Hayley Steel Final Project Write-Up

Hayley Steel

Final Project Write-Up

Communication 125

December 12, 2012

 

Generations of Hope:

A documentary of the Gay Pride Movement in the San Francisco Bay Area

 

            Kate O’Regan and I decided to create a video of the progression of the Gay Pride Movement, focusing especially on the San Francisco Bay Area. This social justice topic has been, and continues to be, a prevalent issue of human rights within our country. With the expansion of mass media, the coverage surrounding the movement has become more available to every American household. Kate and I chose to begin our project by highlighting Harvey Milk, the first openly gay, officially elected public official in the United States. Milk’s message, “Got to give them hope”, and his eventual assassination, helped to open the eyes of the ignorant in the United States. Our project briefly shows examples of the media coverage of homosexuals over the past sixty years and how it has transformed. Our goal was to juxtapose two eras that have very different messages. For example, the 1950’s public television message warning young boys against “the overfriendly homosexual”, compared to the 1995 Ikea advertisement, which was the first ad to feature a homosexual couple. We want to show how the media messages surrounding homosexuality have transformed largely in part to social mobilization through new media.

            New social movement theory focuses on the idea that social movements, including the gay-pride movement, have become more widespread and more common since the 1960‘s. According to Leah A. Lievrouw’s book Alternative and Activist New Media, “The ‘new’ social movements perspective contends that the ideologically driven, society-wide movements of the industrial age-[…]-gave way in the postindustrial, postmodern era of the 1960’s to the 1980’s to smaller-scale movements more focused on wide-ranging issues or concerns, or group identity or lifestyle”(Lievrouw, pg.42). The development of mass communication has allowed for mass mobilization, therefore, the efforts made by Harvey Milk were successfully able to reach all areas of the United States. Mass mobilization also helped to create a community of people across the country, fighting for a common purpose. San Francisco was at the heart of the gay-pride movement, but new media allowed for people in New York, and every city in between, to be apart of the movement. “In new social movements, mobilization is accomplished by cultivating collective identities, shared values, and a sense of belonging among people linked in diffuse, decentralized social and community networks. Activists generate and share symbolic representations of movement identities and values that challenge those of the larger culture” (Lievrouw, pg.155). In the opening speech of our video, Milk talks about a faceless, nameless, young boy somewhere in the country who is struggling with his sexuality. By suggesting that homosexuals may be in your community, or may even be your child, is an example of the symbolic representations used to challenge the larger culture which was primarily homophobic at this time. This idea of a homosexual being someone that you know or someone that you love contradicts the idea that homosexuals are “the others”, but rather that they are people who are widely integrated in the community.  

            Harvey Milk is an example of new social activist because he did not hide his homosexuality. He was open about himself in his political endeavors and he showed the country a side of homosexuality that was not often exposed at the time. “Activists in new social movements tend to live their lives in a way that reflects their political, social, and ethical values, and to engage in movement actions and commitments according to issues of the moment, framed within their larger concerns, shared values, and collective identities” (153). Milk used his political power and influence to promote and acceptance of homosexuals and to promote equal rights for all people.

            In 1994, the Swedish furniture company, Ikea, aired the first ever advertisement featuring a gay couple. The ad was removed from the air after being aired only a few times because certain stores received bomb threats because of it. Since then, the media has featured more and more homosexual couples in ads, television shows, and movies. Shows such as Will & Grace, which aired in 1998, challenged the segregation of homosexuals and heterosexuals by focusing the whole show on a homosexual man and his friendship with a heterosexual woman. Companies such as JCPenney, Cartier, and Levi have, since then, produced ads featuring homosexual couples. This shows an obvious progression in the widespread acceptance of homosexual lifestyles, however, gay couples also provide brands with a new group to target. The typical American household featuring a mother a father and two children has arguably become obsolete and boring. According to Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture, “Redundancy burns up fan interest and causes franchises to fail. Offering new levels of insight and experience refreshes the franchise and sustains consumer loyalty. […]. Different media attracts different market niches” (Jenkins, 98). Featuring a homosexual couple in an ad or in a television show is obviously meant to convey that a certain brand or network is “gay-friendly”. Therefore that company or network is targeting a growing family dynamic, one in which there are often times two disposable incomes and no children.

             According to The Medium Is the Massage, “In an electronic information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained-ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other” (McLuhan, pg. 24). By creating a “global village”, the media has given homosexuals a voice and has given them a face. The media is no longer controlled solely by the dominant class, which means that the homosexual community can no longer be shown as “the others” or in only a negative light.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Work Cited

 

 

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Print

 

Lievrouw, Leah A.. Alternative and Activist New Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Print

 

McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium Is the Message. Corte Madera: Gingko Press Inc, 1967. Print

Hayley Steel Final Project

Media Projects

Dad in the Castro

new

A Documentary Chronicling the Progress Of the Gay Pride Movement In San Francisco, CA

For our project, we will be researching the history of the gay pride movement in San Francisco, CA. We will look at important figures such as Harvey Milk and the development of the culture surrounding the Castro. Using the historical information, we are going to compare it to the culture of the Castro District today by gathering our own pictures and videos. To gain more personal information and background we are going to reach out the Gay Straight Alliance on campus and talk to them about programs used to integrate homosexual and heterosexual cultures together. We are going to try to interview members of the homosexual community on their personal experience living in the Bay Area. Finally, we are going to talk about present day movements such as the PRIDE parade in San Francisco every summer and the development of LGBT organizations in Universities, Colleges, and Hospitals in the Bay Area.

Final project

Kate O’ Reagan and I are doing our final project on the relationships between the LGBT and heterosexual communities in the Bay Area. In order to successfully represent various groups experiences, we will interview members of the LGBT and heterosexual communities and research the different pro and anti movements within the last decade. The production methods that we will be using to complete our project will be interviews, videos, photographs, and data. Our working title as of right now is, Tolerance in the Bay Area: A study of the recent progression of acceptance of the LGBT community.

Critical Essay 3

Fan Culture as Related to Star Wars Uncut

         Amateur film making and fan based culture is not a new phenomenon, however, up until the internet revolution, the amateur film making was always considered a home activity. With the surge of social media and the internet, fan films are more accessible and more widely distributed, which causes the professional film makers to worry. According to Patricia R. Zimmermann’s 1995 book, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Films found in Henry Jenkins‘ Convergence Culture, “amateur film-making has existed since the advent of cinema, and while periodically critics have promoted it as a grassroots alternative to commercial production, the amateur film has remained, first and foremost, the ’home movie’”(Jenkins 146). Since the creation of digital cinema, fan films and amateur films have taken on a whole new meaning.
         A perfect example of fan culture is the Crowd Source Fan Film, Star Wars Uncut (USA 2010). Star Wars Uncut is a compilation of hundreds of other fan films that completely redefines the original movie, Star Wars. Star Wars Uncut is a film that is less about the original story-line and is more used to create an understanding of the limitless interpretations fans have of a story. The film is a perfect example of the diversity of the fan films and the widespread practice of creating fan based media. According to Jenkins, “amateur filmmakers are producing commercial- or near-commercial-quality content on minuscule budgets” (147) The fact that they are not gaining revenue is what keeps these filmmakers at an amateur status. It is clear, when watching Star Wars Uncut, that fan films vary from no cost home videos to fairly high budget, special effects included, films. The diversity of the films are only a mirror reflection of the diversity of the fans creating them.
          Fan films are based mainly on the fans individual interpretation of the original media. It is the general populations chance to engage in the world that they are fascinated by and expand on, and manipulate the ideas that the original creators implemented. On page 102, Jenkins quotes an interview with the Wachowski brothers about the hidden messages in the Matrix. When asked how many hidden messages the film has, they answer, “‘There are more than you’ll ever know’”. This idea relates to fan culture because the creators of the film the Matrix are expressing that there are limitless possibilities in ones interpretation of a story. The Matrix and Star Wars are both creations of different worlds that allow for endless possibilities for fans to interpret, create, and distribute their own ideas.

Critical Essay #2

Hayley Steel

Critical Essay #2

October 2, 2012

The website This Is Now at now.jit.su is a website that constantly is changing with new pictures from people around the world. The idea of the website is to have a ongoing flow of Instagram photos from different major cities. The website is quite hypnotizing because the images are always changing and you never know what is going to show up next.

Sitting and watching the pictures pass by is comparable to sitting in a café and watching the people sitting next to you. Social media, such as Facebook or Twitter is a similar concept, except most of the time we are aware, in one way or the other, who we are looking at.  On this website we see faces of people who are thousands of miles away from us and who we will most likely never come in contact with again. For a few moments we are viewing one aspect of their life that they have decided to show everyone. For maybe ten seconds we see their faces and assume that we know what is going on in the photo and then they are gone, lost in the Internet. The concept of this website reminded me of some aspects of the news that Raymond Williams talks about in Television. The news has always been updated to the best of the medias ability, even when it was in print it was changed daily. With the development of the Internet, the news is always available and it travels at the speed of light. We are connected to the happenings around the world and we can always be informed. Current events happen so often that they are there, and then they are gone. Even though we know we saw it and we know it happened, we can turn the images off and shut them out of our minds, or we can focus on the new information that has been updated. The news happens in a flash, similar to these images.

On page 43 of Television, Williams notes that, “Much of the real content of news has been altered by the facts of visual presentation”. The news controls what the users are exposed to in the same way that we control what our followers see on social media. Using certain framing, lighting, and Photoshop, we can manipulate images to make them appear a certain way. Williams also talked about the importance of images with captions and how images fill the screen while the reporter talks over it. This Is Now is similar besides the fact that no one is explaining the photos. They are up for our own evaluation and we make our own assumptions about the people in the pictures.

Lumbard Street, San Francisco

The winding road.