exande@maila.wm.edu
Last year I took a class in social problems. We talked about a lot of stuff that goes on in our world that really sucks. But the thing that struck me the most about this class, and what I can still apply today, is the whole construct of social problems. What I mean to say is that, in our world today, a social problem isn't really a problem until the media says it is. I guess my big example of this would be the famine situation in Ethiopia. People were starving in Ethiopia before the media made such a big deal out of it. The number of people starving probably did not increase during all of the big hoopla of the 80s. And there are still people starving there today. We just don't hear about it anymore, so we don't care as much. This bugs me, because there are a lot of problems in society which the media has portrayed in this manner, and which are really big problems. But once the media ignores them, then so does the rest of the world. And where does this leave our poor abused children or the homeless? Granted, the media hype has helped to improve some of these situations, but perhaps not permanently.
How would I solve this problem? If I could, I would make sure there was truth, absolute truth, in the media. We learned in my social problems class that there are ways to skew statistics so that they'll fit whatever information you want them to. So what could appear to be a drastic increase in a situation would really only be a slight increase, but if you don't start your graph at zero, then things seem a lot worse. But this won't fix the problem. I really don't know how to fix this problem. I only wish that I did.
erica
exande@maila.wm.edu
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