Writing Paper — fiction vs. reality

I thought about Sarah’s blog on modeling clay while working on my first paper for my organizational communications class. There was a certain odd connection. The paper was to be a critical analysis of an academic research paper, and there was something in the assumptions of the research team that reminded me of some of the things Sarah was saying.

The research study was looking at how prime time television portrayed dissent in the workplace, and then, using cultivation theory, infer how it shaped both people’s perceptions of dissent in the workplace, and their practice of dissent in the workplace.

What I felt from the study was a certain sense of television being the role model, shaping people’s behaviour. I got the idea they thought we watched television looking for people like ourselves, that we expected to find people like ourselves on television.

There is this constant idea that we all are looking for someone to follow, someone to emulate. Never that we might choose to be ourselves. I have an autistic daughter who refused to write a paper on her role models for school, because she was satisfied with herself and didn’t feel the need to copy others. I had to explain to her how to complete that assignment in a way so she wouldn’t flunk it, without having to talk about her role model. But I think she has a good idea about the media.  We shouldn’t be letting them dictate to us who we should be.

But the other point is that they expect people to take drama for reality. As if we didn’t know the difference between the two. That whatever is portrayed in the media we assume is true. So if they portray something about work, we take it as true.

But I disagree.  I think of John P. Hogan and his book Kicking the Sacred Cow. People recognize the errors when hearing things about the places and fields they know, to recognize the differences.  It is in the fields we don’t know that we take the word of the media.  So if we see scenes of the workplace, which we know, then we wouldn’t accept something we know isn’t true.

So on both accounts I tended to discount the influence of the media on the working persons perceptions of the working place.

Thus ends today’s disjointed blog.