Adulthood at 21

In class this week we have emphasized that nothing occurs in your brain overnight. Your mind isn't capable of driving the day before your 16, and your mind does not finally decide it can handle alcohol the day before your 21. Yet, our society is ruled by numbers, specifically age. This obsession with age is detrimental to our development. I know that with more years comes maturity, yet I believe after a certain point, age is JUST a number. When I think of someone I know that is 21, not much about them has changed since they were 18. Once someone hits 18, they are allowed to do almost anything in the legal boundaries. Go to war, drive, live alone, get married and many more things. Yet our society places a bigger emphasis on the age of 21, just because thats the age when one can drink. Our society views a 21 year old as a mature adult, yet a 19 or 20 year old is still a "young adult" that has yet to mature. Why is it that use alcohol to measure maturity?I'm not trying for the point of my blog to support making the legal drinking age earlier, but I am just amused with how our society holds a 21 year old in higher regards than an 18 year old, regardless of any factors pertaining to each person.

Fear and the Media

Today in class we touched on how media affects fear. I am obsessed with all the crime shows: CSI, Law and Order, Criminal Intent and many more. I can totally relate to how these shows creat false fear, and because they do, it is very difficult to differentiate between your 6th sense which is real fear or just being paranoid from too many horror scenes. When I was a little bit younger, the crime shows would scare me when I watched. I would turn my head away at points and after, I would be extremely paranoid. They scared me so much that I would refuse to watch one of the show s when I was home alone. Now that I am older, I realize how fakes these shows are, and even tohugh I still find them entertaining, they do not scare me at all. This relates to sociology because media enstills fear in the public. People fear the most ridiculous things because they see the most normal situations turn into horror scenes on TV shows. This is not a great aspect of television because if you fear everything you see as a potential danger, you are not living life to its fullest. Furthermore, after hearing the story about your wife, it made me realize that you should never second guess your sixth sense. However, your wife thought she was just being crazy so she made the mistake of getting out of the car. Possibly she was negatively impacted by media because she thought she was just being paranoid, when in reality it was a real threat.

Advertising

After examining ads this past week in Sociology I realized a ton about media that I have never noticed. First, I thought I might want to go into marketing in college but I think I have decided that I won't like that because advertising is just "clutter" and the more you advertise or promote a product, the more you are contributing. When we were examining the offensive to female ads I looked at ads in a new way. I would have never thought that the Dolce and Gabbana ad was advertising a gang rape but it makes sense if you look into the deeper meaning of an ad. Although a lot of the ads were crossing the line, I felt like many were okay and appropriate because you can spin almost anything to make it offensive. Before we talked about the Dove ads in class, I had already been aware that they were running ads based on "real women" but I never realized they were running a self- esteem campaign. I think its really good that a major company is spending the money to create short clips, like the one we watched in class, that tell young girls to avoid the influence of supper skinny, super pretty models that are in the majority of ads. That whole ad was not promoting the Dove brand at all, but rather warning girls to avoid the negative influence.