Sample Summer Reading

AP English Language Name: [e-mail] mrkaplanenglish.weebly.com Date:

SUMMER READING ESSAY: SOME SAMPLE ESSAYS
Engaging with sources but addressing larger ideas
Contents
“Bumping into Mr. Ravioli: A theory of busyness, and its hero” by Adam Gopnik
Links for other professional examples
“Social Media Replaces Corporate Media” Sample Summer Reading Essay
“The Influence of Television” Sample Summer Reading Essay

Your homework assignment is to read these three samples and mark them up with insightful notes about style for class. What is Gopnik doing in each paragraph? What are his ideas, how does he shift, and why does he shift? For the student examples, assess how the students deal with the assignment.
What are they doing well? What is lacking? What would your advice be? What questions do these essays raise? Write your notes on the packet, and bring them to class to share.

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http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/09/30/020930fa_fact_gopnik
BUMPING INTO MR. RAVIOLI A theory of busyness, and its hero NEW YORK JOURNAL
By Adam Gopnik SEPTEMBER 30, 2002

My daughter Olivia, who just turned three, has an imaginary friend whose name is Charlie Ravioli. Olivia is growing up in Manhattan, and so Charlie Ravioli has a lot of local traits: he lives in an apartment "on Madison and Lexington," he dines on grilled chicken, fruit, and water, and, having reached the age of seven and a half, he feels, or is thought, "old." But the most peculiarly local thing about Olivia 's imaginary playmate is this: he is always too busy to play with her. She holds her toy cell phone up to her ear, and we hear her talk into it: "Ravioli? It 's Olivia . . . It 's Olivia. Come and play? O.K. Call me. Bye." Then she snaps it shut, and shakes her head. "I always get his machine," she says. Or she will say, "I spoke to Ravioli today." "Did you have fun?" my wife and I ask. "No. He was busy working. On a television" (leaving it up in the air if he repairs electronic devices or has his own talk show).
On a good day, she "bumps into" her invisible friend and they go to a coffee shop. "I bumped into Charlie Ravioli," she announces at dinner (after a day when, of course, she stayed home, played, had a nap, had lunch, paid a visit to the Central Park Zoo, and then had another nap). "We had coffee, but then he had to run." She sighs, sometimes, at her inability to make their schedules mesh, but she accepts it as inevitable, just the way life is. "I bumped into Charlie Ravioli today," she says. "He was working." Then she adds brightly, "But we hopped into a taxi." What happened then? we ask. "We grabbed lunch," she says.
It seemed obvious that Ravioli was a romantic figure of the big exotic life that went on outside her little limited life of parks and playgrounds--drawn, in particular, from a nearly perfect, mynah-bird-like imitation of the words she hears her mother use when she talks about her day with her friends. ("How was your day?" Sighing: "Oh, you know. I tried to make a date with Meg, but I couldn 't find her, so I left a message on her machine. Then I bumped into Emily after that meeting I had in SoHo, and we had coffee and then she had to run, but by then Meg had reached me on my cell and we arranged . . .") I was concerned, though, that Charlie Ravioli might also be the sign of some "trauma," some loneliness in Olivia 's life reflected in imaginary form. "It seems odd to have an imaginary playmate who 's always too busy to play with you," Martha, my wife, said to me. "Shouldn 't your imaginary playmate be someone you tell secrets to and, I don 't know, sing songs with? It shouldn 't be someone who 's always hopping into taxis."
We thought, at first, that her older brother Luke might be the original of Charlie Ravioli. (For one thing, he is also seven and a half, though we were fairly sure that this age was merely Olivia 's marker for As Old as Man Can Be.) He is too busy to play with her much anymore. He has become a true New York child, with the schedule of a Cabinet secretary: chess club on Monday, T-ball on Tuesday, tournament on Saturday, play dates and after-school conferences to fill in the gaps. But Olivia, though she counts days, does not yet really have days. She has a day, and into this day she has introduced the figure of Charlie Ravioli--in order, it dawned on us, to insist that she does have days, because she is too harried to share them, that she does have an independent social life, by virtue of being too busy to have one.
Yet Charlie Ravioli was becoming so constant and oddly discouraging a companion--"He cancelled lunch. Again," Olivia would say--that we thought we ought to look into it. One of my sisters is a developmental psychologist who specializes in close scientific studies of what goes on inside the heads of one- and two- and three-year-olds. Though she grew up in the nervy East, she lives in California now, where she grows basil in her garden and jars her own organic marmalades. I e-mailed this sister for help with the Ravioli issue--how concerned should we be?--and she sent me back an e-mail, along with an attachment, and, after several failed cell-phone connections, we at last spoke on a land line.
It turned out that there is a recent book on this very subject by the psychologist Marjorie Taylor, called "Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them," and my sister had just written a review of it.
She insisted that Charlie Ravioli was nothing to be worried about. Olivia was right on target, in fact. Most under-sevens (sixty-three per cent, to be scientific) have an invisible friend, and children create their imaginary playmates not out of trauma but out of a serene sense of the possibilities of fiction--sometimes as figures of pure fantasy, sometimes, as Olivia had done, as observations of grownup manners assembled in tranquillity and given a name. I learned about the invisible companions Taylor studied: Baintor, who is invisible because he lives in the light; Station Pheta, who hunts sea anemones on the beach. Charlie Ravioli seemed pavement-bound by comparison.
"An imaginary playmate isn 't any kind of trauma-marker," my sister said. "It 's just the opposite: it 's a sign that the child is now confident enough to begin to understand how to organize her experience into stories." The significant thing about imaginary friends, she went on, is that the kids know they 're fictional. In an instant message on AOL, she summed it up: "The children with invisible friends often interrupted the interviewer to remind her, with a certain note of concern for her sanity, that these characters were, after all, just
pretend."
I also learned that some children, as they get older, turn out to possess what child psychologists call a "paracosm." A paracosm is a society thought up by a child--an invented universe with a distinctive language, geography, and history. (The Brontes invented a couple of paracosms when they were children.) Not all children who have an imaginary friend invent a paracosm, but the two might, I think, be related. Like a lonely ambassador from Alpha Centauri in a fifties sci-fi movie who, misunderstood by paranoid earth scientists, cannot bring the life-saving news from his planet, perhaps the invisible friend also gets an indifferent or hostile response, and then we never find out about the beautiful paracosm he comes from.
"Don 't worry about it," my sister said in a late-night phone call. "Knowing something 's made up while thinking that it matters is what all fiction insists on. She 's putting a name on a series of manners."
"But he seems so real to her," I objected.
"Of course he is. I mean, who 's more real to you, Becky Sharp or Gandalf or the guy down the hall? Giving a manner a name makes it real."
I paused. "I grasp that it 's normal for her to have an imaginary friend," I said, "but have you ever heard of an imaginary friend who 's too busy to play with you?"
She thought about it. "No," she said. "I 'm sure that doesn 't occur anywhere in the research literature. That sounds completely New York." And then she hung up.
The real question, I saw, was not "Why this friend?" but "Why this fiction?" Why, as Olivia had seen so clearly, are grownups in New York so busy, and so obsessed with the language of busyness that it dominates their conversation? Why are New Yorkers always bumping into Charlie Ravioli and grabbing lunch, instead of sitting down with him and exchanging intimacies, as friends should, as people do in Paris and Rome? Why is busyness the stuff our children make their invisible friends from, as country children make theirs from light and sand?
This seems like an odd question. New Yorkers are busy for obvious reasons: they have husbands and wives and careers and children, they have the Gauguin show to see and their personal trainers and accountants to visit. But the more I think about this the more I think it is--well, a lot of Ravioli. We are instructed to believe that we are busier because we have to work harder to be more productive, but everybody knows that busyness and productivity have a dubious, arm 's-length relationship. Most of our struggle in New York, in fact, is to be less busy in order to do more work.
Constant, exhausting, no-time-to-meet-your-friends Charlie Ravioli-style busyness arrived as an affliction in modern life long after the other parts of bourgeois city manners did. Business long predates busyness. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when bourgeois people were building the institutions of bourgeois life, they seem never to have complained that they were too busy--or, if they did, they left no record of it. Samuel Pepys, who had a Navy to refloat and a burned London to rebuild, often uses the word "busy" but never complains of busyness. For him, the word "busy" is a synonym for "happy," not for "stressed." Not once in his diary does Pepys cancel lunch or struggle to fit someone in for coffee at four-thirty. Pepys works, makes love, and goes to bed, but he does not bump and he does not have to run. Ben Franklin, a half century later, boasts of his industriousness, but he, too, never complains about being busy, and always has time to publish a newspaper or come up with a maxim or swim the ocean or invent the lightning rod.
Until sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact, the normal affliction of the bourgeois was not busyness at all but its apparent opposite: boredom. It has even been argued that the grid of streets and cafes and small engagements in the nineteenth-century city--the whole of social life--was designed self-consciously as an escape from that numbing boredom. (Working people weren 't bored, of course, but they were engaged in labor, not work. They were too busy to be busy.) Baudelaire, basically, was so bored that he had to get drunk and run out onto the boulevard in the hope of bumping into somebody.
Turn to the last third of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, though, and suddenly everybody is busy, and everybody is complaining about it. Pepys, master of His Majesty 's Navy, may never have complained of busyness, but Virginia Woolf, mistress of motionless lull, is continually complaining about how she spends her days racing across London from square to square, just like--well, like Charlie Ravioli. Ronald Firbank is wrung out by his social obligations; Proust is constantly rescheduling rendezvous and apologizing for being overstretched. Henry James, with nothing particular to do save live, complains of being too busy all the time. He could not shake the world of obligation, he said, and he wrote a strange and beautiful story, "The Great Good Place," which begins with an exhausting flood of correspondence, telegrams, and manuscripts that drive the protagonist nearly mad.
What changed? That James story helps supply the key. It was trains and telegrams. The railroads ended isolation, and packed the metropolis with people whose work was defined by a complicated network of social obligations. Pepys 's network in 1669 London was, despite his official position, relatively small compared even with that of a minor aesthete like Firbank, two centuries later. Pepys had more time to make love because he had fewer friends to answer.
If the train crowded our streets, the telegram crowded our minds. It introduced something into the world which remains with us today: a whole new class of communications that are defined as incomplete in advance of their delivery. A letter, though it may enjoin a response, is meant to be complete in itself. Neither the Apostle Paul nor Horace Walpole ever ends an epistle with "Give me a call and let 's discuss." By contrast, it is in the nature of the telegram to be a skeletal version of another thing--a communication that opens more than it closes. The nineteenth-century telegram came with those busy-threatening words "Letter follows."
Every device that has evolved from the telegram shares the same character. E-mails end with a suggestion for a phone call ("Anyway, let 's meet and/ or talk soon"), faxes with a request for an e-mail, answering-machine messages with a request for a fax. All are devices of perpetually suspended communication. My wife recalls a moment last fall when she got a telephone message from a friend asking her to check her e-mail apropos a phone call she needed to make vis-a-vis a fax they had both received asking for more information about a bed they were thinking of buying from Ireland online and having sent to America by Federal Express--a grand slam of incomplete communication.
In most of the Western world outside New York, the press of trains and of telegraphic communication was alleviated by those other two great transformers: the car and the television. While the train and the telegram (and their love children, subways and commuter trains and e-mail) pushed people together, the car and the television pulled people apart--taking them out to the suburbs and sitting them down in front of a solo spectacle. New York, though, almost uniquely, got hit by a double dose of the first two technologies, and a very limited dose of the second two. Car life--car obsessions, car-defined habits--is more absent here than almost anywhere else in the country, while television, though obviously present, is less fatally prevalent here. New York is still a subject of television, and we compare "Sex and the City" to sex and the city; they are not yet quite the same. Here two grids of busyness remain dominant: the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century grid of bump and run, and the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century postmodern grid of virtual call and echo. Busyness is felt so intently here because we are both crowded and overloaded. We exit the apartment into a still dense nineteenth-century grid of street corners and restaurants full of people, and come home to the late-twentieth-century grid of faxes and e-mails and overwhelming incompleteness.
We walk across the Park on a Sunday morning and bump into our friend the baker and our old acquaintance from graduate school (what the hell is she doing now?) and someone we have been avoiding for three weeks. They all invite us for brunch, and we would love to, but we are too . . . busy. We bump into Charlie Ravioli, and grab a coffee with him--and come home to find three e-mails and a message on our cell phone from him, wondering where we are. The crowding of our space has been reinforced by a crowding of our time, and the only way to protect ourselves is to build structures of perpetual deferral: I 'll see you next week, let 's talk soon. We build rhetorical baffles around our lives to keep the crowding out, only to find that we have let nobody we love in.
Like Charlie Ravioli, we hop into taxis and leave messages on answering machines to avoid our acquaintances, and find that we keep missing our friends. I have one intimate who lives just across the Park from me, whom I e-mail often, and whom I am fortunate to see two or three times a year. We are always . . . busy. He has become my Charlie Ravioli, my invisible friend. I am sure that he misses me--just as Charlie Ravioli, I realized, must tell his other friends that he is sorry he does not see Olivia more often.
Once I sensed the nature of his predicament, I began to feel more sympathetic toward Charlie Ravioli. I got to know him better, too. We learned more about what Ravioli did in the brief breathing spaces in his busy life when he could sit down with Olivia and dish. "Ravioli read your book," Olivia announced, for instance, one night at dinner. "He didn 't like it much." We also found out that Ravioli had joined a gym, that he was going to the beach in the summer, but he was too busy, and that he was working on a "show." ("It isn 't a very good show," she added candidly.) Charlie Ravioli, in other words, was just another New Yorker: fit, opinionated, and trying to break into show business.
I think we would have learned to live happily with Charlie Ravioli had it not been for the appearance of Laurie. She threw us badly. At dinner, Olivia had been mentioning a new personage almost as often as she mentioned Ravioli. "I talked to Laurie today," she would begin. "She says Ravioli is busy." Or she would be closeted with her play phone. "Who are you talking to, darling?" I would ask. "Laurie," she would say. "We 're talking about Ravioli." We surmised that Laurie was, so to speak, the Linda Tripp of the Ravioli operation--the person you spoke to for consolation when the big creep was ignoring you.
But a little while later a more ominous side of Laurie 's role began to appear. "Laurie, tell Ravioli I 'm calling," I heard Olivia say. I pressed her about who, exactly, Laurie was. Olivia shook her head. "She works for Ravioli," she said.
And then it came to us, with sickening clarity: Laurie was not the patient friend who consoled you for Charlie 's absence. Laurie was the bright-toned person who answered Ravioli 's phone and told you that unfortunately Mr. Ravioli was in a meeting. "Laurie says Ravioli is too busy to play," Olivia announced sadly one morning. Things seemed to be deteriorating; now Ravioli was too busy even to say he was too busy.
I got back on the phone with my sister. "Have you ever heard of an imaginary friend with an assistant?" I asked.
She paused. "Imaginary friends don 't have assistants," she said. "That 's not only not in the literature. That 's just . . . I mean--in California they don 't have assistants."
"You think we should look into it?"
"I think you should move," she said flatly.
Martha was of the same mind. "An imaginary playmate shouldn 't have an assistant," she said miserably. "An imaginary playmate shouldn 't have an agent. An imaginary playmate shouldn 't have a publicist or a personal trainer or a caterer--an imaginary playmate shouldn 't have . . . people. An imaginary playmate should just play. With the child who imagined it." She started leaving on my pillow real-estate brochures picturing quaint houses in New Jersey and Connecticut, unhaunted by busy invisible friends and their entourages.
Not long after the appearance of Laurie, though, something remarkable happened. Olivia would begin to tell us tales of her frustrations with Charlie Ravioli, and, after telling us, again, that he was too busy to play, she would tell us what she had done instead. Astounding and paracosmic tall tales poured out of her: she had been to a chess tournament and brought home a trophy; she had gone to a circus and told jokes. Searching for Charlie Ravioli, she had "saved all the animals in the zoo"; heading home in a taxi after a quick coffee with Ravioli, she took over the steering wheel and "got all the moneys." From the stalemate of daily life emerged the fantasy of victory. She had dreamed of a normal life with a few close friends, and had to settle for worldwide fame and the front page of the tabloids. The existence of an imaginary friend had liberated her into a paracosm, but it was a curiously New York paracosm--it was the unobtainable world outside her window. Charlie Ravioli, prince of busyness, was not an end but a means: a way out onto the street in her head, a declaration of potential independence.
Busyness is our art form, our civic ritual, our way of being us. Many friends have said to me that they love New York now in a way they never did before, and their love, I 've noticed, takes for its object all the things that used to exasperate them--the curious combination of freedom, self-made fences, and paralyzing preoccupation that the city provides. "How did you spend the day?" Martha and I now ask each other, and then, instead of listing her incidents, she says merely, "Oh, you know . . . just . . . bumping into Charlie Ravioli," meaning, just bouncing from obligation to electronic entreaty, just spotting a friend and snatching a sandwich, just being busy, just living in New York. If everything we 've learned in the past year could be summed up in a phrase, it 's that we want to go on bumping into Charlie Ravioli for as long as we can.
Olivia still hopes to have him to herself someday. As I work late at night in the "study" (an old hallway, an Aalto screen) I keep near the "nursery" (an ancient pantry, a glass-brick wall), I can hear her shift into pre-sleep, still muttering to herself. She is still trying to reach her closest friend. "Ravioli? Ravioli?" she moans as she turns over into her pillow and clutches her blanket, and then she whispers, almost to herself, "Tell him call me. Tell him call me when he comes home."

Some other essays that weave together several sources in order to discuss a bigger idea:

From The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/08/03/090803crat_atlarge_acocella
BETRAYAL Should we hate Judas Iscariot? A CRITIC AT LARGE
By Joan Acocella AUGUST 3, 2009

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell
HOW DAVID BEATS GOLIATH When underdogs break the rules. ANNALS OF INNOVATION
By Malcolm Gladwell MAY 11, 2009

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_gladwell
THE ORDER OF THINGS What college rankings really tell us. DEPT. OF EDUCATION
By Malcolm Gladwell FEBRUARY 14, 2011

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/09/28/090928crbo_books_gopnik
TRIAL OF THE CENTURY Revisiting the Dreyfus affair. BOOKS
By Adam Gopnik SEPTEMBER 28, 2009

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/02/14/110214crat_atlarge_gopnik
THE INFORMATION How the Internet gets inside us. CRITIC AT LARGE
By Adam Gopnik FEBRUARY 14, 2011

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/20/090720crbo_books_kolbert
XXXL Why are we so fat? BOOKS
By Elizabeth Kolbert JULY 20, 2009

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/06/29/090629crbo_books_lepore
BABY TALK The fuss about parenthood. BOOKS
By Jill Lepore JUNE 29, 2009

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/11/09/091109crat_atlarge_lepore
RAP SHEET Why is American history so murderous? CRITIC AT LARGE
By Jill Lepore NOVEMBER 9, 2009

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/23/120423fa_fact_lepore
BATTLEGROUND AMERICA One nation, under the gun. U.S. CHRONICLES
By Jill Lepore APRIL 23, 2012

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/11/30/091130fa_fact_lepore
THE POLITICS OF DEATH From abortion to health care—how the hysterical style overtook the national debate. A CRITIC AT LARGE
By Jill Lepore NOVEMBER 30, 2009

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/12/23/021223crat_atlarge
CAT PEOPLE What Dr. Seuss really taught us. CRITIC AT LARGE
By Louis Menand December 23, 2002

We might read some of these later on in the year, but you are welcome to read them now.
Read them as models of organization, as a source to add to your essay, or as something you just find interesting.

Teachers Note: This is a student’s final draft of a Summer Reading Essay from 2010. The Category was “Media Culture in America,” and the books the student read over the summer were The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, and In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders.

Social Media Replaces Corporate Media

“The corporate media is out to get us, man,” laments one of my friends, a self proclaimed tortured-artist-socialist. “The ads staring us down everywhere we look, the need for buying and buying that is promoted everywhere… Just think about how much the people at the top of television companies, newspapers, or giant corporations are influencing us. [Exasperated groan] We owe our disgusting consumerist culture to these
guys.”
Bashing the media is a timeless trend in the United States, popular far beyond my Birkenstock laden, granola crunching buddies. Bizarrely, when “the media” is blamed for a plethora of society’s shortcomings, rarely is it clear who, or what, exactly is being blamed. This annoyance towards the media is nonetheless displayed by most people, and is used to provoke heated discussion or to smack onto a summer reading list. Although my friends lack any solid evidence towards their vague but impassioned claims, plenty of researchers and writers offer studies and anecdotes that explain the widespread dislike of the powerful media in America.
In Born to Buy, Juliet B. Schor examines the effect that the media has on consumerism, especially in children, in the United States. Schor’s opinion is clear throughout the book. She adamantly opposes the heavy influence that media has on vulnerable children. Schor studies the difference of behavior of kids in urban and suburban environments, comparing how much exposure they have to television and ads and the subsequent effects. Schor’s research shows how kids’ extreme contact with targeted ads and television nearly always detrimentally affects them. The pressure to make money often overshadows ethical actions for corporate chiefs, causing extensive marketing to children for products that are far from healthy or educational. A corporate marketing chief admits that she would never allow her daughter to buy the products that she works hard to have placed in television shows, magazines, and radio.
In one section of Born to Buy, titled “The Corruption of Public Information,” Schor shows how certain articles in trusted newspapers can often be heavily biased towards a company. Schor breaks down a seemingly innocuous article about a cool new toy, showing how virtually all the information in the article was provided by Hasbro, and how the giant toy making conglomerate refused to let the article run unless they liked it. “It gave [the reporter] materials it wanted him to see, provided access to the kids, and invited him to be present throughout the viral marketing campaign. In the end, Hasbro got a story that served its purposes far better than anything it could have written themselves” (Schor, 81).
Malcolm Gladwell is interested in a more holistic approach to the media. In his book The Tipping Point, he examines what makes various ideas or products become mind bogglingly popular, and how people are harnessing that power in the United States. Gladwell follows researchers hired by Nickelodeon for purportedly educational television shows like Blues Clues or Dora the Explorer as they go into preschools to mathematically test the ‘engagement levels’ of their target audience. These tests are for more than trying to create a nice show. It is all based in money, and the corporate world is hungry to target children. Gladwell and Schor’s research provide more tangible evidence that the popular dislike of the media, of ads and consumerism, is more than warranted. There does seem to be a huge influence on society unfairly held by the people at the top of a few media conglomerates and private corporations. Ubiquitous advertising and excessive targeting towards children do seem to cause plenty of these oft-discussed negative effects in American society. However, there is one small thing missing from the calculations of media culture naysayers, and that is the Internet.

The Internet used to be a digital reflection of our society. Until around 2002, there was not a lot on the web that couldn’t be found in real life, and most text on the Internet was simply an electronic version of text found in print. Email was an electronic version of mail. Primal online shopping was an electronic version of a store. That things were on the Internet did not mean that they were different, more powerful, or game changing. The media giants in America – news corporations, huge companies, advertising giants – held all the power to create a media-centric culture just as negative as they had before the Internet.
In the last decade or so, however, the Internet has evolved quickly to become what Gladwell calls “network-centric.” Social networking started to become popular, and suddenly the way we shared information evolved. Outlets like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and an explosion of blogs allowed people to share, influence, and connect. The Internet’s evolution has caused media culture to radically change, but researchers and experts on media culture are not adequately examining the new Internet. The traditional understandings of consumerism, who and what the media is, and how we interact with it have changed. What are the implications the Internet poses to media culture in the United States?
I started thinking about this when I realized that the greatest connection to media in my life, the Internet, was barely mentioned in either Gladwell or Schor’s works. The most interesting, relatable chapter of The Tipping Point was the afterword of the second edition. In ten pages tacked on to the end of the book, Gladwell concedes that the evolution of the Internet has changed how ideas are spread. But he doesn’t really question if the old tried-and-true methods of traditional media giants are going out the window with the new social Internet.
Throughout his book, Gladwell talks about the power of word of mouth. We are more likely to do something when someone we respect or trust suggests it. Our friends can influence our perception of information, trends, or products. The traditional, corporate media has always tried to be that suggestive friend. The social, connected Internet has given regular people unprecedented abilities to share their thoughts. Instead of a few media superpowers sending information to the populace, everybody who chooses to can constantly share their thoughts – to people who care. Twitter is the place to go to explore the most up to date accounts of what is going on in the world. It removes the newspapers as a middleman, and let people tell their own story. Facebook is the same thing. In a few clicks, I can see the various products, activities, music, movies, books, even people, that my online connections like. And because I have hundreds of “friends”, every minute on Facebook means I am being hammered with intimate knowledge of things that are cool to buy or talk about. The traditional media has always dreamed of creating a constant stream of targeted information to consumers. Instead, the social internet empowered consumers to control various media outlets.
The enormity and unprecedented power of this new social Internet was most clearly shown to me when I saw a website called “Social Media Counts.” On the website, a constantly running counter of various statistics related to social media is displayed in a cute little graphic. What I saw, though, blew my mind. In less than 90 seconds, I witnessed over one million items shared onto Facebook, 70 hours of personal video uploaded onto YouTube, three million videos watched on YouTube, and over two million searches on Google. The amount of information people are constantly sharing on the Internet is incomprehensible. But it’s more than just the sheer numbers. The significance of this electronic chitchat is in its audience. Facebook updates and twitter tweets go out to the ‘friends’ and ‘followers,’ not just a sea of random people. Those who choose to look at social, online media care a great deal more about it than they do a highway billboard or newspaper ad.
Of course, not everyone thinks the Internet has opened the previously closed doors of media to the people. Marshal Poe expertly argues in an article entitled “The Internet Changes Nothing” that, well, the Internet changes nothing. Poe says that the Internet is no longer new, it is done growing, and that “In terms of content, the Internet gives us almost nothing that the much maligned “traditional media” did not.” He argues advertising from the traditional media superpowers is as prevalent on social networking sites as it was in magazines and newspapers and cable television: a fair point. His boldest claim, though, is that “The basic institutions of modern society in the developed world—representative democracy, regulated capitalism, the welfare net, cultural liberalism—have not changed much since the introduction of the Internet.”
This is where Poe’s arguments become irresistibly vulnerable. Perhaps the original invention of the Internet was not going to remake our societies. However, social networks/media and the evolved Internet have transformed society by changing the rules of power in the media. People share far more than the traditional media does on the Internet. Not only that, but the each person actually cares about what they choose to link into in this new Internet. Instead of reading a copy of the newspaper made for the general populace, a consumer can choose media sources tailored precisely to his or her wants. The recent Arab Spring owes its success to Facebook, and the rest of the world owes Twitter for being able to report about it. Social media allows people who may have not been in control previously to have a real say in society and not just be spoon fed information by the media conglomerate.
These new ideas and changes to media in America are shown in George Saunders’ Stories in Persuasion Nation. The book is comprised of many fictional short stories, all loosely based in dystopian future societies characterized by this über-connected, ultra consumerist society. In “My flamboyant grandson,” Saunders vividly describes an old grandfather taking his son out to New York City where he is bombarded by horrifically Internet-ified futuristic advertisements: holograms talking to him, ‘friends’ calling him, signs appealing to him, all specifically targeted due to his digitized connections and traits. The media culture of Saunders’ stories is, although a gross exaggeration, based heavily upon our media culture created by social Internet. It is a cynical prediction of how the media culture could continue to evolve.
Saunders agrees with the general populace, my friends, and even Schor and Gladwell that media influence is overwhelming and over targeted, however he is able to illustrate the role that we ourselves play in the dystopia. Unlike Schor or Gladwell, Saunders seems to consider social media in his conclusions about society. His writing reveals a fundamental awareness of the social Internet in our changing media culture. Saunders is a more in touch cynic of media culture, and this makes him more credible.
Researchers like Schor are too set on “blowing the cover off of the insidious world of marketing” and my friends are too revolutionary and frustrated to stop and think for a minute about how incredibly involved in media culture the Internet has made us. The world that people like to point out and complain about is one where the media aristocracy slams us with exploiting advertisements. Yes, facets of this old television-radio-magazine world still exist, even on the Internet, as Marshall Poe argues. The traditional media superpowers still have elite influences on society and advertising is as ubiquitous as ever. However, I maintain that the current evolving Internet has and is completely changing the media culture of the United States. Americans have always sought independence and individual control. We hate being susceptible, especially to the corporate powers we trash as part of the “media culture” of the United States. But now, we are the media culture. With the new socially integrated Internet, we play too large a role in the media culture of the United States to dissociate ourselves from the problems of our consumerist, advertising littered society. In under a minute and a half, I witnessed over one million Facebook posts. Perhaps I watched “likes” of a product, statuses about wanting things, perhaps a website sponsored by a corporate power. Although the underlying media powers may or may not have changed, the way we interact with them definitely has. We are the people responsible for continuing such an advertising-centric society. The traditional power system of old media dictated a culture of consumerism that we now like to hate, but the social Internet has made us the new media. Before the hate starts flowing towards the media, let us first think about our newfound role in media culture.

WORKS CITED

Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point. Boston: Little, Brown, 2000. Print.

Long, Jim. "Why Social Media Is the New Corporate Media." Verge New Media. N.p., 9
May 2010. Web. 6 Oct. 2011. .

Poe, Marshall. "The Internet Changes Nothing." History News Network. George Mason
University, 28 Nov. 2010. Web. 6 Oct. 2011. .

Saunders, George. In Persuasion Nation: Stories. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.
Print.

Schor, Juliet. Born to Buy. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.

Shell, Ellen. "The High Cost of Cheap Credit." The Boston Globe 7 June 2009:. The high cost of cheap credit. Web. 6 Oct. 2011.

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Teachers Note: This is a student’s final draft of a Summer Reading Essay from 2010. The Category was “Media Culture in America,” and the books the student read over the summer were The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, and Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson.

The Influence of Television
It’s hard to estimate how much of my personality is actually my own. Well, perhaps I should modify that: It is hard to estimate how much of my personality was actually originally mine. As a child, I was extremely impressionable. If I saw a trait I liked in a character, I would subconsciously try to adopt it – and sometimes, I would subconsciously adopt traits I did not like at all. In fact, now that I think about it, most of my personality is made of bits and pieces scavenged from the books I used to read and the TV shows I used to watch. But because I read books more than watched the television, most of my personality came from those.
The slow alteration of my personality was an influence from the media I consumed – an innocuous one, but still an influence. But because I didn’t watch too much T.V., I escaped the worst of it. Immersion in any social media can deeply influence how one thinks about the world. And more often than not, it affects us negatively. Today, social media is literally everywhere. With the advent of mobile media and cellphones that are more like handheld computers, it is now able to follow us no matter where we go. It is steadily infiltrating society – even appearing on the March 2011 SAT test in the form of an essay question on reality T.V. With such prevalence, we are more immersed in social media than ever before. According to a 2009 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 8-18 year olds in America spend about 7 hours and 38 minutes daily on social media – an increase from 6 hours 21 minutes in 2004. The majority of time is spent on T.V. content, with an average of 4 hours, 29 minutes, nearly double that of the runner-up, music and audio, at 2:31 (Rideout 2).The computer comes in third. As the time spent on the TV far surpasses the amount of time spent online or listening to audio, it stands to reason that there should be much more influence from television media on its viewers. As entertainment media, television tends to portray an unrealistic world. It contains an unusual amount of violence, with a crime rate about 10 times as high as that of the real world, and often distorts reality – for example, ethnic minorities are consistently paired with villains and whites with heroes (Shrum 243). Those who watched more television dramas tended to over-estimate crime and violence rates. As a result, they also tend to be much more careful and suspicious when interacting with people they do not know. They assume that the world, like the world seen on television, is full of people who “are just looking out for themselves” (Nabi 1) and cannot be trusted. Lighter viewers of television tended to be much less suspicious of the world. Although it seems possible that those who are initially more suspicious would watch more violent dramas while those who have a more innocent or naïve view of the world would be less likely to, other studies suggest otherwise. Children who were shown television with “prosocial content” in another study later showed more altruistic behavior than those who were shown shows with “antisocial content” (Mares). If these children’s behavior was so affected by the content of the shows they were put in front of, it seems unlikely that one’s original personality would be to blame for the discrepancy. Obviously the content of a television show is important in regard to its influence on the viewer, but what is surprising is that these effects translate into how television viewers interact with the world itself. This is especially harmful with messages that are reinforced over and over again. Throughout their lives, boys and girls are treated to different messages through the films and T.V. series they watch – differences that can have extremely disturbing results. “Little boys and little girls when they’re seven years old in equal number want to be president of the United States when they grow up. But then you ask this same question when they’re fifteen and you see this massive gap emerging,” says Caroline Heldman, associate professor of Political Science at Occidental College (‘Miss Representation’). It’s ludicrous to assume that as they aged suddenly girls decided “Oh, power is not for me,” and it seems unlikely that this decision originates from within. Were it the case that 15-year-olds found the thought of being president unrealistic, then we would still expect to see the relatively close numbers of boys and girls still clinging to that dream. So the reason for this gap must come from without, and likely the media is to blame. What else is almost everywhere and constantly sends messages through shows and advertisements? Even the news media is often derogatory toward women in power, crowing over their appearances, something men are not treated to. Whereas boys are sent ‘macho’ messages of power (which aren’t necessarily good either), the end message that the media is sending to girls is that not only are they not supposed to hold positions of power, but that their appearances are more important than what they actually do. That television advertisements usually rely on making people feel insecure to sell things (‘Miss Representation’) does not help – all those make-up advertisements serve only to bolster the conception that the face matters most, and that girls must define themselves in terms of their faces. Even children are being targeted by advertisements. Because children are increasingly watching television shows intended for an adult audience as well, they are being exposed to advertising that does not fall under guidelines put in place to regulate marketing to children. Advertising to children is bad enough. But because the whole of American advertising is based on “making people feel anxious and…insecure” (“Miss Representation”), child marketing becomes an even shadier business. Born to Buy by Juliet B. Schor details the methods that marketers use to make children become consumers of more and more goods, especially by use of advertisements. She describes how since children are now watching more and more adult shows - a side-effect of what she terms “age compression” – those regulations no longer apply, as the intended audience of the shows are over 50% adult. As a result, marketers do not need to refrain from suggesting that owning a certain product would either confer superiority or popularity on the owner. Marketers are also trying to put advertisements targeting children everywhere possible, even trailing children to schools that desperately need money. These companies pay schools to show commercials during school hours – times when the children are basically forced to watch commercials, a ‘captive audience.’ This isn’t only a problem if the ads sell unhealthy foods. It can be more problematic if the ads are about selling ‘cool’ to children – an important part of childhood social standings. As Del Vecchio, former marketer executive and author of a book on selling to kids, says, “Part of being cool is having something others do not. That makes a kid feel special” (Schor 58). Selling ‘cool’ means training children to become super-consumers, who feel the urge to buy and define themselves by what they have in relation to others. Such materialistic world-views have proven to have negative consequences for the children involved; studies conducted on groups of children from different socio-economic backgrounds found that overall, children who bought more into materialism tended to have lower self-esteem, as well as to be more depressed. Heavy users of social media also tended to have worse grades, with 47% reporting C’s or below for heavy users of social media, as compared to 31% and 23% for moderate and light users. They also tend to be less happy in school (or even just in general) and to get into trouble more often (Rideout 4). Although these correlational relationships do not take other factors into account – for instance, those who are unhappy might escape to social media – other studies have shown that materialism and “poor functioning” are mutually reinforcing. Regardless of whether or not social media and contentment are directly related, social media is at the very least indirectly responsible for some of the displayed maladies. The idea that one is what one owns also creates an endless race to buy more and more, where the child learns that his or her self-worth relies on what toys or clothes they have and little more – hardly a healthy way to view oneself. At the very least, young children should be safe, right? After all, they tend not to like commercials because those don’t tell stories. But of course, there’s a way to fix that. Malcolm Gladwell writes in his book The Tipping Point that “There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible” (Gladwell 132). He calls it “The Stickiness Factor,” and it is some small, seemingly trivial detail that catapults the given information into the forefront of the receiver’s mind. Gladwell cites Blue’s Clues and Sesame Street, both children’s shows that managed to help children learn to recognize objects, analyze information, and to read, as two examples of the success of the Stickiness Factor. Both shows relied on endless trials before finding the exact combination of components that would make them memorable. But despite these benign uses of the Stickiness Factor, there is potential for child marketers to take it and run with it. Marketing directly to children is a relatively new phenomenon; it’s not unlikely that marketers will grab hold of anything to sell more. When used in the marketing, the Stickiness Factor could cement advertisements even more directly into people’s minds – something that already has precedent with the Columbia Record Club, a mail-order business, that used the “Stickiness Factor” by making a slight change to their ads – putting a small golden box in the corner and creating a ‘legend’ to go with it – that enabled their advertisements to stick in people’s minds. That year, all their formerly unprofitable ads saw profits. So is the television good for us in any way? It makes us smarter, argues Steven Johnson. Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good For You, argues that despite its oft-lamented content, television has actually become more complex, citing examples of complicated plots in which multiple storylines may run unannounced at any time, left for the viewer to pick up, as well as more complex inter-character relationships that are not explicitly stated. Comparing present shows (such as The Sopranos) to past TV shows (like Dragnet), Johnson draws the conclusion that because television media is becoming more complex, we are being forced to think more. He cites examples of forums where people debate and theorize about the newest updates from television series. He, however, fails to realize that those who would theorize about television series are often those who would theorize and analyze anyway – just for some different media, if television series were lacking. Johnson assumes that they are theorizing because the television series prompted them to do so. However, it’s possible that they were merely attracted by television media when the content became complex enough to actually engage their attention.
As a member of multiple forums where people theorize and discuss the latest updates in manga, a sort of Japanese comic, I can attest to this: for every couple of people who have in-depth, philosophical or analytical discussions, there will be at least 10 people who are merely there to comment “so exciting!” or something similar. That is, not everyone who watches something theorizes about it. That’s not to say they couldn’t; just that they choose not to, contrary to what Johnson suggests they would do. Those who do comment with in-depth analysis are likely those who would be analyzing something else, were it not that television series that caught their attention. In the end, Johnson fails to connect the additional complexity of television series – which he proves quite well – with an actual increase in intelligence on the parts of the viewers. If you give someone a simple television series, they will not think much about it; but if you give them a more complex series, they will likely have more questions. It’s hard to say that this effect arises from an increase in intelligence and a drive toward more analytical thinking as opposed to simply responding to the media itself, which makes this argued benefit doubtful. Television media is rapidly soaking deeper and deeper into our culture, and influencing our minds as it goes. Exposure to the content of this media is slowly shaping our perceptions, whether we are aware of it or not. Television doesn’t have to send such negative messages. But it does, likely as a combination of cultural biases and the desire to sell – television series or products. And unfortunately, “good” is harder to sell. Many entertainment series rely on violence or marital drama or other conflicts to keep things engaging, although there are some good shows out there that do not. And likewise, it makes no sense economically for advertisement companies to change the way they are selling. If you convince someone they need your product to fulfill themselves, then you’ve got your business set. If you tell someone they don’t need your product, there’s no guarantee they will buy it. Ultimately, it would take a shift in American capitalism and even American culture itself – away from our current biases and materialistic values –to change the subtle messages that television throws at us constantly. But simply being aware of the real, harmful effects T.V. can have on the way we think is a start. We have the ability to counter those influences if we are only aware of their presence.

Bibliography:

Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point. New York City: Hachette Group, 2002. Print.

Johnson, Steven. "Television." Everything Bad Is Good For You. New York City: Penguin Group, 2006. 62-115. Print.

Mares, Marie-Louise, and Emory Woodard. "Positive Effects of Television on Children 's Social Interactions: A Meta-Analysis." Media Psychology 7.3 (2005): 301-22. PsycNET. American Psychological Association. Web. 25 Sept. 2011. .

Miss Representation. Dir. Jennifer S. Newsom. Prod. Regina K. Scully, Geralyn Dreyfous, and Sarah J. Redlich. Vimeo/Miss Representation 8 Min. Trailer. 23 Aug. 2011. Web. 5 Oct. 2011. .

Nabi, Robin L., and Karyn Riddle. "Personality Traits, Television Viewing, and the Cultivation Effect." Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (2008): 1-13. Business Library. CBS, Sept. 2008. Web. 23 Sept. 2011. .

Rideout, Victoria J., Ulla G. Foehr, and Donald F. Ronald. Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds. Rep. Kaiser Family Foundation, Jan. 2010. Web. 23 Sept. 2011. .

Schor, Juliet B. Born to Buy. New York City: Scribner, 2005. Print.

Shrum, L. J. "11: Television Viewing and Social Reality." Social Psychology of Consumer Behavior. 241-42. Web. 5 Oct. 2011. .