Since I will be teaching youth studies at the undergraduate level rather than English at the high school level I decided to broaden out the film adaptation assignment and do some thinking about critical media literacy.
Critical Media Literacy
The critical media literacy approach sees the audience as active in the process of meaning-making and promotes the production of counter-hegemonic media (Kellner & Share, 2007). In this case we can see our students as a potential audience. Kellner (2004) suggested that new technologies of communication are powerful tools that can liberate or dominate harkening back to Dewey’s moral measure of, “Does it liberate or suppress, ossify or render flexible, divide or unify interest?” (Dewey, 1922, p.326). Kellner (2004) has also suggested that educators must teach their students to use and critically analyze these media if students are to embrace civic participation and radical democracy. Critical media literacy enables people to evaluate, dissect, and investigate media content and forms and to cultivate skills in analyzing ideologies and the multiple meanings and messages embedded in media texts (Kellner & Share, 2005).
Youth, Credibility & Digital Media
The topic of how youth asses the objective and subjective components of messages on the internet has garnered much attention recently. Young people have access through digital technology to more available information than any other time in history. Metzger & Flanagin (2008) have suggested that teaching youth how to navigate the “ocean of information” available through digital technologies is important and necessary to critically assessing credibility. Flanagin and Metzger (2008) have also argued that youth are more likely than their parents or grandparents to turn to digital media when researching a topic for school or personal use. They have argued that the impact of “growing up digital” is that more information that ever is filtered through largely unknown sources and that “although youth are talented and comfortable users of technology, they may lack crucial tools and abilities that enable them to seek and consume information effectively”(p.7). One of the difficulties of assessing credible sources on the internet is that conventional methods may not work because of the fast pace, link structure, and lack of referencing (Metzger & Flanagin, 2008). However, these authors have suggested that it would be simplistic to say youth are inherently lacking compared to adults when it comes to credibility assessment. Although many educational efforts have taken the more “protectionist” approach towards shielding students from potentially incorrect information online, others have argued this type of sheltering inhibits the ability to think critically about digital information. Metzger and Flanagin (2008) have argued that collaborative filtering processes like Wikipedia with its unprecedented peer review can have the potential to solve many credibility issues raised by digital media. Encouraging youth to examine Wikipedia pages where collaborators discuss contested information, encouraging youth to become providers of information themselves, and making direct comparisons between competing news accounts may all be ways to gain skills in assessing credibility (Metzger & Flanagin, 2008).
Considering the incredible immersion of youth in digital technologies, more research to fill this void is needed. Most of the research exploring information people obtain through digital media has focused mainly on websites. More research could be done looking at different information resources like blogs, wikis, email and text messaging and although research on credibility and media is growing, very little is today is dedicated specifically to youth with the exception of college students. Metzger and Flanagin (2008) have argued that “credibility is a cornerstone of people’s interactions, personal representation, academic and professional performance, and democratic expression and choice” (p. 20). Understanding better how youth asses credibility is therefore of significant interest.
Some Conclusions
The research suggests that in this unprecedented time of media consumption, it is vitally important that parents, youth workers, teachers and all those who work with and on behalf of youth pay closer attention to how media informs and educates young people. Many authors have suggested that media messages are generally for profit and are constructed using their own special language. These authors have argued it is important to question the images portrayed by media and not take them for granted. Each person brings their own context and life history to interpret media messages and not everyone will interpret messages in the same way. Many may not be able to see positive representations of themselves in the popular media because of embedded values of the corporations that produce these messages. However, the literature also suggests that embracing critical thinking around these issues can bring us towards more informed communities and a more enlightened democracy.
Brown, Schaffer, Vargas, LaHoma & Romocki (2004) have noted that there is a growing body of case study evidence suggesting critical media literacy can positively impact the lives of young people. The goal of incorporating critical media literacy into the everyday lives of youth is about creating more aware, engaged, civically-minded youth who can make more informed choices not only as consumers (as we know vast amounts of energy and resources are spent on marketing to youth) but also as advocates for positive representations of themselves in media. Brown et. al. also wrote, “Our vision is that in the future, the media world would be a more diverse and civically engaged place in which young people could find and produce positive images of themselves. Raising a generation of media-literate citizens may help realize that vision”(p. 264).
Directions for Future Research
The body of literature connecting youth development and critical media literacy is growing. Hopefully projects like the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning spanning research, educational reforms and technology development will continue to be funded. Topics like youth, digital media and credibility have started to emerge and capture the public’s attention, but further research is needed. Other important research focusing on media, consumer, and digital culture is happening as well. The anthology Media/Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches came out in 2009 and dedicated 644 pages to a vast array of media–related topics many of which focused on youth and media usage. I would argue that there are many exciting places where youth development research and critical media research can intersect. Hopefully further research exploring these connections will support youth, their families, and communities by giving them tools to interpret and deconstruct media messages, challenge these messages and create new messages that better represent themselves.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Final Project: A Perfectly “Delightful” Way to Learn: An Exploration of Mental Hygiene Films
“We pledge…to produce only those films which will motivate constructive students thinking…to maintain maximum interest level through well-paced realism rather than unwarranted artifice…to regard as an honored privilege and a sacred trust our function in aiding in the development of finer men and women to the end that a better understanding may exist among all peoples of the world.”
-“pledge to the Educators of America,”
Mental Hygiene filmmaker ad, 1946
“Everybody keeps talking about teenagers as if we were a bunch of freaks or something”
-What About Juvenile Delinquency (1955)
Born out of the instructional film movement in the 1940’s, a segment of films dedicated to social guidance cropped up in classrooms around America. These social guidance films were dubbed “mental hygiene” films and they were created with the intent to adjust social behavior (Smith, 1999). Teens were expected to learn “proper” social behavior from these ten minute films with names like Are You Popular? and A Date with Your Family in the 1940’s, The Snob, What About Juvenile Delinquency and How to Be an American in the 1950’s and Keep off the Grass and Highways of Agony in the late 1960’s. Through these films, kids were asked to consider that being “…selfish, arrogant, undemocratic, or delinquent could make them unhappy or; depending on the producer, dead” (Smith, p. 12). In the world of mental hygiene, playing by the rules and maintaining the status quo were rewarded with popularity and happiness.
When looking at a range of these films it becomes clearly problematic that the film makers isolated issues from everyday life and put youth at the center of blame for many of society’s problems. For example, the particularly gory genre of highway safety films like Mechanized Death (1961) and Highways of Agony (1969) solely blamed teens for major accidents on America’s roads without consideration of the Detroit automaker’s lack of safety standards. For the mental hygiene film producers, the bottom line was to keep costs down and production cheap which meant keeping the storylines simple and characters stereotypical. Complex social problems were boiled down to simple solutions. In the majority of mental hygiene films as Smith (1999) argued, “…it was as impossible to be a little good or a little bad as it was to be a little dead” (14).
For the purposes and scope of this paper I will focus in particular on the mental hygiene films and not popular television at the time, but I think it is important to note that popular television especially in the 1950s was providing moral and ethical demonstrations about civil society as well. Laurie Oullettte and James Hay wrote, (2008) “A popular domestic comedy like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet represented problems and solutions in domestic family governance that were not entirely disconnected from mental hygiene classroom films shown during those years” (p. 27). The themes covered in the mental hygiene films were certainly part of the wider public’s imagination at the time.
I want to critically examine how these films were a response to what was happening in America as World War II ended, what was happening in American education at the time since the films were primarily shown in classrooms and explore some of the studios that produced mental hygiene films. Then I plan to explore two themes in the mental hygiene films – the idea of youth “as” trouble (juvenile delinquency) as well as the idea of youth “in” trouble (safety and morality) through several selected films. As I explore the mental hygiene films and their relationship to history, progressive education and the educational film industry, I hope to highlight along the way what I believe are some of the biggest problems with these films and what was really at stake for the youth represented in them.
The mental hygiene films are often overlooked for what seems like their completely straightforward and passé nature. Ironically, as bland as many of the films were, the histories of the film producers were entertaining and often quite dark – connections to pornography, suicide, alleged murder and a connection to start up capital from John Wayne are just a few of the interesting side notes to the mental hygiene history. My hope is a closer look at these films and their messages mostly long forgotten will prompt us to think more deeply about how youth were often problematically represented in and indoctrinated by the mental hygiene films and how some of these problems still live with us today. In the introduction to Residual Media Charles Acland (2007) reminds us, “…how surprising and unsettling figures from the past can be. They creep up to remind us of their existence and of the influence they wield in the present”(xiii).
World War II & Mental Hygiene
The mental hygiene films emerged in the midst of a fearful and traumatized public following World War II. During World War II, films had been widely used to teach soldiers and women on the factory assembly line alike how to perform their tasks and “want to”(Smith, p. 21). The films were created to stir up pride and morale with names like Pride of Victory, Avenge December 7, and Farmer at War. Savage (2007) wrote, “The whole culture was full of propaganda that stressed excitement and thrills” (p. 393). What had been the standard practice during the depression—staying in school and out of the labor market, changed with World War II. Everyone was needed. Pre-enlistment age youth had newfound social and economic importance. Playing a part in the war effort gave many youth the incentive to drop out of school and work. The war effort had not only increased the number of women in factories but youth as well. From 1940-1943, the percentage of 14-17 year olds employed in factories increased 300%, as compared to a 30% increase of women. In 1942, some three million teenagers were in the labor force (Gilbert, 1988, p. 20). This work led to greater economic freedom and greater visibility of youth. This visibility however attracted adult criticism and reports of juvenile delinquency grew (Savage, 2007). For example, the 1943 Zoot-Suit Riots, where Mexican-American youth battled servicemen and then police on the streets of Los Angeles, were publicized nation-wide, and became symbolic of the potential for delinquent and anti-social behavior among youth (Gilbert, 1988, p. 33). The complex cultural politics of Los Angeles and fact that it was off-duty servicemen that started the riots by attacking young men wearing zoot suits escaped public attention.
As World War II came to a close, fear of communists and nuclear annihilation caused a great deal of anxiety in American life. There were also fears that because youth had enjoyed great freedoms during the war while fathers fought overseas and mothers worked in the factories that the country was witnessing the destruction of the traditional family and the existing social order. According to this problematic discourse, the war, women, and a new youth culture were responsible for the coming social chaos.
Lewis Hine, head of the American Federation of Labor argued that women should leave the factories and return home, thereby fulfilling their patriotic duties “to see that their children ... have the care and protection that will enable them to develop into persons who will live good and responsible lives” (Gilbert, 1988, p. 33). National security depended on the stability of the “traditional family” and the containment of women in their “rightful” place in the home.
What is considered the very first mental hygiene film –You and Your Family (1946) became a response to the growing fears of a society afraid of juvenile delinquents and was meant to fix what was fast becoming known as the “youth problem.” In the film, Mary the main character is called up and asked to go to a dance. She proceeds to ask her parents who say no and then we are introduced to different scenarios of how Mary “could” act in response. It’s strangely robotic, but the film gets the point across that Mary above all else should respect the authority of her father…and mother and that their decisions are best for her. Smith (1999) argued that films such as You and Your Family were meant to “turn back the clock and train American kids how to be kids again” (p. 22). In this discourse apparently learning to be kids again meant learning to not question parental authority. Mental hygiene films reinforced the narrative that stressed the importance of the traditional family.
Take the film, The Snob (1958) for example which instructed students on the social condemnation and exile that faced young women who veered from society’s definition of what it meant to be female. The central character Sarah is ostracized and labeled deviant for wanting to stay home on a Friday night to do her algebra work (traditionally a male subject and also reminds us of textbooks since the film is produced for McGraw-Hill Books), rather than go to her neighbor Rob’s party with the other kids. When Sarah relents and attends the party, she is lambasted by her peers for her non-conformity and for emasculating a male peer by refusing to be his dance partner. She is told that she “really froze him out” implying a stereotypically unfortunate discourse about women who don’t give in to men as being “frigid.” Her father is not much help when he asks “Pumpkin. Aren’t all those kids who you think you’re better than having more fun than you?” The problematic and dominant narrative that was playing out post World War II explained that deformed families produced antisocial youth, in which case, society needed to step in, and be the better parent.
Tina Besley in her article on Foucault, disciplinary technologies and mental hygiene (2002) wrote, “…because we tend to see young people as our hope for the future, society has continued to be concerned with the moral constitution of young people…by devising and harnessing technologies that teach, encourage control and enable the mastery of governance of self”(p. 423). I would argue that these ‘disciplinary technologies’ of film meant to guide and control the morality of young people were a morally panicked response and in a sense these technologies were meant to be a substitute for “better parents.” Grossberg (2010) echoes this fundamental idea that youth are inevitably tied to our hope and struggle over our relation to the future. He argues, “While I think kids are caught at the intersection of a number of struggles, the most powerful of these is a struggle over ‘the question of the future’—over our assumptions about the relation between the present and the future”(p. 63).
After the war, progressive educators took note of how effective films had been in training soldiers and women in the factories and began to demand methods like film for use in the classroom to help “inculcate attitudes and ideals that will enable boys and girls to make their places as efficient and effective members of a democratic society” (Smith, p. 21). Of course it’s hard to know if their ideals truly affected students the way they wanted them to. Stuart Hall (1994) wrote about how those wanting to control preferred readings of texts (which can be films) cannot predict how others will read them. He noted that “…they cannot contain every possible reading of the text. The very text which they encode slips from their grasp. You can always read it another way”(p. 262). Anna McCarthy echoed this sentiment in a different way talking about the rise in governing through television in the 1950s. McCarthy (2010) argued when corporations, philanthropic institutes, private agencies (and I’ll add mental hygiene film producers) tried to educate the public about the “responsibilities of freedom” in a capitalist democracy they, “often discovered a profound discrepancy between the effects they hoped to achieve and the responses of their viewers”(p. 7).
Disdained before the war, film as a tool of education was now recast as a “perfectly delightful way to learn” (Green, quoted in Smith, p. 22). I would argue that this connection (maybe even conjuncture) is vitally important to the rise of the mental hygiene films because before World War II film was not highly regarded as a tool of education. Grossberg (2010) notes that the unity of a conjuncture usually deals with a social crisis of sorts. If it had not been for crisis of World War II and the necessity of training hundreds of thousands of young men and women during the war very quickly, film as a method of educating may not have come to prominence. Without the educational/”attitude building” films being shown widely during the war, the mental hygiene film movement which was the intersection of a method (film) and curriculum (social guidance) may not have come together.
Progressive Education?
In 1944 the United States Office of Education commissioned a study called Vocational Education in the Years Ahead and it took a year and a half to complete with the results presented in May of 1945 at a conference on education in Washington D.C. (Kliebard, 2004). Born out of this study was the agreement the youth in the United States were being underserved by high schools, but the direction that reform should take was not abundantly clear. Charles Prosser, the director of the Dunwoody Institute in Minneapolis came to the forefront of the proceedings and delivered what became known as the Prosser resolution. The resolution called for a new theme in education—life adjustment. This new curriculum would be “attuned to the actual life functions of youth as a preparation for adulthood”(Kliebard, 2004, p. 252). This new curriculum would have an unprecedented scope (Pinar, 2004).
Achievements of the popularity of this movement were embodied in the mental hygiene films. Kliebard (2004) wrote, “Much of the popularity of these films derived from fears that, without proper guidance, the rebelliousness of youth would ultimately threaten the foundations of society, and schools were seen as the place where menace could be minimized”(Kliebard, p. 258). The “rules” for social guidance in the films became overwhelmingly clear with proper behavior in regards to meeting people, eating in restaurants, going on dates, and attending school dances amongst many other topics. Kliebard (2004) argued that the fact that the films reached their height of popularity during the life adjustment era was no coincidence. In some ways these films were “adjunct to the curriculum…they conveyed precisely the messages that life adjustment advocates thought to be the most salient”(p. 259). These advocates of the life adjustment curriculum were very concerned about the dropout rate and felt that the current curriculum “rooted in the ideal of scholarship” was far from the general interests of the current high school population. The desire to reform the curriculum to functional areas of living versus the traditional “elements of the cultural heritage” that were the hallmark of education at the turn of the century became a lightning rod for criticism. Wrath from academicians was aroused when they understood that the life adjustment curriculum “promoted programs like basic living not merely as an addendum to the traditional curriculum, but as a substitute for it” (Kliebard, p. 260). Interestingly, as the life adjustment curriculum came and went, the mental hygiene films still held sway in classrooms through the 1960s although their popularity was never the same after the 1950s.
It’s important to note that the life adjustment curriculum came out of the greater movement of progressive education. By the time mental hygiene films arrived on the scene progressive education with its Deweyan tenants of child-centeredness and experiential learning had been well underway since the turn of the century. Dewey (1917) wrote in Democracy and Education, “…schools remain, of course, the typical instance of environments framed with express reference to influencing the mental and moral disposition of their members”(p. 22). It should be noted that Dewey believed (and this is often lost in how other progressive educators talked about schools) that in the transmitting of this kind of mental and moral knowledge that the school was only one means “…and compared with other agencies, a relatively superficial means”(p. 5). So if we (like many educators then and now) read Dewey and think about progressive education bracketing the complexities of the school in relation to families and communities, showing the mental hygiene films in American classrooms would certainly seem to follow from this ideal of inculcating youth with positive moral behavior. Besey (2002) wrote, “Broadly speaking, progressive education’s aims were for all boys and girls to be inculcated with ideals and attitudes to enable them to meet the complexities of modern life and to take their place as effective members of a modern democratic society”(p. 426). The mental hygiene films were a response in part to the added element of a fearful and traumatized public that had endured a second world war. Something new was needed in education to help ensure there would be no future disasters. Smith (1999) wrote, “That ‘something’ was the mental hygiene classroom film, a uniquely American experiment in social engineering, the marriage of a philosophy—progressive education—and a technology—the instructional film”(19).
One of the insidious problems with the films being tied to progressive education was that progressive educators who touted critical thinking and critical pedagogy essentially sold their students a big bucket of indoctrination when they flipped off the lights and turned on the newest mental hygiene film. While movies like The Snob (1958) and What About the Juvenile Delinquency (1955) ended with a question mark asking “What would you do?” they presumably had already clearly told youth what to think. For example again in The Snob the audience is told over and over how the main character Sarah’s behavior is “snobbish” and “alienating” by the narrator of the film. It is hard to believe when he asks “have we judged Sarah’s snobbery too harshly?” that it would be possible to judge her in any other way. Indoctrination came from very savvy film producers who “as experts in manipulative sales, advertising and magazine publishing, adapted these psychologically manipulative techniques to education”(Besley, p. 431).
A Little Hollywood in the Midwest
“Coronet Films is proud to be a vital part of modern American education. The responsibility for providing teachers with films to train the youth of this nation is not taken lightly.”
-Coronet Promotional Literature (1947)
Coronet films under the direction of David Smart a millionaire publisher of Apparel Arts (later GQ) and Esquire began producing mental hygiene films starting in 1945. Smart was ambitious and well funded. He built a studio in Glenville, IL which became the largest privately owned film studio east of Hollywood. He had specifically built it to overlook Glenville Country Club which had barred him from membership because he was Jewish. It was a gamble, but Smart recognized that social guidance films had a bankable formula and it was actually because of his Hollywood style (actors with actual lines rather than narration dubbed over the film) that educators wanted the films thinking they would have greater appeal for youth. His closest competitors of the time Encyclopedia Britannica films and Simmel-Meservey were still silent with dry overdubbed narration. Smart wanted emotional impact and “real” characters (white, middle-class, clean-cut) so he created character storylines and used techniques of Hollywood filmmaking—dramatic lighting, fades, dissolves etc (Smith, 1999). At the height of production, Smart was putting out an educational film every 4 days and his studio became known as the “social guidance studio.”
It wasn’t long before other filmmakers caught on to the success of Coronet. Soon what were supposed to be thought-provoking films dedicated to progressive education principles became mass-produced and homogenized “consistent…and often unrecognizable from each other”(Smart, p. 95). What’s problematic here is that Coronet was really selling films not education. The films portrayed a perfect world where problems were easily solved. Not unlike the sitcoms of the time, all problems were neatly solved in the matter of ten to twenty minutes. Coronet was selling simple solutions to complex problems. Coronet’s collaboration with Chicago progressive educators was suspect. Although each film theoretically had an “educational collaborator” whose job it was to uphold scholastic standards, they were often relegated to benign tasks like making sure napkins and silverware were placed correctly in scenes about manners (Smith, 1999). The film producers in the Midwest didn’t operate completely outside the purview of progressive educators especially because of their proximity to the University of Chicago which was a major advocate for using visual resources in education and a hub for progressive thinkers. It’s important to note that at one time William Benton a wealthy advertising executive that produced films for Encyclopedia Britannica (right down the road from Coronet in Glenville, IL) was also at one time the vice-president of the University of Chicago.
Coronet’s time was short-lived however, not long after his sixtieth birthday in 1952 David Smart died on the operating table after an operation to inspect his colon went wrong. The chief surgeon ironically diagnosed Smart’s death as “mental suicide” since he had ordered the surgery himself—he had long suffered from pathophobia—the fear of disease (Smith, 1999).
Centron, another of the largest educational film producers hailed from Lawrence, KS. The studio which began in the back of a camera shop was created by two friends Arthur Wolf and Russell Mosser. Where Coronet had claimed the market on films with neat and tidy endings, Centron made films that actually addressed the messy-ness of being a teenager. Wolf and a young housewife Trudy Travis became the scriptwriting team with a shared vision that mental hygiene films should “stimulate discussion and that showcasing human emotions was the best way to do that”(Smith, p. 109). From 1951 to 1959 they produced the Discussion Problems in Group Living series with titles like The Trouble Maker, The Griper, and What About Prejudice? Smith (1999) noted that they also produced films not exclusively for education like Operation Grass Killer (Monsanto) and Tomorrow’s Spark Plug Today (AC Delco). Not surprisingly these business side projects helped to fund Centron so unlike Coronet they could make less mental hygiene films because of their financial support by their industrial clients. The lines blurred between the business and education films and it wasn’t long before Centron was making films “that aped mental hygiene so that corporate sponsors could weasel their way into the classroom”(Smart, p. 111).
Centron was certainly not alone in this problematic mixture of mental hygiene and product placement. If educators were trying to indoctrinate by social guidance, big corporations were trying to indoctrinate under the guise of freedom to consume. The sub-genre of business mental hygiene films were particularly insidious for their product placement. It’s hard to imagine educators who bought and showed the films in their school districts didn’t notice the propaganda in these films, but producers had become more savvy “deftly placing products in familiar everyday scenarios”(Smtih, p. 84). Some of the titles produced included Mr. B Natural (1957)which linked band instruments to popularity and A Date for Dinner (1960) shilling Kimberly Clark paper products. Developing future brand loyalty in young people did not escape the mental hygiene films.
The majority of all mental hygiene films were produced by the few Midwestern studios like Coronet, Centron (who often produced for MgGraw-Hill Book Co.,) and Encyclopedia Britannica, however one rogue filmmaker is worth mentioning since he made some of the most famous and disturbing films in the genre. Sid Davis grew up in Hollywood working on and off in the film industry, his main source of income working as a stand in for John Wayne. When a little girl in Los Angeles was molested in 1949 Davis became deeply worried as he was the father of a little girl himself. He decided that a film should be made warning about the dangers of child molesters. With a thousand dollar loan from John Wayne himself, Davis shot The Dangerous Stranger (1950). He used the profits to continue making movies the other studios would not make because of their darker subject matter—drug use, social anarchy and prejudice.
What is problematic to begin with is that even though these films were shown alongside other mental hygiene films of the time, no educators ever contributed or oversaw his work. He had no peers to judge him leaving him free to make assertions in his films such as The Terrible Truth (1951) where he accused the Soviet Union of promoting drug use in the United States. Since he made most of his 150 films for less than a thousand dollars a piece they were bizarrely much like the dry Encyclopedia Britannica education films in style. A monotone judgmental narrator accompanied the silent films with lines like “You youngsters can save yourselves a lot of pain if you just stop and think” (Live and Learn, 1951). Davis sought to keep youth out of trouble by exposing them to a cruel world. Davis was once quoted saying, “…having been somewhat of a delinquent myself as a younger kid, I understood their thinking. So it was right up my alley.”
Youth In Trouble
Davis is the right place to start when thinking about some of the films that viewed youth in trouble. One of his most famous films Boys Beware (1961) warns of the dangers of the “sick homosexual.” The film begins with Jimmy, a young teenage boy needing a ride. He takes a ride from an older man, a “stranger” in dark sunglasses named Ralph. That leads to a series of encounters that the narrator suggests are being orchestrated by Ralph. The two go to a burger joint one day and fishing the next. While fishing Ralph pulls out a pack of pornographic pictures and Jimmy looks at them “not wanting to offend his new friend.” Ralph is portrayed as a manipulative, deceitful pedophile and Jimmy as an innocent victim. The narrator informs us, “What Jimmy didn't know was that Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not physical like small pox, but no less dangerous and contagious. A sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual, a person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex." The last scene of Jimmy and Ralph suggests they are walking into a motel together and cuts quickly to Jimmy walking out of a courthouse with his parents. Jimmy had told his parents about Ralph and Ralph arrested. The next scene involves a boy Mike shooting hoops with a man in a suit and bow tie who offers a ride home. We are told that the homosexual can be violent and Mike is apparently killed, which we are supposed to infer by the narrator informing us that he didn’t know that he was “riding in the shadow of death.” The last scene cautions that public restrooms are “often a hangout for the homosexual” and that “one never knows” when the homosexual is about. The film ends with the narrator telling us, “So, no matter where you meet a stranger, be careful if they are too friendly, if they try to win your confidence too quickly, and if they become too personal. They may appear normal, and it may be too late when you discover he is mentally ill. So keep with your group and don’t go off alone with strangers unless you have permission of your parents or teacher.”
Beyond the entirely problematic discourse around homosexuality as being a “disease” and being equated with pedophilia I would argue that Boys Beware plays out almost as a cautionary tale like a Little Red Riding Hood whereby Jimmy trusting a stranger and straying from the straight and narrow path of safety courts danger. One wonders about the fragility of heterosexuality when it is being threatened at every turn. The narrator reminds us, “The decision is always yours and your whole future may depend on making the right one.” Sid Davis produced the film in conjunction with the Inglewood Police Department which makes some sense out of the parts of the movie where the kids seem oddly concerned with writing down license plate numbers. The film suggests that youth are innocent and hapless victims who need the “expert” advice of adults—parents, teachers, and policemen. Other films like The Terrible Truth (1951) and Six Murderous Beliefs (1955) also viewed youth as victims awaiting calamity. For youth who had to grow up fast during World War II taking on many adult tasks and often fending for themselves I wonder how they wrestled with being portrayed as innocent hapless victims?
Youth As Trouble
As much as youth were portrayed as hapless victims in the mental hygiene films, the flip side was youth represented as morally corrupt juvenile delinquents. In the film, What About Juvenile Delinquency (1955) a gang of boys roughs up a white middle class man driving a new Buick when doesn’t move his car fast enough. When the main character Jamie meets up with his gang at the malt shop he discovers it was his own poor father who was the victim of his own crowd. He rips the badly stitched gang insignia off his coat relinquishing it to the gang and runs out of the malt shop. Cut to the next day at school and the student council president along with the football captain are begging Jamie to accompany them to city hall. There are new curfew laws on the table for the city because of the recent juvenile delinquency problem (Jamie’s former gang). They also might have to forgo the prom and the big game! After much sinister griping from his former gang members Jamie decides to go with the group to city hall. They walk in on a meeting in progress of men yelling about the problem of juvenile delinquency. There is some cajoling from the principle who tells the angry councilmen that these youth “who represent all youth” should be allowed to speak because a few juvenile delinquents should not ruin things for everyone. We don’t actually get to hear any solutions from the youth since the film just ends with a question posed to the audience – “What would you do?” Roman (1996) writes about youth having an inaudible voice in public debate over concerns (like the curfew laws in What About Juvenile Delinquency) that crucially affect them. “The missing presence of youth themselves as speakers with political legitimacy and unique epistemic standpoints from most forums in which they are the literal, metaphorical, and political subjects should not go unremarked”(p. 1).
I would argue that the film wants us to recognize that EVEN white middle class fathers can fall victim to juvenile delinquency so it must be a pretty big problem. It’s certainly problematic that the principle refers to the youth as “these youth who represent all youth” if this is really supposed to be a film used for critical thinking in education. I would argue that those youth that are supposed to represent everyone are perfectly chosen for their conformist roles. We have the football team captain, the student council president, the student body president and Jamie who represents his white middle class father. The film isn’t asking for students to consider the complexity of juvenile delinquency rather to associate with prescribed roles of clean cut middle class white youth. It’s not necessarily problematic that there is a football captain and a student council president represented in the film, but it is problematic that they are naturally portrayed as ordinary kids who represent all youth.
Another group of mental hygiene films that problematically put youth at the center of blame was the gory genre of highway safety films. Films like What Made Sammy Speed (1957) Mechanized Death (1961) and Highways of Agony (1969) were made to scare the living daylights out of youth and blame them for death on America’s highways. At the time no American automobile manufacturer had a safety department and minor auto accidents were often fatal because there were no shoulder belts, air bags, headrests, antilock brakes or child safety seats. In 1949 the V-8 engine debuted and many teenage boys re-worked old cars putting the new powerful engines in them. Fatalities on America’s highways jumped 20% in 1950. What had been thought of vaguely as “reckless drivers” became more specifically the “thoughtlessness of youth” (Smith, p. 76). Last Date (1950) for example, portrayed a young Dick York as an uncooperative driver who meets a bloody end. Smith (1999) argued that “by portraying teenagers as thrill-crazed maniacs, the film offered the public a familiar and acceptable scapegoat…however these films did little or nothing to stem the carnage on the roads”(p. 76). The relationship between higher engine horsepower, unsafe vehicles and death tolls was ignored in favor of storylines that blamed teenagers. The overarching discourse of the time was that since accidents continued, teenagers needed even stronger lessons so the films only got worse.
Budge Crawley, an independent mental hygiene filmmaker from Canada began using actual footage of accident scenes in his movies like Safety or Slaughter (1958). In this particular film we hear a narrator explain over the footage of dead bodies, “That man is a statistic. So is that girl.” Another independent filmmaker named Richard Wayman in Ohio took note of these films after a friend died in an accident and began making his own version of the gory films. Independently wealthy from his prestigious accounting job at Ernst & Ernst (later Ernst & Young) he was able to combine pictures he had taken of accidents along with police footage of bloody Ohio Turnpike accidents to make Signal 30 in 1959. The brochure for the film noted it was shot “in living (and dying) color” (Smith, p. 80). Wayman had good timing as the 1960s ushered in America’s bloodiest decade of highway accidents. In 1964, Detroit automakers like Chevrolet were putting out compact cars with 400 horsepower engines dubbing them “muscle” cars.
In 1965, Ralph Nader published Unsafe at any Speed calling the Detroit automakers in to question by exposing the deadly designs of many of their cars being sold at the time. Nader (1965) attacked the industry charging that billions of dollars had been wasted on property damage, lost wages, legal fees, insurance costs and funeral costs due to the lack of safety standards. His book prompted congress to pass the Traffic and Motor Safety Vehicle act in 1966. Teenagers needed safer cars not a heaping of blame in horrifying highway safety films. Of all the mental hygiene genres the highway safety films are possibly the most visible still today. Youth are still shown gory car wreck footage in driver’s education courses around America. We are still left with a problematic discourse that assumes teenagers are a menace to our roads.
I would argue that the films portraying youth as trouble may have had a more damaging impact on teenagers. Youth were being represented as horrible accident causing delinquents, scapegoats for morally panicked society. The films that portrayed youth in trouble were certainly dark like the Sid Davis cautionary tales, but youth were usually portrayed as innocent victims not perpetrators of violence and mayhem. Of course some teens did drive recklessly and some were delinquent, but the mental hygiene films with their simple storylines told by “expert” narrators effectively silenced real youth voices and ultimately curtailed any meaningful conversation about these problems.
Conclusion
Sometimes when I’ve shown these films to people who grew up watching them, at first they snicker, but also often lament that it was a “simpler” time where everyone “shared the same values” which if course was not true then and it is not true now. If life had been like Ozzie and Harriet or Leave it to Beaver, mental hygiene films would not have needed to exist. Life probably didn’t look much like a sitcom or a mental hygiene film at all after World War II when terrified American families were trying to pick up the pieces and rebuild themselves. Grossberg (2010) writes, “…I do not think any sustainable hegemonic position, any stable balance in the field of forces, has been reached in the United States since the 1950s. (perhaps that is why it is still a site of nostalgic investment?), and struggles have since become integrated into the everyday life of the nation”(p. 70).
In some ways I would argue that the films existed (to borrow a war term) in a “no man’s land” because they were simultaneously trying to get kids “to be kids again” looking backward as well as trying to create future democratic citizens, youth who would never let anything bad happen to America again. It’s almost like there was never a “present” for the mental hygiene films because they never accurately portrayed what was happening at the time. However, even if they didn’t ever quite accurately portray the “present” at the time, they were certainly an important response to (loosely borrow a phrase) the “structure of feeling” in America as World War II ended. I would argue that attempting to understand this conjuncture when the films were created does give us deeper insight and a “better story” as Grossberg (2010) might say of what life may have been like for many youth and their families in post war America. The films themselves require us to look beyond them for answers.
In his own work on youth history in the United States Grossberg (2010) tells us, “But the story I was telling could not begin in the 1970s, for it mapped out developments that took the story back into the postwar decades…and the same story—albeit with important differences –continues into the present decade”(p. 64). So it is with mental hygiene. Its darker roots trace backwards in time to mid-nineteenth century America replete with ties to eugenics. Fast forward slightly and you’ll find whole books being written on the subject. For example in 1917 W.A White wrote in his book The Principles of Mental Hygiene, “Mental hygiene has come to stay. There is not a shadow of a doubt about that, but its principles remain to be formulated because its activities have been scattered over so many fields which, while not really, still are practically disconnected”(vi). Following the path after the last films were shown in the late 1960s we find mental hygiene weaving its way into the ABC afterschool specials of the 1970s through the 1990s. Take for example, 1977’s The Horrible Honchos which depicts a juvenile gang tormenting a young boy (evoking What About Juvenile Delinquency) or 1983’s Andrea’s Story: A Hitchhiking Tragedy (harkening back to Boys Beware). Some of the films still blame youth for tragedy on America’s roads like 1990’s Over the Limit. Residual effects of the corporate sponsored mental hygiene films like A Date for Dinner or Mr. B Natural can be seen in classrooms where sex education videos suggest feminine products made by the producers of the film like Johnson and Johnson.
The next task of this project would be to walk those paths backwards into the mid-19th century, to the cities, the slums, where mental hygiene found its roots and then to walk forwards into the later 20th century following the traces of sometimes obvious, sometimes subverted messages in afterschool specials, sex education films, and public service announcements. This way the conjuncture, the moment the films were at the height of their popularity and our understanding of them and what they were responding to could be more fully developed and strengthened.
References
Acland, C. R. (Ed.) (2007). Residual Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Besley, T. (2002). Social education and mental hygiene: Foucault, disciplinary technologies and the moral constitution of youth. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 34(4), 419.
Blake, G. (1946). You and Your Family. B.K. Blake, Inc.
Collins, L. (1950). Last Date. CA: Wilding Picture Company.
Davis, Sid. (1961). Boys Beware. Hollywood, CA: Sid Davis Films.
Hall, S. (1994). Reflections upon the Encoding/Decoding Model: An Interview with Stuart Hall. In Cruz, J. & Lewis, J. (eds.), Viewing, reading, listening: Audiences and critical reception. (pp. 253-274). Boulder, CO: Westview.
Harvey, Harold. (1955). What About Juvenile Delinquency? Lawrence, KS: Centron Films.
Harvey, Harold. (1958). The Snob. Lawrence, KS: Centron Films for McGraw-Hill Books.
Gilbert, J. (1988). A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s. NY: Oxford University Press.
Grossman, L. (2010). Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kliebard, H. M. (2004). The Struggle for the American Curriculum: 1893-1958. London: RoutledgeFalmer.
McCarthy, A. (2010). The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America. NY: The New Press.
Nader, R. (1965). Unsafe at Any Speed. NY: Grossman Publishers.
Ouellette, L. & Hay, J. (2008). Better Living Through Reality TV: Television. MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Pinar, W. F. (2004). Understanding Curriculum. NY: Lang Publishing.
Roman, L. G. (1996). Spectacle in the dark: Youth as transgression, display, and repression. Educational Theory, 46(1), 1.
Savage, J. (2007). Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture 1875-1945. NY: Penguin.
Smith, K. (1999). Mental Hygiene Classroom Films 1945-1970. NY: Blast Books.
White, W.A. (1917) The Principles of Mental Hygiene. NY: Macmillan.
-“pledge to the Educators of America,”
Mental Hygiene filmmaker ad, 1946
“Everybody keeps talking about teenagers as if we were a bunch of freaks or something”
-What About Juvenile Delinquency (1955)
Born out of the instructional film movement in the 1940’s, a segment of films dedicated to social guidance cropped up in classrooms around America. These social guidance films were dubbed “mental hygiene” films and they were created with the intent to adjust social behavior (Smith, 1999). Teens were expected to learn “proper” social behavior from these ten minute films with names like Are You Popular? and A Date with Your Family in the 1940’s, The Snob, What About Juvenile Delinquency and How to Be an American in the 1950’s and Keep off the Grass and Highways of Agony in the late 1960’s. Through these films, kids were asked to consider that being “…selfish, arrogant, undemocratic, or delinquent could make them unhappy or; depending on the producer, dead” (Smith, p. 12). In the world of mental hygiene, playing by the rules and maintaining the status quo were rewarded with popularity and happiness.
When looking at a range of these films it becomes clearly problematic that the film makers isolated issues from everyday life and put youth at the center of blame for many of society’s problems. For example, the particularly gory genre of highway safety films like Mechanized Death (1961) and Highways of Agony (1969) solely blamed teens for major accidents on America’s roads without consideration of the Detroit automaker’s lack of safety standards. For the mental hygiene film producers, the bottom line was to keep costs down and production cheap which meant keeping the storylines simple and characters stereotypical. Complex social problems were boiled down to simple solutions. In the majority of mental hygiene films as Smith (1999) argued, “…it was as impossible to be a little good or a little bad as it was to be a little dead” (14).
For the purposes and scope of this paper I will focus in particular on the mental hygiene films and not popular television at the time, but I think it is important to note that popular television especially in the 1950s was providing moral and ethical demonstrations about civil society as well. Laurie Oullettte and James Hay wrote, (2008) “A popular domestic comedy like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet represented problems and solutions in domestic family governance that were not entirely disconnected from mental hygiene classroom films shown during those years” (p. 27). The themes covered in the mental hygiene films were certainly part of the wider public’s imagination at the time.
I want to critically examine how these films were a response to what was happening in America as World War II ended, what was happening in American education at the time since the films were primarily shown in classrooms and explore some of the studios that produced mental hygiene films. Then I plan to explore two themes in the mental hygiene films – the idea of youth “as” trouble (juvenile delinquency) as well as the idea of youth “in” trouble (safety and morality) through several selected films. As I explore the mental hygiene films and their relationship to history, progressive education and the educational film industry, I hope to highlight along the way what I believe are some of the biggest problems with these films and what was really at stake for the youth represented in them.
The mental hygiene films are often overlooked for what seems like their completely straightforward and passé nature. Ironically, as bland as many of the films were, the histories of the film producers were entertaining and often quite dark – connections to pornography, suicide, alleged murder and a connection to start up capital from John Wayne are just a few of the interesting side notes to the mental hygiene history. My hope is a closer look at these films and their messages mostly long forgotten will prompt us to think more deeply about how youth were often problematically represented in and indoctrinated by the mental hygiene films and how some of these problems still live with us today. In the introduction to Residual Media Charles Acland (2007) reminds us, “…how surprising and unsettling figures from the past can be. They creep up to remind us of their existence and of the influence they wield in the present”(xiii).
World War II & Mental Hygiene
The mental hygiene films emerged in the midst of a fearful and traumatized public following World War II. During World War II, films had been widely used to teach soldiers and women on the factory assembly line alike how to perform their tasks and “want to”(Smith, p. 21). The films were created to stir up pride and morale with names like Pride of Victory, Avenge December 7, and Farmer at War. Savage (2007) wrote, “The whole culture was full of propaganda that stressed excitement and thrills” (p. 393). What had been the standard practice during the depression—staying in school and out of the labor market, changed with World War II. Everyone was needed. Pre-enlistment age youth had newfound social and economic importance. Playing a part in the war effort gave many youth the incentive to drop out of school and work. The war effort had not only increased the number of women in factories but youth as well. From 1940-1943, the percentage of 14-17 year olds employed in factories increased 300%, as compared to a 30% increase of women. In 1942, some three million teenagers were in the labor force (Gilbert, 1988, p. 20). This work led to greater economic freedom and greater visibility of youth. This visibility however attracted adult criticism and reports of juvenile delinquency grew (Savage, 2007). For example, the 1943 Zoot-Suit Riots, where Mexican-American youth battled servicemen and then police on the streets of Los Angeles, were publicized nation-wide, and became symbolic of the potential for delinquent and anti-social behavior among youth (Gilbert, 1988, p. 33). The complex cultural politics of Los Angeles and fact that it was off-duty servicemen that started the riots by attacking young men wearing zoot suits escaped public attention.
As World War II came to a close, fear of communists and nuclear annihilation caused a great deal of anxiety in American life. There were also fears that because youth had enjoyed great freedoms during the war while fathers fought overseas and mothers worked in the factories that the country was witnessing the destruction of the traditional family and the existing social order. According to this problematic discourse, the war, women, and a new youth culture were responsible for the coming social chaos.
Lewis Hine, head of the American Federation of Labor argued that women should leave the factories and return home, thereby fulfilling their patriotic duties “to see that their children ... have the care and protection that will enable them to develop into persons who will live good and responsible lives” (Gilbert, 1988, p. 33). National security depended on the stability of the “traditional family” and the containment of women in their “rightful” place in the home.
What is considered the very first mental hygiene film –You and Your Family (1946) became a response to the growing fears of a society afraid of juvenile delinquents and was meant to fix what was fast becoming known as the “youth problem.” In the film, Mary the main character is called up and asked to go to a dance. She proceeds to ask her parents who say no and then we are introduced to different scenarios of how Mary “could” act in response. It’s strangely robotic, but the film gets the point across that Mary above all else should respect the authority of her father…and mother and that their decisions are best for her. Smith (1999) argued that films such as You and Your Family were meant to “turn back the clock and train American kids how to be kids again” (p. 22). In this discourse apparently learning to be kids again meant learning to not question parental authority. Mental hygiene films reinforced the narrative that stressed the importance of the traditional family.
Take the film, The Snob (1958) for example which instructed students on the social condemnation and exile that faced young women who veered from society’s definition of what it meant to be female. The central character Sarah is ostracized and labeled deviant for wanting to stay home on a Friday night to do her algebra work (traditionally a male subject and also reminds us of textbooks since the film is produced for McGraw-Hill Books), rather than go to her neighbor Rob’s party with the other kids. When Sarah relents and attends the party, she is lambasted by her peers for her non-conformity and for emasculating a male peer by refusing to be his dance partner. She is told that she “really froze him out” implying a stereotypically unfortunate discourse about women who don’t give in to men as being “frigid.” Her father is not much help when he asks “Pumpkin. Aren’t all those kids who you think you’re better than having more fun than you?” The problematic and dominant narrative that was playing out post World War II explained that deformed families produced antisocial youth, in which case, society needed to step in, and be the better parent.
Tina Besley in her article on Foucault, disciplinary technologies and mental hygiene (2002) wrote, “…because we tend to see young people as our hope for the future, society has continued to be concerned with the moral constitution of young people…by devising and harnessing technologies that teach, encourage control and enable the mastery of governance of self”(p. 423). I would argue that these ‘disciplinary technologies’ of film meant to guide and control the morality of young people were a morally panicked response and in a sense these technologies were meant to be a substitute for “better parents.” Grossberg (2010) echoes this fundamental idea that youth are inevitably tied to our hope and struggle over our relation to the future. He argues, “While I think kids are caught at the intersection of a number of struggles, the most powerful of these is a struggle over ‘the question of the future’—over our assumptions about the relation between the present and the future”(p. 63).
After the war, progressive educators took note of how effective films had been in training soldiers and women in the factories and began to demand methods like film for use in the classroom to help “inculcate attitudes and ideals that will enable boys and girls to make their places as efficient and effective members of a democratic society” (Smith, p. 21). Of course it’s hard to know if their ideals truly affected students the way they wanted them to. Stuart Hall (1994) wrote about how those wanting to control preferred readings of texts (which can be films) cannot predict how others will read them. He noted that “…they cannot contain every possible reading of the text. The very text which they encode slips from their grasp. You can always read it another way”(p. 262). Anna McCarthy echoed this sentiment in a different way talking about the rise in governing through television in the 1950s. McCarthy (2010) argued when corporations, philanthropic institutes, private agencies (and I’ll add mental hygiene film producers) tried to educate the public about the “responsibilities of freedom” in a capitalist democracy they, “often discovered a profound discrepancy between the effects they hoped to achieve and the responses of their viewers”(p. 7).
Disdained before the war, film as a tool of education was now recast as a “perfectly delightful way to learn” (Green, quoted in Smith, p. 22). I would argue that this connection (maybe even conjuncture) is vitally important to the rise of the mental hygiene films because before World War II film was not highly regarded as a tool of education. Grossberg (2010) notes that the unity of a conjuncture usually deals with a social crisis of sorts. If it had not been for crisis of World War II and the necessity of training hundreds of thousands of young men and women during the war very quickly, film as a method of educating may not have come to prominence. Without the educational/”attitude building” films being shown widely during the war, the mental hygiene film movement which was the intersection of a method (film) and curriculum (social guidance) may not have come together.
Progressive Education?
In 1944 the United States Office of Education commissioned a study called Vocational Education in the Years Ahead and it took a year and a half to complete with the results presented in May of 1945 at a conference on education in Washington D.C. (Kliebard, 2004). Born out of this study was the agreement the youth in the United States were being underserved by high schools, but the direction that reform should take was not abundantly clear. Charles Prosser, the director of the Dunwoody Institute in Minneapolis came to the forefront of the proceedings and delivered what became known as the Prosser resolution. The resolution called for a new theme in education—life adjustment. This new curriculum would be “attuned to the actual life functions of youth as a preparation for adulthood”(Kliebard, 2004, p. 252). This new curriculum would have an unprecedented scope (Pinar, 2004).
Achievements of the popularity of this movement were embodied in the mental hygiene films. Kliebard (2004) wrote, “Much of the popularity of these films derived from fears that, without proper guidance, the rebelliousness of youth would ultimately threaten the foundations of society, and schools were seen as the place where menace could be minimized”(Kliebard, p. 258). The “rules” for social guidance in the films became overwhelmingly clear with proper behavior in regards to meeting people, eating in restaurants, going on dates, and attending school dances amongst many other topics. Kliebard (2004) argued that the fact that the films reached their height of popularity during the life adjustment era was no coincidence. In some ways these films were “adjunct to the curriculum…they conveyed precisely the messages that life adjustment advocates thought to be the most salient”(p. 259). These advocates of the life adjustment curriculum were very concerned about the dropout rate and felt that the current curriculum “rooted in the ideal of scholarship” was far from the general interests of the current high school population. The desire to reform the curriculum to functional areas of living versus the traditional “elements of the cultural heritage” that were the hallmark of education at the turn of the century became a lightning rod for criticism. Wrath from academicians was aroused when they understood that the life adjustment curriculum “promoted programs like basic living not merely as an addendum to the traditional curriculum, but as a substitute for it” (Kliebard, p. 260). Interestingly, as the life adjustment curriculum came and went, the mental hygiene films still held sway in classrooms through the 1960s although their popularity was never the same after the 1950s.
It’s important to note that the life adjustment curriculum came out of the greater movement of progressive education. By the time mental hygiene films arrived on the scene progressive education with its Deweyan tenants of child-centeredness and experiential learning had been well underway since the turn of the century. Dewey (1917) wrote in Democracy and Education, “…schools remain, of course, the typical instance of environments framed with express reference to influencing the mental and moral disposition of their members”(p. 22). It should be noted that Dewey believed (and this is often lost in how other progressive educators talked about schools) that in the transmitting of this kind of mental and moral knowledge that the school was only one means “…and compared with other agencies, a relatively superficial means”(p. 5). So if we (like many educators then and now) read Dewey and think about progressive education bracketing the complexities of the school in relation to families and communities, showing the mental hygiene films in American classrooms would certainly seem to follow from this ideal of inculcating youth with positive moral behavior. Besey (2002) wrote, “Broadly speaking, progressive education’s aims were for all boys and girls to be inculcated with ideals and attitudes to enable them to meet the complexities of modern life and to take their place as effective members of a modern democratic society”(p. 426). The mental hygiene films were a response in part to the added element of a fearful and traumatized public that had endured a second world war. Something new was needed in education to help ensure there would be no future disasters. Smith (1999) wrote, “That ‘something’ was the mental hygiene classroom film, a uniquely American experiment in social engineering, the marriage of a philosophy—progressive education—and a technology—the instructional film”(19).
One of the insidious problems with the films being tied to progressive education was that progressive educators who touted critical thinking and critical pedagogy essentially sold their students a big bucket of indoctrination when they flipped off the lights and turned on the newest mental hygiene film. While movies like The Snob (1958) and What About the Juvenile Delinquency (1955) ended with a question mark asking “What would you do?” they presumably had already clearly told youth what to think. For example again in The Snob the audience is told over and over how the main character Sarah’s behavior is “snobbish” and “alienating” by the narrator of the film. It is hard to believe when he asks “have we judged Sarah’s snobbery too harshly?” that it would be possible to judge her in any other way. Indoctrination came from very savvy film producers who “as experts in manipulative sales, advertising and magazine publishing, adapted these psychologically manipulative techniques to education”(Besley, p. 431).
A Little Hollywood in the Midwest
“Coronet Films is proud to be a vital part of modern American education. The responsibility for providing teachers with films to train the youth of this nation is not taken lightly.”
-Coronet Promotional Literature (1947)
Coronet films under the direction of David Smart a millionaire publisher of Apparel Arts (later GQ) and Esquire began producing mental hygiene films starting in 1945. Smart was ambitious and well funded. He built a studio in Glenville, IL which became the largest privately owned film studio east of Hollywood. He had specifically built it to overlook Glenville Country Club which had barred him from membership because he was Jewish. It was a gamble, but Smart recognized that social guidance films had a bankable formula and it was actually because of his Hollywood style (actors with actual lines rather than narration dubbed over the film) that educators wanted the films thinking they would have greater appeal for youth. His closest competitors of the time Encyclopedia Britannica films and Simmel-Meservey were still silent with dry overdubbed narration. Smart wanted emotional impact and “real” characters (white, middle-class, clean-cut) so he created character storylines and used techniques of Hollywood filmmaking—dramatic lighting, fades, dissolves etc (Smith, 1999). At the height of production, Smart was putting out an educational film every 4 days and his studio became known as the “social guidance studio.”
It wasn’t long before other filmmakers caught on to the success of Coronet. Soon what were supposed to be thought-provoking films dedicated to progressive education principles became mass-produced and homogenized “consistent…and often unrecognizable from each other”(Smart, p. 95). What’s problematic here is that Coronet was really selling films not education. The films portrayed a perfect world where problems were easily solved. Not unlike the sitcoms of the time, all problems were neatly solved in the matter of ten to twenty minutes. Coronet was selling simple solutions to complex problems. Coronet’s collaboration with Chicago progressive educators was suspect. Although each film theoretically had an “educational collaborator” whose job it was to uphold scholastic standards, they were often relegated to benign tasks like making sure napkins and silverware were placed correctly in scenes about manners (Smith, 1999). The film producers in the Midwest didn’t operate completely outside the purview of progressive educators especially because of their proximity to the University of Chicago which was a major advocate for using visual resources in education and a hub for progressive thinkers. It’s important to note that at one time William Benton a wealthy advertising executive that produced films for Encyclopedia Britannica (right down the road from Coronet in Glenville, IL) was also at one time the vice-president of the University of Chicago.
Coronet’s time was short-lived however, not long after his sixtieth birthday in 1952 David Smart died on the operating table after an operation to inspect his colon went wrong. The chief surgeon ironically diagnosed Smart’s death as “mental suicide” since he had ordered the surgery himself—he had long suffered from pathophobia—the fear of disease (Smith, 1999).
Centron, another of the largest educational film producers hailed from Lawrence, KS. The studio which began in the back of a camera shop was created by two friends Arthur Wolf and Russell Mosser. Where Coronet had claimed the market on films with neat and tidy endings, Centron made films that actually addressed the messy-ness of being a teenager. Wolf and a young housewife Trudy Travis became the scriptwriting team with a shared vision that mental hygiene films should “stimulate discussion and that showcasing human emotions was the best way to do that”(Smith, p. 109). From 1951 to 1959 they produced the Discussion Problems in Group Living series with titles like The Trouble Maker, The Griper, and What About Prejudice? Smith (1999) noted that they also produced films not exclusively for education like Operation Grass Killer (Monsanto) and Tomorrow’s Spark Plug Today (AC Delco). Not surprisingly these business side projects helped to fund Centron so unlike Coronet they could make less mental hygiene films because of their financial support by their industrial clients. The lines blurred between the business and education films and it wasn’t long before Centron was making films “that aped mental hygiene so that corporate sponsors could weasel their way into the classroom”(Smart, p. 111).
Centron was certainly not alone in this problematic mixture of mental hygiene and product placement. If educators were trying to indoctrinate by social guidance, big corporations were trying to indoctrinate under the guise of freedom to consume. The sub-genre of business mental hygiene films were particularly insidious for their product placement. It’s hard to imagine educators who bought and showed the films in their school districts didn’t notice the propaganda in these films, but producers had become more savvy “deftly placing products in familiar everyday scenarios”(Smtih, p. 84). Some of the titles produced included Mr. B Natural (1957)which linked band instruments to popularity and A Date for Dinner (1960) shilling Kimberly Clark paper products. Developing future brand loyalty in young people did not escape the mental hygiene films.
The majority of all mental hygiene films were produced by the few Midwestern studios like Coronet, Centron (who often produced for MgGraw-Hill Book Co.,) and Encyclopedia Britannica, however one rogue filmmaker is worth mentioning since he made some of the most famous and disturbing films in the genre. Sid Davis grew up in Hollywood working on and off in the film industry, his main source of income working as a stand in for John Wayne. When a little girl in Los Angeles was molested in 1949 Davis became deeply worried as he was the father of a little girl himself. He decided that a film should be made warning about the dangers of child molesters. With a thousand dollar loan from John Wayne himself, Davis shot The Dangerous Stranger (1950). He used the profits to continue making movies the other studios would not make because of their darker subject matter—drug use, social anarchy and prejudice.
What is problematic to begin with is that even though these films were shown alongside other mental hygiene films of the time, no educators ever contributed or oversaw his work. He had no peers to judge him leaving him free to make assertions in his films such as The Terrible Truth (1951) where he accused the Soviet Union of promoting drug use in the United States. Since he made most of his 150 films for less than a thousand dollars a piece they were bizarrely much like the dry Encyclopedia Britannica education films in style. A monotone judgmental narrator accompanied the silent films with lines like “You youngsters can save yourselves a lot of pain if you just stop and think” (Live and Learn, 1951). Davis sought to keep youth out of trouble by exposing them to a cruel world. Davis was once quoted saying, “…having been somewhat of a delinquent myself as a younger kid, I understood their thinking. So it was right up my alley.”
Youth In Trouble
Davis is the right place to start when thinking about some of the films that viewed youth in trouble. One of his most famous films Boys Beware (1961) warns of the dangers of the “sick homosexual.” The film begins with Jimmy, a young teenage boy needing a ride. He takes a ride from an older man, a “stranger” in dark sunglasses named Ralph. That leads to a series of encounters that the narrator suggests are being orchestrated by Ralph. The two go to a burger joint one day and fishing the next. While fishing Ralph pulls out a pack of pornographic pictures and Jimmy looks at them “not wanting to offend his new friend.” Ralph is portrayed as a manipulative, deceitful pedophile and Jimmy as an innocent victim. The narrator informs us, “What Jimmy didn't know was that Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not physical like small pox, but no less dangerous and contagious. A sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual, a person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex." The last scene of Jimmy and Ralph suggests they are walking into a motel together and cuts quickly to Jimmy walking out of a courthouse with his parents. Jimmy had told his parents about Ralph and Ralph arrested. The next scene involves a boy Mike shooting hoops with a man in a suit and bow tie who offers a ride home. We are told that the homosexual can be violent and Mike is apparently killed, which we are supposed to infer by the narrator informing us that he didn’t know that he was “riding in the shadow of death.” The last scene cautions that public restrooms are “often a hangout for the homosexual” and that “one never knows” when the homosexual is about. The film ends with the narrator telling us, “So, no matter where you meet a stranger, be careful if they are too friendly, if they try to win your confidence too quickly, and if they become too personal. They may appear normal, and it may be too late when you discover he is mentally ill. So keep with your group and don’t go off alone with strangers unless you have permission of your parents or teacher.”
Beyond the entirely problematic discourse around homosexuality as being a “disease” and being equated with pedophilia I would argue that Boys Beware plays out almost as a cautionary tale like a Little Red Riding Hood whereby Jimmy trusting a stranger and straying from the straight and narrow path of safety courts danger. One wonders about the fragility of heterosexuality when it is being threatened at every turn. The narrator reminds us, “The decision is always yours and your whole future may depend on making the right one.” Sid Davis produced the film in conjunction with the Inglewood Police Department which makes some sense out of the parts of the movie where the kids seem oddly concerned with writing down license plate numbers. The film suggests that youth are innocent and hapless victims who need the “expert” advice of adults—parents, teachers, and policemen. Other films like The Terrible Truth (1951) and Six Murderous Beliefs (1955) also viewed youth as victims awaiting calamity. For youth who had to grow up fast during World War II taking on many adult tasks and often fending for themselves I wonder how they wrestled with being portrayed as innocent hapless victims?
Youth As Trouble
As much as youth were portrayed as hapless victims in the mental hygiene films, the flip side was youth represented as morally corrupt juvenile delinquents. In the film, What About Juvenile Delinquency (1955) a gang of boys roughs up a white middle class man driving a new Buick when doesn’t move his car fast enough. When the main character Jamie meets up with his gang at the malt shop he discovers it was his own poor father who was the victim of his own crowd. He rips the badly stitched gang insignia off his coat relinquishing it to the gang and runs out of the malt shop. Cut to the next day at school and the student council president along with the football captain are begging Jamie to accompany them to city hall. There are new curfew laws on the table for the city because of the recent juvenile delinquency problem (Jamie’s former gang). They also might have to forgo the prom and the big game! After much sinister griping from his former gang members Jamie decides to go with the group to city hall. They walk in on a meeting in progress of men yelling about the problem of juvenile delinquency. There is some cajoling from the principle who tells the angry councilmen that these youth “who represent all youth” should be allowed to speak because a few juvenile delinquents should not ruin things for everyone. We don’t actually get to hear any solutions from the youth since the film just ends with a question posed to the audience – “What would you do?” Roman (1996) writes about youth having an inaudible voice in public debate over concerns (like the curfew laws in What About Juvenile Delinquency) that crucially affect them. “The missing presence of youth themselves as speakers with political legitimacy and unique epistemic standpoints from most forums in which they are the literal, metaphorical, and political subjects should not go unremarked”(p. 1).
I would argue that the film wants us to recognize that EVEN white middle class fathers can fall victim to juvenile delinquency so it must be a pretty big problem. It’s certainly problematic that the principle refers to the youth as “these youth who represent all youth” if this is really supposed to be a film used for critical thinking in education. I would argue that those youth that are supposed to represent everyone are perfectly chosen for their conformist roles. We have the football team captain, the student council president, the student body president and Jamie who represents his white middle class father. The film isn’t asking for students to consider the complexity of juvenile delinquency rather to associate with prescribed roles of clean cut middle class white youth. It’s not necessarily problematic that there is a football captain and a student council president represented in the film, but it is problematic that they are naturally portrayed as ordinary kids who represent all youth.
Another group of mental hygiene films that problematically put youth at the center of blame was the gory genre of highway safety films. Films like What Made Sammy Speed (1957) Mechanized Death (1961) and Highways of Agony (1969) were made to scare the living daylights out of youth and blame them for death on America’s highways. At the time no American automobile manufacturer had a safety department and minor auto accidents were often fatal because there were no shoulder belts, air bags, headrests, antilock brakes or child safety seats. In 1949 the V-8 engine debuted and many teenage boys re-worked old cars putting the new powerful engines in them. Fatalities on America’s highways jumped 20% in 1950. What had been thought of vaguely as “reckless drivers” became more specifically the “thoughtlessness of youth” (Smith, p. 76). Last Date (1950) for example, portrayed a young Dick York as an uncooperative driver who meets a bloody end. Smith (1999) argued that “by portraying teenagers as thrill-crazed maniacs, the film offered the public a familiar and acceptable scapegoat…however these films did little or nothing to stem the carnage on the roads”(p. 76). The relationship between higher engine horsepower, unsafe vehicles and death tolls was ignored in favor of storylines that blamed teenagers. The overarching discourse of the time was that since accidents continued, teenagers needed even stronger lessons so the films only got worse.
Budge Crawley, an independent mental hygiene filmmaker from Canada began using actual footage of accident scenes in his movies like Safety or Slaughter (1958). In this particular film we hear a narrator explain over the footage of dead bodies, “That man is a statistic. So is that girl.” Another independent filmmaker named Richard Wayman in Ohio took note of these films after a friend died in an accident and began making his own version of the gory films. Independently wealthy from his prestigious accounting job at Ernst & Ernst (later Ernst & Young) he was able to combine pictures he had taken of accidents along with police footage of bloody Ohio Turnpike accidents to make Signal 30 in 1959. The brochure for the film noted it was shot “in living (and dying) color” (Smith, p. 80). Wayman had good timing as the 1960s ushered in America’s bloodiest decade of highway accidents. In 1964, Detroit automakers like Chevrolet were putting out compact cars with 400 horsepower engines dubbing them “muscle” cars.
In 1965, Ralph Nader published Unsafe at any Speed calling the Detroit automakers in to question by exposing the deadly designs of many of their cars being sold at the time. Nader (1965) attacked the industry charging that billions of dollars had been wasted on property damage, lost wages, legal fees, insurance costs and funeral costs due to the lack of safety standards. His book prompted congress to pass the Traffic and Motor Safety Vehicle act in 1966. Teenagers needed safer cars not a heaping of blame in horrifying highway safety films. Of all the mental hygiene genres the highway safety films are possibly the most visible still today. Youth are still shown gory car wreck footage in driver’s education courses around America. We are still left with a problematic discourse that assumes teenagers are a menace to our roads.
I would argue that the films portraying youth as trouble may have had a more damaging impact on teenagers. Youth were being represented as horrible accident causing delinquents, scapegoats for morally panicked society. The films that portrayed youth in trouble were certainly dark like the Sid Davis cautionary tales, but youth were usually portrayed as innocent victims not perpetrators of violence and mayhem. Of course some teens did drive recklessly and some were delinquent, but the mental hygiene films with their simple storylines told by “expert” narrators effectively silenced real youth voices and ultimately curtailed any meaningful conversation about these problems.
Conclusion
Sometimes when I’ve shown these films to people who grew up watching them, at first they snicker, but also often lament that it was a “simpler” time where everyone “shared the same values” which if course was not true then and it is not true now. If life had been like Ozzie and Harriet or Leave it to Beaver, mental hygiene films would not have needed to exist. Life probably didn’t look much like a sitcom or a mental hygiene film at all after World War II when terrified American families were trying to pick up the pieces and rebuild themselves. Grossberg (2010) writes, “…I do not think any sustainable hegemonic position, any stable balance in the field of forces, has been reached in the United States since the 1950s. (perhaps that is why it is still a site of nostalgic investment?), and struggles have since become integrated into the everyday life of the nation”(p. 70).
In some ways I would argue that the films existed (to borrow a war term) in a “no man’s land” because they were simultaneously trying to get kids “to be kids again” looking backward as well as trying to create future democratic citizens, youth who would never let anything bad happen to America again. It’s almost like there was never a “present” for the mental hygiene films because they never accurately portrayed what was happening at the time. However, even if they didn’t ever quite accurately portray the “present” at the time, they were certainly an important response to (loosely borrow a phrase) the “structure of feeling” in America as World War II ended. I would argue that attempting to understand this conjuncture when the films were created does give us deeper insight and a “better story” as Grossberg (2010) might say of what life may have been like for many youth and their families in post war America. The films themselves require us to look beyond them for answers.
In his own work on youth history in the United States Grossberg (2010) tells us, “But the story I was telling could not begin in the 1970s, for it mapped out developments that took the story back into the postwar decades…and the same story—albeit with important differences –continues into the present decade”(p. 64). So it is with mental hygiene. Its darker roots trace backwards in time to mid-nineteenth century America replete with ties to eugenics. Fast forward slightly and you’ll find whole books being written on the subject. For example in 1917 W.A White wrote in his book The Principles of Mental Hygiene, “Mental hygiene has come to stay. There is not a shadow of a doubt about that, but its principles remain to be formulated because its activities have been scattered over so many fields which, while not really, still are practically disconnected”(vi). Following the path after the last films were shown in the late 1960s we find mental hygiene weaving its way into the ABC afterschool specials of the 1970s through the 1990s. Take for example, 1977’s The Horrible Honchos which depicts a juvenile gang tormenting a young boy (evoking What About Juvenile Delinquency) or 1983’s Andrea’s Story: A Hitchhiking Tragedy (harkening back to Boys Beware). Some of the films still blame youth for tragedy on America’s roads like 1990’s Over the Limit. Residual effects of the corporate sponsored mental hygiene films like A Date for Dinner or Mr. B Natural can be seen in classrooms where sex education videos suggest feminine products made by the producers of the film like Johnson and Johnson.
The next task of this project would be to walk those paths backwards into the mid-19th century, to the cities, the slums, where mental hygiene found its roots and then to walk forwards into the later 20th century following the traces of sometimes obvious, sometimes subverted messages in afterschool specials, sex education films, and public service announcements. This way the conjuncture, the moment the films were at the height of their popularity and our understanding of them and what they were responding to could be more fully developed and strengthened.
References
Acland, C. R. (Ed.) (2007). Residual Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Besley, T. (2002). Social education and mental hygiene: Foucault, disciplinary technologies and the moral constitution of youth. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 34(4), 419.
Blake, G. (1946). You and Your Family. B.K. Blake, Inc.
Collins, L. (1950). Last Date. CA: Wilding Picture Company.
Davis, Sid. (1961). Boys Beware. Hollywood, CA: Sid Davis Films.
Hall, S. (1994). Reflections upon the Encoding/Decoding Model: An Interview with Stuart Hall. In Cruz, J. & Lewis, J. (eds.), Viewing, reading, listening: Audiences and critical reception. (pp. 253-274). Boulder, CO: Westview.
Harvey, Harold. (1955). What About Juvenile Delinquency? Lawrence, KS: Centron Films.
Harvey, Harold. (1958). The Snob. Lawrence, KS: Centron Films for McGraw-Hill Books.
Gilbert, J. (1988). A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s. NY: Oxford University Press.
Grossman, L. (2010). Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kliebard, H. M. (2004). The Struggle for the American Curriculum: 1893-1958. London: RoutledgeFalmer.
McCarthy, A. (2010). The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America. NY: The New Press.
Nader, R. (1965). Unsafe at Any Speed. NY: Grossman Publishers.
Ouellette, L. & Hay, J. (2008). Better Living Through Reality TV: Television. MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Pinar, W. F. (2004). Understanding Curriculum. NY: Lang Publishing.
Roman, L. G. (1996). Spectacle in the dark: Youth as transgression, display, and repression. Educational Theory, 46(1), 1.
Savage, J. (2007). Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture 1875-1945. NY: Penguin.
Smith, K. (1999). Mental Hygiene Classroom Films 1945-1970. NY: Blast Books.
White, W.A. (1917) The Principles of Mental Hygiene. NY: Macmillan.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
The "Reality" of Becoming a Top Chef
Reality TV as a genre is now incredibly diverse in terms of how many types of shows are produced as well as the amount networks that produce them. However, I think the the real "variety" of subjects, themes, etc. is more questionable considering these shows are often as formulaic as scripted television dramas or comedies and are really (at the top) owned by very few media conglomerates. Pepi Leistyna in an article on social class and entertainment TV urges us to consider when the United States media is controlled by very few massive corporations how we might look critically at the stories Reality TV presents to us. Whose interests are being served by these representations? How could we imagine or even produce alternative visions?
I want to take some time to consider some issues with Reality TV as a whole and then look a little more specifically at Top Chef and it's spin off Top Chef: Just Desserts from a feminist point of view. I believe this show in particular has a massive appeal for women because of the convergance of private/public aspects. It considers something we all must do - eat!, but also cooking has been long part of the domestic/private sphere and in that sphere primarily in the domain of women. How does a show that elevates the cook to the chef play out for women? Only one woman to date has won top chef and it's not looking good for a woman to win Just Desserts this season.
First I want to consider some points from Laurie Oullette and James Hay's "Better Living Through Reality TV" (2008). The authors pose some very interesting questions that I think get beyond the basic critiques about Reality TV. They say, "At a time when privatization, personal responsibility, and consumer choice are promoted as the best way to govern liberal capitalist democracies, reality TV shows us how to conduct and "empower" ourselves as enterprising citizens."
They go on to consider how all the different types of shows share a preoccupation with judging, testing, advising and rewarding the conduct of "real" people in whatever capacity they are participating - housemates, contestants, workers homeowners, romantic partners etc. I think this is a very interesting idea to consider: the State trusts private entities like TV to be a social service provider and so consequently Reality TV ends up being a resource for "inventing, managing, caring for, and protecting ourselves as citizens."
In a time where there is a real absence of welfare programs we are seeing thousands of people apply directly to reality TV programs for things like housing (Extreme Home Makeover), and healthcare (Three Wishes). Oullette and Hay also say, "In certain respects, reality and lifestyle TV represents nothing short of the current conception of social welfare in which all citizens - whatever their resources and histories of disenfranchisement - are expected to 'take responsibility' for their fate." This is a fascinating arguement and a new way to frame how Reality TV can work in our society and in some ways help us consider how may be "governed" by Reality TV.
http://www.bravotv.com/top-chef
Specifically I want to focus on the Reality Show Top Chef and it's spin off Top Chef: Just Desserts. This subgenre is focused on the contestant as chef who is asked to go through a series of cooking challenges to win $100,000 (always furnished by a heavily talked about sponsor - gladware, etc.) They usually have "quickfire" challenge in the first half of the show (often attached to immunity or a cash prize) and a second elimination challenge where the losing chefs are asked to come before the judges, plead their case and one is ultimately sent home.
I do really enjoy this show, but there are things that I will talk about soon that I think are problematic for women viewers. Whereas a show like Big Brother can be exciting to watch because of the drama between contestants I appreciate Top Chef because most of the show (certainly not all) is dedicated to the food challenges. If there's drama unrelated to the cooking I usually fast forward to the next cooking challenge. I love to cook and quite enjoy the creative dishes that contestants come up with. It really does amaze me how they can come up with these new concoctions week after week.
What concerns me as a woman viewer is that in 7 seasons there has only been one woman winner and 2 women in runner-up positions. Often the men are very egotistical and many are not very compimentary of the women on the show. In a recent episode of Top Chef: Just Desserts there was a competition where the contestants had to run to the table of sweets to pick their ingredients. One of the male contestants actually knocked one of the women in the face trying to get his ingredients. She had to continue with the challenge while nursing a very bruised cheek. The only way the show addressed this was a cutaway interview with the male contestant saying "if you go to the post with Shaq and you get hit, you don't go to the post with Shaq again" essentially saying he had every right to knock this woman down because of the "challenge" atmosphere. This statement went unchallenged.
I think the chef as male is very dominating in this genre and can have a negative impact on women viewers who see cooking as something pleasurable and aspirational. Are women resigned to being "cooks" (amateurs) having to aspire to be "chefs" while the men are a priori "chefs" (experts) to begin with?
Student Activity:
For undergraduate students I would divide them into several groups and have clips from different seasons available of Top Chef especially scenes where women and men have confrontations or women contestants are criticized by male contestants. I would have them consider cultural constructions of myths around gender differences and then carefully analyze the clips to consider what might be problematic for women viewers.
We would also take a look at what rules effectively "govern" this type of reality show as well as consider our assumptions are about this type of show. We could consider if anything (at all) was different about the season that a woman won top chef. Did she have to work harder to prove that she was indeed a chef rather than a cook? How do these shows help or hinder women who aspire to be chefs or just enjoy cooking and want to learn more? Does a show like this reinforce stereotypes? How could BRAVO do a better job? Why would they want to?
The "Reality" of Top Chef
View more presentations from jennasethi.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Facebook Mini-Ethnographic Study
I chose to do a small study of facebook by asking three people in three different "generations" - baby boomer, gen x, and millenial to see if there was any difference in how they used facebook. Here are my questions and their responses:
Approximately when did you first join facebook and why?
What role does facebook play in your everyday life?
What functions do you use most and why - Posting to walls? Sending messages? Reading the news feed? etc.
How do you experience community on facebook?
What have you learned about yourself or how others communicate by using facebook?
Baby Boomer:
I joined Facebook about two years ago because I saw my daughter using it to stay in touch with friends and that's what I wanted to do.
I check Facebook several times a day to see who's posted something on my wall. It keeps me up-to-date on what friends are thinking-particularly their political opinions at this time. I also am exposed to many interesting media/political/humorous clips that people share.
I rarely post anything (last time was on my daughter's graduation day). I often respond to other peoples' posts or messages. I never read the news feed. I often get "work" messages through Facebook: choir members will let me know when they can't be at rehearsal or I'll find out if a member is sick through what they post on Facebook. I don't "friend" any students but I'm friends with a number of teaching colleagues so I sometimes get work news that way. I'm also using Facebook to contact high school classmates as we get ready for a reunion. Facebook has also helped me to find out about events through friends' invitations and it's easy to RSVP them if I can attend something.
Keeping in touch with high school and college classmates is a way of experiencing community that I would not have had without Facebook. These "friends" are not necessarily people I would have sent letters to just to stay involved in their lives but since they're on Facebook it's been easy to friend them and learn more about them since we last saw each other.
I've confirmed what I've always known: I like to be entertained by people. Facebook entertains me with the life stories of adults who were once kids in my church handbell choir, people who were once the cheerleaders, band members, athletes in my old high school, grown-up children of a dear friend who is diseased. Without Facebook I would have little or no contact with most of my 150+ "friends." Now all I have to do is to make a friends request~and read...
Generation Xer
It's something to do while I'm on the bus, during my lunch break or during otherwise unoccupied times. It mostly just keeps my brain active when I don't have something else with which to engage it.
I mostly stick to the news feed and post comments/likes. I maybe post a status update once a month - I'm more of a user than a giver. I also use the mail system regularly to keep in touch with friends. I use it in place of my email account for most of my personal contacts. I used to play Farmville and other similar time-wasting games while my dogs ate their breakfast, but it eventually got boring.
Facebook is kind of like walking into a cocktail party. Everyone's trading witty quips, swapping stories about their lives in an abbreviated form. They're keeping up with each other in a way that is fun, but ultimately kind of surface-level. Messages with friends are usually along the lines of "wow, it's been a long time, let's make some time to get together soon..." so in some ways it's also a social organizer.
I have learned that instant messaging is dangerous. I overshare way too easily in that format. I have learned that different people have different beliefs about when it is appropriate to use all caps in a status update. I've learned that reaching out and connecting with other people has to be one of the most common features of human beings. I have sent and received friend requests (the equivalent of a small head nod across a crowded room) from more people than I would have expected when I first started with Facebook. There has to be a reason that I've either requested or agreed to be friends with people that I never intend to see again. Like some value or positive emotional reaction that comes with connecting with someone in even the most simplistic of ways - Friend Request means: "I remember you or I know who you are and I don't hate you." Confirm Request means: "Thank you for acknowledging me. I will do the same."
Millenial
I joined Facebook in the Fall of 2005 because my cousin Mary suggested I check her page out and I liked what I saw.
Now that I am out of college, I feel like Facebook is less integrated into my daily life. I still look at photos and talk with friends but I don't think to check it as much.
I mainly post to friends, scan the news feed and post photos.
On Facebook, I feel like I experience community when people I know join groups or causes together. I also feel a sense of community when I post an update or read an update from a friend and many people will comment on the status creating a place for discussion.
I think I've learned a lot about what I wouldn't want to put on the computer through Facebook, there is a lot of oversharing on the internet and Facebook seems to be the catalyst for this behavior. Overall, I enjoy Facebook but I feel it has a lot of negative behaviors associated with it.
My own assesment:
One of the first things I noticed was the idea of "oversharing." Both the Gen X-er and Millenial were aware of the problems of giving out too much information, but the Baby Boomer was not as concerned probably more because this person uses facebook mainly to see what others are doing rather than make many public comments. I really liked the Gen X-er's comment about facebook being like walking into a cocktail party with people trading quips and stories. It is rather like always already walking in on something in progress. You can either jump in and comment or hang in the background for awhile listening to others talk about the news of the day.
The Baby Boomer and Gen Xer who responded talked about rarely posting in a regular manner and I would include myself in this group as well, but the Millenial was more of a "poster." I tend to stick to private messages and I do enjoy the feature like in email of being able to send a message to a select few people.
In terms of posting I am not entirely sure yet if it is tied to age or an outgoing personality. It could be a combination of both, but it would be interesting to do further research. I think you could pretty easily do a quantitative study with four different age groups tracking their number of posts for a 2 week period and run a simple 2-way ANOVA to look at differences.
Community was also an interesting topic. No one flinched at the idea that facebook could be a "real community" whereas several years ago I wonder if the idea that a community could exist without a physical "place" would have been more contested. I think we have begun the think of virtual communities as important spaces to relate to one another, but in decidedly different ways than we may relate face to face. We seem to enjoy the opportunity to stay connected with those who would have fallen out of our social circles, but at the same time desire that distance that doesn't require us to put in a huge effort.
As the gen x-er said -
Friend Request means: "I remember you or I know who you are and I don't hate you." Confirm Request means: "Thank you for acknowledging me. I will do the same."
There may be real truth in that assesment of how we deal with "friends" in a digital age.
Approximately when did you first join facebook and why?
What role does facebook play in your everyday life?
What functions do you use most and why - Posting to walls? Sending messages? Reading the news feed? etc.
How do you experience community on facebook?
What have you learned about yourself or how others communicate by using facebook?
Baby Boomer:
I joined Facebook about two years ago because I saw my daughter using it to stay in touch with friends and that's what I wanted to do.
I check Facebook several times a day to see who's posted something on my wall. It keeps me up-to-date on what friends are thinking-particularly their political opinions at this time. I also am exposed to many interesting media/political/humorous clips that people share.
I rarely post anything (last time was on my daughter's graduation day). I often respond to other peoples' posts or messages. I never read the news feed. I often get "work" messages through Facebook: choir members will let me know when they can't be at rehearsal or I'll find out if a member is sick through what they post on Facebook. I don't "friend" any students but I'm friends with a number of teaching colleagues so I sometimes get work news that way. I'm also using Facebook to contact high school classmates as we get ready for a reunion. Facebook has also helped me to find out about events through friends' invitations and it's easy to RSVP them if I can attend something.
Keeping in touch with high school and college classmates is a way of experiencing community that I would not have had without Facebook. These "friends" are not necessarily people I would have sent letters to just to stay involved in their lives but since they're on Facebook it's been easy to friend them and learn more about them since we last saw each other.
I've confirmed what I've always known: I like to be entertained by people. Facebook entertains me with the life stories of adults who were once kids in my church handbell choir, people who were once the cheerleaders, band members, athletes in my old high school, grown-up children of a dear friend who is diseased. Without Facebook I would have little or no contact with most of my 150+ "friends." Now all I have to do is to make a friends request~and read...
Generation Xer
It's something to do while I'm on the bus, during my lunch break or during otherwise unoccupied times. It mostly just keeps my brain active when I don't have something else with which to engage it.
I mostly stick to the news feed and post comments/likes. I maybe post a status update once a month - I'm more of a user than a giver. I also use the mail system regularly to keep in touch with friends. I use it in place of my email account for most of my personal contacts. I used to play Farmville and other similar time-wasting games while my dogs ate their breakfast, but it eventually got boring.
Facebook is kind of like walking into a cocktail party. Everyone's trading witty quips, swapping stories about their lives in an abbreviated form. They're keeping up with each other in a way that is fun, but ultimately kind of surface-level. Messages with friends are usually along the lines of "wow, it's been a long time, let's make some time to get together soon..." so in some ways it's also a social organizer.
I have learned that instant messaging is dangerous. I overshare way too easily in that format. I have learned that different people have different beliefs about when it is appropriate to use all caps in a status update. I've learned that reaching out and connecting with other people has to be one of the most common features of human beings. I have sent and received friend requests (the equivalent of a small head nod across a crowded room) from more people than I would have expected when I first started with Facebook. There has to be a reason that I've either requested or agreed to be friends with people that I never intend to see again. Like some value or positive emotional reaction that comes with connecting with someone in even the most simplistic of ways - Friend Request means: "I remember you or I know who you are and I don't hate you." Confirm Request means: "Thank you for acknowledging me. I will do the same."
Millenial
I joined Facebook in the Fall of 2005 because my cousin Mary suggested I check her page out and I liked what I saw.
Now that I am out of college, I feel like Facebook is less integrated into my daily life. I still look at photos and talk with friends but I don't think to check it as much.
I mainly post to friends, scan the news feed and post photos.
On Facebook, I feel like I experience community when people I know join groups or causes together. I also feel a sense of community when I post an update or read an update from a friend and many people will comment on the status creating a place for discussion.
I think I've learned a lot about what I wouldn't want to put on the computer through Facebook, there is a lot of oversharing on the internet and Facebook seems to be the catalyst for this behavior. Overall, I enjoy Facebook but I feel it has a lot of negative behaviors associated with it.
My own assesment:
One of the first things I noticed was the idea of "oversharing." Both the Gen X-er and Millenial were aware of the problems of giving out too much information, but the Baby Boomer was not as concerned probably more because this person uses facebook mainly to see what others are doing rather than make many public comments. I really liked the Gen X-er's comment about facebook being like walking into a cocktail party with people trading quips and stories. It is rather like always already walking in on something in progress. You can either jump in and comment or hang in the background for awhile listening to others talk about the news of the day.
The Baby Boomer and Gen Xer who responded talked about rarely posting in a regular manner and I would include myself in this group as well, but the Millenial was more of a "poster." I tend to stick to private messages and I do enjoy the feature like in email of being able to send a message to a select few people.
In terms of posting I am not entirely sure yet if it is tied to age or an outgoing personality. It could be a combination of both, but it would be interesting to do further research. I think you could pretty easily do a quantitative study with four different age groups tracking their number of posts for a 2 week period and run a simple 2-way ANOVA to look at differences.
Community was also an interesting topic. No one flinched at the idea that facebook could be a "real community" whereas several years ago I wonder if the idea that a community could exist without a physical "place" would have been more contested. I think we have begun the think of virtual communities as important spaces to relate to one another, but in decidedly different ways than we may relate face to face. We seem to enjoy the opportunity to stay connected with those who would have fallen out of our social circles, but at the same time desire that distance that doesn't require us to put in a huge effort.
As the gen x-er said -
Friend Request means: "I remember you or I know who you are and I don't hate you." Confirm Request means: "Thank you for acknowledging me. I will do the same."
There may be real truth in that assesment of how we deal with "friends" in a digital age.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Media Ethnography and Facebook
I joined Facebook a few years ago when I began to realize that more and more friends had left myspace. I was very new to the social network phenomenon and had just started thinking about what it meant to present an online persona.
I remember immediately being drawn to the more "clean" look of facebook - no blinking signs or loud music popping up every time I switched profiles like on myspace. It seemed more "grown up" maybe even "safer?" I decided too from the beginning that on facebook I would only be friends with people I knew in "real life." That is why I still have about 200 or so friends and acquaintances which for me feels like a lot, but I have seen many people with well over 1000 friends listed on their page.
In the beginning I did follow posts, invites and all the other pieces that make up facebook more closely, but now I generally use it to keep up with close friends. As a tail end generation x-er being on facebook feels neither completely organic nor does it feel completely out of my comfort zone. I do greatly appreciate the ability to stay in touch with friends I would surely have fallen out of communication with at this point in my life. As a mom of two, I do love to share a picture here and there of my kids and keep up with others who are now parents.
There are however annoyances and deep concerns that go along with a commitment to facebook. I hear as a common complaint and I tend to agree that the "post" section garners a lot of meaningless and "too much information" kind of dialogue. In fact, dialogue is a term that may not apply to often when it comes to these seemingly benign posts - "Just went to the gym!", "Just ate cereal!" "Just wanted to let everyone know I can write!" Okay maybe I've never seen that one, but it will probably be up tomorrow. Reading those types of posts makes you wonder more about our need to be heard, to exist as if we may not if we don't post.
The deeper concerns that I briefly want to address regard the problems of how people navigate new relationships but also questions about class, race, gender, identity online. The idea that sites like myspace and facebook would effectively reduce racism, homophobia and other issues has not proven true. "Digital gating" has been brought up in a number of journal articles on social networking showing that the same problems that exist in society are happening in social networking as well with people essentially staying securely in what they consider their own peer groups and here I challenge my own use of facebook as well.
In a media ethnography I would like to survey friends and ask about their own feelings about using facebook as well as how the site addresses questions of identity and relationships. What is the connection between our online and offline lives? Is there one and do we act differently on a social networking site like facebook than we do in person? How do we decide to "friend" someone and what does that mean? I would like to take a look at these and other questions regarding facebook.
I remember immediately being drawn to the more "clean" look of facebook - no blinking signs or loud music popping up every time I switched profiles like on myspace. It seemed more "grown up" maybe even "safer?" I decided too from the beginning that on facebook I would only be friends with people I knew in "real life." That is why I still have about 200 or so friends and acquaintances which for me feels like a lot, but I have seen many people with well over 1000 friends listed on their page.
In the beginning I did follow posts, invites and all the other pieces that make up facebook more closely, but now I generally use it to keep up with close friends. As a tail end generation x-er being on facebook feels neither completely organic nor does it feel completely out of my comfort zone. I do greatly appreciate the ability to stay in touch with friends I would surely have fallen out of communication with at this point in my life. As a mom of two, I do love to share a picture here and there of my kids and keep up with others who are now parents.
There are however annoyances and deep concerns that go along with a commitment to facebook. I hear as a common complaint and I tend to agree that the "post" section garners a lot of meaningless and "too much information" kind of dialogue. In fact, dialogue is a term that may not apply to often when it comes to these seemingly benign posts - "Just went to the gym!", "Just ate cereal!" "Just wanted to let everyone know I can write!" Okay maybe I've never seen that one, but it will probably be up tomorrow. Reading those types of posts makes you wonder more about our need to be heard, to exist as if we may not if we don't post.
The deeper concerns that I briefly want to address regard the problems of how people navigate new relationships but also questions about class, race, gender, identity online. The idea that sites like myspace and facebook would effectively reduce racism, homophobia and other issues has not proven true. "Digital gating" has been brought up in a number of journal articles on social networking showing that the same problems that exist in society are happening in social networking as well with people essentially staying securely in what they consider their own peer groups and here I challenge my own use of facebook as well.
In a media ethnography I would like to survey friends and ask about their own feelings about using facebook as well as how the site addresses questions of identity and relationships. What is the connection between our online and offline lives? Is there one and do we act differently on a social networking site like facebook than we do in person? How do we decide to "friend" someone and what does that mean? I would like to take a look at these and other questions regarding facebook.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Images of Women in Alcohol Advertising
This is a lesson I would do with undergrads. I would have a sheet to fill out with the questions below. We would take time to look at the ads together and then break into small groups to have a discussion.
However, before we got into the specifics of the women and alcohol ads I would have a more broad discussion about how advertising in our capitalist consumer society has changed over time. We would look at how advertising was originally more about providing information and how advertising strategies now sell ideas about social status and identity.
First, what do you think is the message about drinking in this ad? What is it promising consumers?
Who might be the target audience for this ad? (Include age range, culture, gender, race, socio-economic level.)
What underlying message or value is being sold by the ad? Is it obvious or subliminal?
Which aspect of human sexuality is being appealed to? (Emotional/physical? Spiritual? Biological?)
In this a postive or negative portrayal of sexuality? In what ways?
How does power play in to this image?
Monday, October 4, 2010
Using Narrative Analysis and Semiotic Analysis in Levi's O Pioneers Commercial
First I want to take a look at the narrative structure of the Levi's O Pioneer's commercial. Even through this commercial doesn't seem to follow a traditional story pattern (a specific hero, a quest etc.) I would argue that there are key narrative elements that represent cultural values like freedom, vitality, and initiation that make it move like a story.
You feel from the beginning that whatever the story is behind these young people, it's moving and at a fast pace. We travel with these wild, free youth through the jungle, the prairie and the "urban jungle." The underlying Whitman poem underscores the action often with snare drum hits punctuating the action (sometimes coinciding ever so briefly with a shot of the jeans themselves, lest we not forget what the real purpose is here...)As we move through the various shots and scenes we can almost feel this momentum which could maybe be interpreted as a movement, a wild free youth movement, a gathering storm. Even through the commercial clocks at about a minute I think we feel like we've been on a journey with these young people glimpsing into their world.
On another level this commercial lends itself to a semiotic analysis. I want to take a look at a couple of specific examples using the idea of denotation and connotation.
Denotation is the first order of signification: the signifier is the image itself and the signified the idea or concept--- what it is a picture of.
Connotation is a second-order signifying system that uses the first sign, (signifier and signified), as its signifier and attaches an additional meaning, another signified, to it.
Image #1
Denotative Level - A male holding a torch
Connotative Level - This image shows a young male staring intensely into the camera, holding a torch on fire and seemingly yelling, but one could argue he looks like a wild animal growling
Image #2
Denotative Level - Two men embracing
Connotative Level - Young men are passionately engaged in intimacy - Levi's could be expressing support of same sex relationships, that this image fits into the worldview of the young person who wears Levis
Image #3
Denotative Level- Blond female turns to camera
Connotative Level- The woman appears almost flushed, her hair wet like she was in a rainstorm and you can almost hear her breathing hard. The background is strikingly green like a jungle and she appears much like the first male, a wild creature
Image #4
Denotative Level - Youth are gathered around a fire
Connotative Level- Most people we can see in this image and the ones leading up to it are taking off everything, but their jeans. You could imagine that Levi's are part of the nakedness, the rawness in being free and wild. As we had only seen one or two people in shots at the beginning of the commercial we now see many running across a field (feeling of a movement) and now in the final shot dancing around a fire together. The jeans are associated with lust, energy, fire (element of life), youth and freedom.
I think there is so much that can be done from a semiotic analysis standpoint in this commercial. I would do a critical media analysis with students and take them through the commercial several different times looking at these questions in particular:
1. What do you notice about the way this message is constructed? –Colors? Shapes? Sound effects? Music? Silence? Dialogue? Narration? Clothing? Sets? Movement? Lighting?
2. Where is the camera? What is the viewpoint?
3. How is the story told? What are people doing?
4. Are there visual symbols? Metaphors?
5. What’s the emotional appeal? Persuasive devices?
6. What makes it seem “real”?
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