Justin Beiber

In the first video we watched as a class about Justin Bieber, they talked about his Photoshop incident with a Calvin Klein photo-shoot that he did. People were saying that the photos were clearly photo shopped making parts of his body larger and adding more muscles. This was a big controversial problem and caused a lot of attention in the media. In the second video we watched of a women explaining to us the situation with the Justin Bieber photo shopping she also explain the scenario and how Justin and his legal team handled the situation.  A lot of people questioned the cultural response to Justin's fake picture allegations. Both of these videos claim that they believe the main reason for the controversy over the pictures were due to the fact that Justin and his legal team denied any such allegations. The videos we watched both said how almost everyone in the media today is photo shopped to shape any flaws into perfect human beings when finished. With Justin saying the photos were not photo shopped at all made him look ridiculous. This also made him look a little insecure with feeling the need to lie about the original picture instead of having self love for the way he looks. This is also a big controversy in the media because for quite a long time it's been a major thing for women to be photo shopped to fit beauty standards but never really men. We judge men for their  package size and make them feel like less of a man if it doesn't meet our standards. Women stress about wanting to be smaller while men stress about wanting to be bigger. The media makes it seem as if its acceptable for women to be photo shopped but not the men.

Cultivation Theory

In this weeks reading we examined what is cultivation theory, which was developed by George Gerbner. He explained that cultivation theory is how television and the things that we watch on TV affects us in the real world. The author of the video we watched described cultivation theory as a fish in a fish bowl. When a fish is in a fish bowl surrounded by water, he does not realize he is surrounded by that water because that is all the fish knows. This is how our society is when it comes to TV. Since we have been exposed to violent types of TV for so long we tend to not realize how it is affecting us because we "know nothing else". It's hard to measure something when there wasn't a starting point that a person was not exposed to the thing being measured, such as violent TV. Violent TV also tends to make society feel a lot of fear and anxiety for what "could" happen. Even more specifically violent TV that contains torture draws a lot of viewers to think that torture works and that it is reasonable to do. With that being said 57% of people believe that torture in real life actually works. TV today also scares us into thinking that torture and violence could happen to us personally. Torture on TV is dramatic and is really just a device used to move the plot a long when watching. People today who watch TV, see violence, and then become scared and do things such as increase security systems around homes, buy guns, and even try to better our government to protect us as a whole from violence. We misinterpret violence because of the way that TV explains it to us. 

BIRG & CORF

In class we watched two videos, one that explained BIRGING and CORFING and also the Stephen Colbert old show from comedy central that showed examples of the two terms. In the first video we were introduced and explained to what BIRG and CORF were. BIRG stands for basking in reflected glory. That basically is when a person feels a strong connection with a team and have a sense of belonging with them. CORF stands for cutting of reflected failure. This essentially is when a person minimizes a relationship that they have with a bad team. When doing this they often blame the lack of success on outside influences and even demonizing other teams in the process.

In both the video from Stephen Colbert, there are several examples they show the viewers that better help our understanding of BIRG and CORF. One example is what the NFL team the Jaguars did to their stadium. The team had been having a rough record for the past several years, which was causing their fan base to decrease tremendously. With that being said, to draw a stronger fan base behind the team, they decided to make some renovations to the stadium itself. This included replacement of the stadiums seating area with pools and cabanas. This is an example of CORFING, people stopped attending the games and began to minimizes their relationship with the team so in order to improve this they added the pools to attract more support and people involved at their stadium. This video also shows and example of BURGING. It talks about a time that state senators of two hockey teams placed bets against each other on who's team would end up winning the championship cup. Although the bets were stupid ones that held no value to them, the state senates still were connecting their state team to themselves. They both felt as if they had a belonging with the team and took a team win as also a fan win to them.