Framing Class

In "Framing Class, Vicarious Living, and Conspicuous Consumption", author Diana Kendall writes about the power of the media, and its ability to "shape and create cultural perceptions." She discusses how media audiences perceive and ultimately "act upon popular cultural images or frames". Throughout the piece she breaks down and analyzes how each different class is portrayed in the media, giving various examples, and why they are portrayed that way. She talks about how this portrayal has influenced our country for the worst, and how dangerous this will become as more middle-class and working-class families lifestyles continue to deteriorate.
In the end, she places most of the blame on the fact that media has become basically a small piece in huge conglomerate companies, who only care about the bottom line. She states, "The profits of television networks and stations come from selling advertising, not from producing programs that are accurate reflections of social life." And, because the owners and executives of these large corporations are a part of the upper-class, they have no desire to change the status-quo.
In the best part of the piece, Kendall pleads with her readers to not let media be their one and only source of information in their lives, "For the sake of our children and grandchildren, we must balance the perspectives we gain from the media with our own lived experiences and use a wider sociological lens to look at what is going on around us in everyday life." Well said. Media cannot and should not play a large role in how we perceive the world around us. We need to get off the couch, get outside, and define our own lives, and stop letting media define it for us.