Outline

Media and Inequality: An Overview

I. Introduction to Media and Inequality – Brief history, introduction to discussion on white patriarchal media, address problems and shortcomings

II. Theme – The paper will address the lack of “outsider” influence on popular media, from print news to feature length film, from gender inequality to racial inequality, this paper will show inequality in media and provide enough insight for the first time student as well as enough depth to keep a scholar interested. I haven’t found anything that is a complete overview of current issues dealing with media, such as New Racism and media illiteracy, and decided to write something myself. The actual point is education and how important it is to the development of society, people need to be taught to be aware of the things that they see, as the media around us is trying to get us to consume, and isn’t working with us, but rather with our wallets. On top of this, the majority of media created is for one particular consumer, the white male. I want to address this, illustrate how it manifests in various forms of media, and present possible solutions. I want this paper to be accessible to any reader and to lay down a foundation of current media and inequality issues for my own reference in later works. This is a technology and inequality class and I’m looking at media as a form of technology, media as a whole is biased, and I wish to confront this bias in my paper, rather than focus on the minute detail of specific occurences, which can be taken out of context. Popular media such as newspapers, magazines, television, film, music, and the internet will all be under review, and I hope to create a lens through which these media can be viewed skeptically and rationally.

III. Frameworks – Social Constructivism, Determinism, Technological Momentum. This paper will particularly address these frameworks, constructivism in that our technology (media) progresses due to society’s needs, determinism in that the media created is the result of prior types of media, and technological momentum in that while things are currently inequal, we are making progress for equality and constantly moving forward in this sense, not backwards.

IV. Sources  - Stewart Hall, various academic articles by accredited scholars Gorham, Larson, Heider, Chen, Bramlett-Solomon, Chen, Billings, etc. full works cited will be provided with the paper, all sources will be accredited and published.