A World of Hits

[essyllus]

With remap's help, I have finally found the article I was looking for! Lately people have been seeing a trend of less diversity in mass media, and it immediately reminded me of this particular article that discusses how mainstream media is becoming more tasteless mainstream. While the article doesn't touch upon race or stereotypes in the media, I think

Comments

[skudge]

That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read "The Lost Symbol", by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

Oh, so that's why I hate bestsellers so much. =/

Anyway, I've always thought I was pretty bad at analyzing articles and things, but I'll tell you what I think about the diversity thing anyway, and hopefully I'm not completely wrong.

I'm not sure whether the article calls for more or the same diversity, but I don't think it's suggesting less diversity. It says that even though there's a huge variety of films/books/TV shows/music, but only the few most "mainstream" ones really draw audiences. But I don't think this means that they're advocating for less diversity in the media, since the article goes on to say that no one really knows what it is that makes the top movies so big. Err, if that makes sense. (I failed every single rhetorical analysis essay when I took AP English language.)

So...since I'm so bad at this reading between the lines stuff, I'm curious to know which parts you thought were supporting the "mainstream America = white America" thing.

[essyllus]

I was basing that conclusion from connecting with the data from this article I linked earlier before the Economist's article: http://www.backstage.com/bso/news-and-features-news/undercovers-and-under-scrutiny-1004106565.story (I just realized that my link goes to a locked entry -- sorry about that!)

You do have a point that diverse media is out there, its distribution made easily accessible by the Internet. But if you think about how to market market mass media to a mass audience... most of the time, I would imagine that people are making casting/program decisions based on the audience's demographic, most of whom are Caucasian. To a point, I think that's fair. What I find kind of disturbing, however, is that networks will have less incentive to produce smaller shows featuring people of color because they/we make up a numerical minority in the US. I hope this makes better sense about where I'm coming from.

[skudge]

Ohh, I got it, I think I misunderstood. Now after reading that one I get what you were saying about how the Economist article would suggest less diversity, when you combine it with the other article. I totally agree with you. It sucks how even though it feels like since we're like moving forward and supposedly getting away from like racism or the all-white kind of view, but rather than shows and movies having more and more people of different races in them, it seems like they're staying the same or even becoming even more dominated by Caucasians. Whenever I watch TV I'm like, "Man, this doesn't feel real at all," because out of the entire cast there's maybe one person who's not white, whereas (at least everywhere I've ever been) there have been a significant number of Asians and Hispanics and African-Americans; even though the majority of people are still white, it's pretty impossible in real life to have this group of like twenty to thirty people and all but one of them are Caucasian. I wish TV and movies would reflect that.