Bethany Economos, Lane Folkers and Ty Lynnes
Brandi Fuglsby
English 120 Positional Argument
Friday, November 28, 2008
Media’s Projection of Family Image: A Lack of Spectrum.
Family, a word that automatically conjures images and feelings in any person’s mind. Every person has a family of some sort, and at the same time they have a mental image of what a family represents. The high level of emotion connected to the word “family”, along with its ambiguity, makes it an ideal tool for the media. Everyday the populace gets bombarded by the media to the point that it affects everything we do and to some extent believe (Kilbourne 57-75). Not surprisingly, media affects society’s ideas of family, mainly by the over-use of images of families and over dramatizing family life. The media uses different images of family depending on the effect it desires, whether it aims to sell a product or boost ratings. Advertisements mostly project the perfect nuclear family of a husband/wife pair with 2.3 children with or without a pet, usually a golden retriever. On the other hand, entertainment industries often rely on more dramatic representations. The media’s projection of family image distorts reality, represented as either too perfect to be obtainable or too dramatic to be functional; this projection in turn results in the populace pretending to be something they’re not, while at the same time rationalizing dysfunctional problems. This problem causes the families to ignore problems, letting them grow to be unchangeable.
Family, a fluid and dynamic relationship, is shared between varieties of people under a variety of situations. Some people believe family has to do with blood relations and marriage which includes a large number of people. For others, family can be as simple as two people who care about one another and nothing more. The majority of people associate the word “family” with happy memories and the feeling of love, but some connect it with sad or...