Culture is learned behavior.

Culture is learned behavior. By individuals.

Culture is learned behavior. By individuals. Of a given group or groups.

Culture is learned behavior

We learn culture from people around us. Cultural anthropologists often refer to this as "storytelling". People gather around the fire and learn about life and learn how to live from the stories passed down by our families and our village elders.

But the "campfire" has changed as society changed. From campfire to front porch or parlor, from parlor to church socials, from church to radio to television to films to video games to the internet, the "campfire" keeps evolving. We explore the changing nature of campfires later in the course.

Both "Empire" and "Breaking Bad" tell the story of families under pressure. Are they mirrors to our society? Are they warnings to take heed of? Are they models to follow? What do we learn from their stories?

When people talk about the "decline in family values", they often mean that the culture of one generation is not being passed down to the next. They fear that "the media" has replaced the family as the storyteller.

Their fear is increased by a perceived degrading of "values" by the media.

They fear that programs viewed, movies watched, songs listened to will negatively influence people. The media shows people doing "bad" things with no punishment. Consequently, the people consuming the media will be encouraged to do "bad" things.

Click here to read Folklore in a Box by Lance Morrow.

Morrow's article was written over fifteen years ago. Do you think his argument was valid then and is valid now? We'll talk about this in our next Assignment.

Have the family values of Father Knows Best and Cosby ...

... been replaced by Homer Simpson?

... or something even worse? Did Miley teach us irresponsible behavior is fun, has no negative consequences, and is actually profitable? (Don't tell anyone, but your parents did this in the 50's and 60's. Then, it was called the "Dirty Dog". And it wasn't shown on TV.)

Click here to read The Other Parent by James Steyer, Chapter 1.

"For me, as a parent of three young children and as a longtime teacher, the loss of innocence at too early an age is perhaps the highest price that American kids pay in this new media environment. Ever since the Hays Office began monitoring Hollywood morals in the 1920's, Americans have worried about the media's impact on "family values."

But before our mass-media culture became so explicit and so pervasive, before large media companies began to realize huge profits by pushing sex and sensationalism, things were different. Parents were much better able to control what their children learned about and when."

Steyer recommends parents monitor and control their children's media consumption. But he also recommends they organize advocacy groups, contact government leaders, and boycott media outlets that target children with inappropriate content. In terms we'll discuss later, Steyer recommends aggressive "gatekeeping" to keep content he considers inappropriate off the air.

Modern parents, however, may have moved away from Steyer's model of uncontrolled media use by children. Recent studies find that parents actually drive the media use of their children.

From the final report, "Parents are creating vastly different types of media environments for their children to grow up in, and, not surprisingly, the choices they make are strongly related to their children's media use. The study identified three different parenting styles regarding the family's approach to media: media-centric families, media-moderate families, and media-light families. Rather than the commonly presented scenario of children driving more and more media use and parents trying to moderate it, this study found something different, at least among children ages 0-8: parents set the tone and create a "family media ecology" that permeates through the generations."