.

She can't believe people would still defend this...piece of work. Neither can I.