I am by no means a morning person and have a very hard time getting up early. As a result I often wear sweat pants and scrubby clothes to my classes in the morning and it gives off the impression to others that I'm messy, unorganized, and lazy. My impression management with the people I see in the mornings isn't very good because although I am sort of lazy I'm a neat-freak and usually end up looking presentable after my classes for the rest of my day. Another example is when I was younger my sisters would complain about my behavior and be stunned because when with them I would be completely capable of doing things on my own and taking care of myself but when my parents came around, particularly my mom, I guess I would automatically switch to a whiney voice that made me seem helpless. I never realized I did it, it was almost like second nature to just switch to being a baby around my mom because I was so used to whining and getting what I wanted and being dependent of her. So due to my impression management with my parents, they thought I was a little baby who needed help with everything and would then do everything for me.
This doesn't really pertain to me but when reading about the impression management strategy performance team, it made me think of the situations where you hear about kids whos parents divorce each other and they are shocked and didn't see it coming at all. Usually the parents are a performance team as they rely on one another to keep up the image of a happy loving relationship so the kids don't get upset by their fighting or disagreements, if that's what they separated for.
As for impression formation, there are so many times that people assume things about me based on how I look or where I'm from. All the time people say they're surprised I'm smart because I'm pretty, they were ALWAYS surprised I was a hockey goalie because I didnt look like I'd be one or when id say something or make a mistake they'd accuse me of being flighty or dumb because they would associate a correlation with pretty and ditzy or something. Once my roommate and I were on a plane with two nine year old boys sitting in front of us. My roommate Katie said to me that she had eaten so much food in the airport and was stuffed and one boy turned back and said, "but didn't you throw up after?" We were so confused as to why he said that and we realized it was because for whatever reason this boy thought all young skinny girls were weight concsious and had some sort of eating disorder so he assumed she had thrown up after eating. Little did he know she eats a lot and doesn't have an eating disorder and isn't very weight conscious. That was his impression formation of her at work. When I tell people I'm from Coon Rapids people often think I'm going to be, or should be, ghetto.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Media/News Confusion When Shaping Reality
In chapter 3 they talk about how one powerful force that constructs reality is media and the news. I’m in an intro to journalism class right now and one major thing we discussed was news consumer’s common mistake of thinking things in the news are usual occurrences. This can lead to readers’ unintentionally fabricating epidemics or new commonplaces.
The news often shapes reality accidentally or intentionally in a way where people think what’s being reported on is the norm (For example: avoiding and labeling a neighborhood where a murder happened as dangerous, solely after learning of the murder in the news) but they don’t step back and realize a major, if not the main, reason it’s probably in the news is because it’s novelty or unusual. Consumers don’t always consider that maybe the murder was in the news because the area isn’t known for high-crime, making murders there unusual or unlikely.
To go one step further one should question why they even deem certain places riskier than others based only off the news. If crime is common somewhere, reporters most likely wouldn’t do a report on a specific murder or burglary case there because of its location; the only reason there’d be coverage would be for some novelty aspect or simply to enforce a story that’s specifically about the crime in that area, in which case there wouldn’t be an illegitimate assumption of high crime because it’d be specifically said that there’s crime there.
This issue of assumption strengthens the idea that reality is perception. People start believing an area is dangerous from how they perceived the news. That is their reality now. Then, even if initially statistics don’t support high crime rates, the once false assumption could lead to it actually becoming a more dangerous area from its new reputation (self-fulfilling prophecy?).
An additional thing to consider is the possibility that when media in general, not just the news, gets a lot of attention from a story or situation, the media source assumes that type of thing is what people like to hear and/or what will get their ratings and popularity up. They may start to seek out successions of it to gain/maintain their popularity. The explosion of similar situations or cases coming from the media then makes them seem more common, hence fabricated epidemics.
The news often shapes reality accidentally or intentionally in a way where people think what’s being reported on is the norm (For example: avoiding and labeling a neighborhood where a murder happened as dangerous, solely after learning of the murder in the news) but they don’t step back and realize a major, if not the main, reason it’s probably in the news is because it’s novelty or unusual. Consumers don’t always consider that maybe the murder was in the news because the area isn’t known for high-crime, making murders there unusual or unlikely.
To go one step further one should question why they even deem certain places riskier than others based only off the news. If crime is common somewhere, reporters most likely wouldn’t do a report on a specific murder or burglary case there because of its location; the only reason there’d be coverage would be for some novelty aspect or simply to enforce a story that’s specifically about the crime in that area, in which case there wouldn’t be an illegitimate assumption of high crime because it’d be specifically said that there’s crime there.
This issue of assumption strengthens the idea that reality is perception. People start believing an area is dangerous from how they perceived the news. That is their reality now. Then, even if initially statistics don’t support high crime rates, the once false assumption could lead to it actually becoming a more dangerous area from its new reputation (self-fulfilling prophecy?).
An additional thing to consider is the possibility that when media in general, not just the news, gets a lot of attention from a story or situation, the media source assumes that type of thing is what people like to hear and/or what will get their ratings and popularity up. They may start to seek out successions of it to gain/maintain their popularity. The explosion of similar situations or cases coming from the media then makes them seem more common, hence fabricated epidemics.
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