1F25 Post 2: The Media We Get

                 The media is a tool used to convey societies values,  as well as views, and  the world that we live in. While people may feel that the media that is presented to us is a reflection of what we want to see, I feel like it is really what the provider wants us to see. The saving grace with this is that we still have to option of what we pay attention to what we want in the media that is presented to us, this gives us the illusion that we get the media that we want.

Of course in Western culture we do have it rather easy when it comes to what media is given to us as we have a wide variety of content that isn't heavily censored and anything deemed inappropriate for people has a viewer discretion or some sort of "adult content" warning on it. Of course in certain countries this is not always the case, for example in China where there are strict censorship laws which limits the content that it's people can see, this became problematic for search engine powerhouse Google who was not able to display anything that the government deemed to be sensitive.  Google ended up refusing to comply with China's laws in 2010 and ended up exiting China altogether, information that I learned from O'Shaughnessy and Stadler's textbook (Page 7).

This also applies in regards to the media that is distributed as entertainment, while I know this may be considered inappropriate I'm going to be focusing specifically on pornography, and not typical but gay pornography. In the gay porn industry the major producers are all very similar in regards to what they deliver and that is for the majority is hairless muscle men with ridiculously large penises, most of these "actors" being white or latino. Now while there is a cry for more diversity in gay porn there hasn't been any, and this is probably due to the fact that the models they use make them lots of money already and like what O'Shaughnessy and Stadler stated "distributors of pornography are not really interested in making their audience happy and sexually fulfilled; they want to make money." (Page 8). This could probably also apply just regular TV shows as well, I mean generally a new TV series isn't based off of user demands but off a concept that they believe will make them money, once it stops so does the series which also pays into the idea that we get the media we want, as opposed to the reality of what we get.