The Radio Industry of the 1920s.

In the 1920s, much of the radio industry developed because of the audience's demand for what was being listened to; it determined what was broadcast on the radio at the time and made a difference on what is being chosen to be broadcast on radio today. The audience's choice in content created stirs in society as a whole. New ideas were being established and "mass produced" throughout the population of the area, and government would have to step in and perhaps censor what was being said. At the very beginning, people were amazed by what radio could do, and there was pretty much a channel/show for everyone to enjoy.

The radio industry in the 1920s set the foundation of what our media is like today-- what is/is not or can/cannot be shown, what people like to see/hear, etc. For example, RCA was the first huge radio broadcasting company, developed by Sarnoff. In 1926, the NBC radio network was developed by RCA, and today it has become a huge television broadcasting company, broadcasting television shows that millions of happy viewers avidly follow.

Priming and Sex Within Society.

In the society we live in today, it seems as though we are living in promiscuity; a lot of it seems to be due to the  priming of sexuality within the media. The priming theory is the idea that the images we see in the media as an audience plant thoughts in our minds. The media has so much power nowadays, with its infinite ways of reaching audiences, from music to film to television, and naturally, it should have the ability to supplant ideas unseen within the audience's brains. Specifically, the media creates an image of sex that makes it desirable, and the idea that if you are not out there enjoying it with your girlfriend/boyfriend/some random hot person you picked up at a bar, you're missing out on life. Let's use the example the textbook uses: the hit TV show, Gossip Girl. Now, I won't deny it, I am an avid fan of the television series, but I also won't deny the unrealistic levels of scandalous activity and sexual promiscuity in every episode. Whether it's because the audience thinks that on a certain level that this is the kind of promiscuity out there in the upper east side of Manhattan right at this moment or if that is the social norm, it is media like this that promotes the idea that premarital sex is completely normal and socially accepted. Personally, I believe in the abstinence of sexual activity before marriage, but now it seems as though the majority of unmarried people, regardless of their age, disregard the idea of abstinence, and I strongly believe that media has a lot to do with the implantation of the idea that abstinence is unimportant. Think about it: society used to believe that the showing of ankles is considered some level of prostitution, yet... how are we today?

Hegemony: The Dominant Ideology.

The concept of hegemony within the media helps us to understand the development of sexism in society and its acceptance by people. Hegemony is the idea that the dominant ideology is made to seem natural. Since Biblical times, women have been seen as passive and, in most ways, "weaker" than men, and at the same time, men are given pressure to be the stronger sex, and therefore, they attempt to depict that image through physical means, often leading to violent or unnecessary actions. As they described in Killing Us Softly and Tough Guise, this ideology has morphed into such a ridiculous stereotype that women are expected to be extremely vulnerable and dependent, and that in turn is what men use to describe attractiveness. On the flip side, everyone expects men to be strong and dominant, but it has gone so far that most of the violent crimes committed within society now are at the hands of men.

For example, nowadays, children and teenagers make jokes such as, "Woman, go make me a sammich (sandwich)!" or "Big men don't cry." From the very beginning, boys and girls are placed into stereotypes that reflect later on what they will be expecting of themselves and other people to fall under. If we try so hard to break out of our racial stereotypes (because Asians aren't really all such terrible drivers, and some of us really are not very good at math, Blacks aren't truly verbally deficient and all "gangsters", and Indians don't just eat curry all the time), who says that we should continue to succumb to these gender stereotypes?