Joey skipping rocks on the shore of Lake Victoria in
Tanzania, Africa.
Joey is a thirteen-year old American teenager who lived almost his entire life in Mwanza, Tanzania on the shores of Lake Victoria in Central Africa. His parents - natives of Ventura, CA - moved to Tanzania with their family when Joey was still an infant to work at a local school. Joey has visited Ventura frequently to spend time with his grandparents and cousins, but he has spent much more of his life in Africa than in the United States. Joey has hiked through the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa; has canoed all over Lake Victoria and fished and enjoyed the over 400 species of bird life in the area; and has traveled the famous Serengeti Plain and watched packs of lions, hippos, and zebras speed across the horizon at sunset. Along with English, Joey speaks Swahili. He is equally comfortable among the local Africans and the transplanted Westerners.
Joey and his parents are in most ways a regular American family, and a visitor from Ventura would not feel out of place in their home or at their dinner table. But Joey and his parents have lived their lives almost entirely free of modern American mass media. They have watched very little television and heard almost no pop music. Joey attends an international school for Americans overseas and in most ways is a typical American teenager, except for his lack of knowledge of the most recent trends. What Joey lacks is specific concrete knowledge of what life is like in the United States.
But that will be changing soon. Joey's family plans to move back permanently to Ventura, California in August of 2002. They miss life in the United States and want to give Joey a more traditional high school experience. They want Joey to understand what it means to be an American and to take pride in it; they don't want Joey to grow up to feel like a stranger in his own country. Joey supports this decision and is looking forward to it. He wants to learn how to surf, as his father was a well known surfer in his youth. A noted soccer player, Joey also wants to compete more generally and widely than is possible in Mwanza. In fact, he plans to attend Foothill Technology High School! He hopes to make the Buena High School boy's soccer team! Joey is eager and excited to return to the United States. But he is a little nervous about being able to adjust to a different lifestyle and social scene.
Your task in this assignment will be to write a letter to Joey explaining mass media and popular culture in America. Remember: Joey has almost no experience at all with television or pop music or media hype! Joey will rely on your advice to make sense of everything upon suddenly finding himself immersed in modern media. Explain everything that, in your opinion, Joey needs to know to navigate successfully and healthily the modern American mediascape.
Use the following areas as reference points for an outline:
Opening/Thesis paragraph (5-6 sentences) -- ANSWER ESSAY QUESTION! --
- Television and our culture
- What did people do before television?
- What would I do without television?
- Life with television
- My family and television
- TV vs. Internet
- Future of Communications
- (Transition!)
- Constructed reality
- Image vs. Print
- Commercial interests
- Poses and values
- Codes and concepts
- Cult of celebrityhood
- Politics and "sound bites"
- Shadows vs. Reality; truth vs. untruth
- (Transition!)
- High school life in Ventura
Concluding paragraph (5-6 sentences) -- RE-STATE ANSWER TO ESSAY QUESTION! --
"In the absence of traditional authority, advertising has become a kind of social guide. It depicts us in all the myriad situations possible to a life of free choice. It provides ideas about style, morality, behavior."
Ronald Berman
Advertising and Social Change
(1981) Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, p. 13
