Formal Essay

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Formal Essay 1 Guidelines

Due: Friday, June 29th By Midnight

Your first essay should be approximately 4-5 pages typed in 12-point double-spaced Times New Roman. This essay is worth 100 points.

Revisit your early use of media.

Read the excerpt [Excerpt, Ch.1, Follow the Music, Holzman.pdf] from Jac Holtzman’s book Follow the Music: The Life and High Times of Elektra Records in the Great Years of American Pop Culture. Holzman describes always believing he was born to the wrong parents, but that he escaped through the movies. Here’s a key passage:

"My only other escape was far more to my liking—the movies. The images on the screen showed characters of stature, grace, and romance: the world the way I wished it could be. From my bedroom window, if I craned my neck just so, into view would come the Trans-Lux theater, which changed films weekly and gave you a free pass on your birthday. I haunted the place."

In this essay, you need to similarly look back at your early use of media and also consider how media still today impact your daily life and social relationships. At first, it might be useful to consider how media impact you today, but then trace back to your earliest use of media and examine what media provided in relation to your non-mediated childhood memories.

Some questions to consider might be the following (you should answer at least four of these):

  • How did your media use connect you to other people?
  • How did media separate or isolate you?
  • Did you discuss your media use with others, especially parents (were there usage limits, policies, etc.)?
  • In terms of how you perceive media compared to your current and more nuanced understanding of how media are constructed, how did you perceive media differently when you were younger?
  • Looking back, do you wish your engagement with media had been different?

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Chapter 1 Opening bars . . . Fugue of an Upper East Side kid . . . Maryland Avenue . . . Narrow streets, some of cobblestone . . . With Sister Anne in the Vistadome JAC HOLZMAN: I was not raised, I was lowered. As far back as I can remember, I was sure that I had been born to the wrong parents. The family showed its best face in public; in private there were powerful currents of dissatisfaction and unease. My mother was not uncaring, but my father was a silent dominator. He ruled house and home, marriage and family. Everyone served at his pleasure—my mother, my younger brother Keith, and me. Especially me. Many times and in so many ways my father told me that I, his firstborn, had not bred true to his high standards. With my father I rarely did anything right. He withheld communication, controlling the emotional temperature, and he kept the cold turned up. The unstated message: I was not worth much. My father was a successful doctor, a graduate of Harvard Medical School who had interned at Mt. Sinai and was a strong diagnostician much in demand for consultation. Working frequently with gentile doctors, he was tagged with the tolerant WASP designation of the time— "white Jew." Money was the measure of my parents' wellbeing. We lived in a big apartment, with high ceilings, on the Upper East Side of New York, on 84th Street between Park and Madison. I was born in September 1931, and all through the years of the Great Depression we had servants, a live-in couple, the wife doubling as maid and cook, the husband as butler and chauffeur. My parents were at the fringe of café society, and I recall my mother in evening dress, my father in top hat, tails and spats, sporting an ivory-tipped cane. Yet, for all my "advantages," I wanted to be anyone but who I was, anywhere but where I was. Every year from age five I ran away, pedaling my fancy Schwinn bike as fast and as far as I could from the Upper East Side, to sell on the street for train ticket money. On Mother's Day of my twelfth year I made it all the way to Trenton, New Jersey, on my own at last in Bleaksville, independently miserable in a hotel room with smudged cream-colored walls and a tiny moon of a dusty light bulb dangling from a frayed wire. From these escape attempts I was always dragged home. My only other escape was far more to my liking—the movies. The images on the screen showed characters of stature, grace, and romance: the world the way I wished it could be. From my bedroom window, if I craned my neck just so, into view would come the Trans-Lux theater, which changed films weekly and gave you a free pass on your birthday. I haunted the place. I must have seen eight out of every ten Hollywood movies made every year of my young life. If not at the Trans-Lux, then along 42nd Street, which was lined on both sides with theaters. I fondly remember "King Kong," Errol Flynn swashbuckling in "The Sea Hawk," and I was mesmerized by Orson Welles in "Citizen Kane," which I saw four times in two weeks, totally absorbed in the cinematography and the scale of the drama. Movies jump-started my emotional life. And music was my emotional soundtrack. My parents had bought a 1939 state-of-the-art console, an Ansley Dynaphone with the legendary Garrard turntable, the pickup weighing close to half a pound. Included with the Dynaphone was a library of classical music on fragile shellac 78 rpm records. I was introduced to the great warhorses of the symphonic repertoire—nothing like the climax of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony to stir the blood. Nearly all of my emotional life was passed cocooned in music, blocking out the discordancies of life; or in the dark of movie houses, absorbed in fantasy more real to me than reality. Home and family seemed jagged, hazy, often treacherous. School too. I was never a conventional student and had no patience for anything the way it was taught. I absorbed what I needed to know by osmosis. Once, during a math test, I submitted the answers but not the proof and was accused of cheating. Why the rigor of proof if I could get to the answer without any effort? I sassed my teachers, first at PS 6 and then at a private school, Pennington, from which I managed to get myself expelled. I went through my childhood making a general pest of myself, troublesome, not filially dutiful, uncomfortable in my own skin. My father thought child psychiatry would be helpful, but the psychiatrist told him he was the one who should make an appointment. With psychiatry out, I was shipped off to the Peekskill Military Academy, "confined to barracks" for two years. If it had not been for my grandparents, Estelle Sternberger and J. Max Weis, I would have been a basket case. Long after I had grown to adulthood I came across a line by Margaret Mead that expressed my situation perfectly: "Children and their grandparents have a common enemy." Estelle and Max gave me a sense of perspective and balance, and from them I felt my first unconditional love. Estelle had grown up in Cincinnati. From her earliest years she was a crusader for women's rights, and in the mid-Twenties she was brought to New York to head the National Council of Jewish Women. She moved on to political commentary on WABC (CBS's flagship New York Station in the Thirties) and WQXR, the voice of the New York Times, and to writing speeches for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Estelle held a Saturday afternoon political salon, where I met Jim Farley, postmaster general of the United States and head of the Democratic Party. Also Mary McLeod Bethune, a world-famous educator. Mrs. Bethune was the first black person I had ever seen up close, and she was jet-black, the ebony pigmentation that brought out the worst of American prejudice—"If you're white, alright. If you're brown, stick around. If you're black, get back." When I was introduced to Mrs. Bethune I shook her hand, for once a model of small-child good manners, and then to the horror of my liberal grandmother I furiously tried to rub the color off her wrist. Mrs. Bethune, who had the carriage and speech of a queen, kidded Estelle about that episode for years. I loved to be with Estelle when she did her radio broadcasts. I would sit in the control booth, watching the sound mixer move the knobs for the different microphones. Precision and control were words I would not have known, ideas I could not have formulated, but that is what impressed me. Jac’s grandmother, Estelle Sternberger Photo courtesy of the Holzman Family Archive Everything about radio was fascinating. Somehow a transmitter agitated the airwaves, and out of a box came words and music. I was a big CBS fan, rising early to listen to the 8am world news: Winston Burdett or Eric Sevareid or Ed Murrow from London. I began to experiment, building rudimentary crystal sets. At Pennington, after lights out at ten, when all electricity was cut off in the dorm, I would listen under the blankets. And at military school in Peekskill I built myself a tiny battery-operated heterodyne receiver, which I connected to the spring support of my mattress. With this oversize antenna I could pick up all the New York stations. I fed my appetite for electronics knowledge by devouring the wonderfully illustrated catalogs of Concord Radio, Lafayette, Newark, and especially Allied out of Chicago. If you read the Allied catalog carefully it was an education in itself. You could infer how equipment worked, and how one component could be hooked together with others. I studied till the pages came loose from their binding. JAC: My father enjoyed the old Washington food market, downtown. On a Saturday afternoon he might take Keith and me with him, and we would gravitate to the Cortland Street area. Collected there were all the stores selling surplus electronic gear from World War II, chaotically spilling out of cartons onto the sidewalk: Navy fighter gunsights, vacuum tubes, radio
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Explanation & Answer

Attached.

Surname 1
Name
Instructor
Course
Date
How media use connect to other people
According to Jac Holtzman’s book, Follow the Music, the connection between media use
and other people is examined through the representation of an ethnic minority in the media, and
it is regarded in association to how the use of media impact on other people in regards to identity
formulation and the individual's social world. People’s conceptualization and their approaches
with other people reveal a clear connection to a person’s use of the media through a lived
experience.
Notably, Jac noted that young people consider their identities, diverse, complex, and
contradictory and show a reflexive awareness of the young people’s sense of self, which is a
phenomenon personally constructed, always revised and shown to others. Holtzman argues that
the media is a resource used by young people in formulating and conceptualizing the current
identities and in articulating achievable future selves.
How media isolates or separates young people
In his book, Follow the Music, Jac argues that media has impacted on the young people
by separating or isolating them from the society. He explains this point saying that before mass
media emerged, young people utilized symbolic materials as self-formation tools, which were
achieved through direct interaction processes. Hence, in this context, Jac says that identity
construction was through individual ways, and was restricted through young people’s immediate
personal interactions and locale with others. Therefore, Jac's works explain that knowledge was

Surname 2
restricted on “local knowledge,” that was modified and transmitted orally through pragmatic
concerns: ‘The understanding horizons of most people were restricted by face-to-face
interactions, which made information to flow’ (p. 212).
On contrary to this form of interaction, Holtzman stated that such conditions have
undergone radical changes as communication media developed, in such ways that the selfmotivation of an individual is highly reliant on the presence of “mediated communication forms”
(p. 213). In this framework, Jac gives proposals that “local knowledge” has turned to be
supplanted and augmented by upcoming non-local knowledge modes given in the media that
makes individuals obtain information past the capability of their specific social words. He
explains this by saying that "personal" understanding horizons are broadened, making them no
longer restricted to direct interaction patterns rather are shaped majorly through the expanding
mediated networks of communication (p.214). For Holtzman, this accessibility increase of nonlocal knowledge, as well as the greater symbolic materials array facilitated through media of
communication, enhance the project of self-reflection. This statement is explained by
considering that if individuals were to be offered a more varied mediated materials range, the
media would function like a resource that people can incorporate and exploit reflexively into
their self-identity narratives.
Additionally, as young people get in touch with the ever-developing symbolic materials
numbers that can be drawn on self-constructing, Jac argues that young people are constantly
confronted with fresh possibilities, thus their horizons are constantly changing, as well as their
reference symbolic point (p. 213). Therefore, through highlighting the upcoming self-formation
new opportunities opened up in the symbolic materials proliferation, Holtzman proposes that
young people go through a greater difficulty in reverting back to understanding models grounded

Surname 3
in specific and traditional locales. Overall, Jac concludes that the developing mediated
experience availability creates fresh opportunities, new arenas, and new options for selfexperimentation.
Do you discuss media use with other people?
Notably, discussing the issue of media use with other especially parents is depended on
young people’s choices of the role model and their influence. This is because, during the
development of identity in young people, they view their role models as a guidance source;
seeking for emulation figures who show specific characteristics and abilities. Equally, Holtzman
stated that although family members and parents can be important advisors to young people on
their media use, additional influences, involving the mass media give a crucial heroes source for
young people. Importantly, young people’s advisers on mass media use are, to a certain degree,
subject on the young people’s gender and ethnicity (p. 117). However, regardless of the
importance of the common culture of giving young people media heroes, overall most young
peop...


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