How the media sees me example paper

Media plays a tremendous part in my life on a day to day basis. Media has been with me no matter where I am in the world. Whether it be sports, television's program, music, video games or even films, media has changed tremendously within my life. However media remains a constant facet of my life. I identify myself as a North American with an Indian-Chinese heritage. The reason I say North American is because I have spent a tremendous amount of my life living in the United States and Canada.I feel both cultures have shaped me tremendously. Whether it was living in Canada where my love of sports was developed; or it was living in California where I learnt about consumerism; North America has helped shape me and contributed to my ongoing development.

From ages 2-6, almost immediately after I was born in Ottawa Ontario, my family moved to Portland, Oregon. I went to A Child’s Way Kindergarten in Portland, Oregon where I learned some incredible lessons that still hold true in my life today. One of the most important lessons I learned was the value of assimilation. While at that I didn’t know what assimilation was or meant, I did realize that all the other boys in my class had Pokemon cards. So, after many discussions with my parents, they started buying me Pokemon cards and sure enough even though I was the only minority in my class I got along well with all the other boys. This taught me at a very young age that integrating myself into what was popular culturally was important. However this was never more true than with sports. My friend Jordan’s dad worked for Nike and encouraged my dad to get me into sports. So my dad got me a hockey net and a basketball hoop. From there my affection in basketball grew and peaked when I learned about Michael Jordan and the 1996 Chicago Bulls. When my family moved from Portland back to Canada, sports and Pokemon were the only things that came with me.

Living in Canada was also important in my development of understanding political policy but also in a grasp of economics. Canada’s entire population is smaller than in the state of California and thus praise along with scrutiny are more concentrated in the areas Canadian are most passionate about. I discovered the first year I lived in Canada that I could no longer play basketball during the entire year due to snow. This shifted me into caring far more about hockey as it was the easiest way to make friends. This gave me friends not only quickly but also instilled a belief within me that no matter where I go I should take an interest in the national sport. While I kept my passion for basketball, I found that the long winters led me to developing new hobbies to fill the void of playing basketball. This is where I found a deep love for music and video games. My music in my early youth was largely alternative music such as Blink 182, Green Day and Sum 41. I was not allowed to listen to rap music as were almost all of my friends. My parents upon reflection were very conservative culturally and often when I would try to have new experiences like listening to hip-hop or rap I would quickly be admonished by my parents. However I discovered that since my dad worked in technology video games were a new hobby my friends and I were allowed. So video games became the thing my friends and I would do besides hockey during long cold winters. However upon reflection the most interesting thing about living in Canada  was that my race was never something I thought about until I moved to California.

When I first moved to California it was difficult. I was immensely sad having left Canada and my friends in addition I missed the things I took for granted like my favorite chocolate bars and how at the time I could buy hockey cards very easily. However living in California has shaped my image, understanding of race and ambition. I went from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; to Los Gatos, California where economic circumstances were dramatically different. My first day of middle school I remember seeing kids with cell phones and getting dropped off in cars that I would rarely, if ever, see in Canada. I was the only kid who didn’t have a cell phone and had no idea what “texting” was. I learned during this process that I ultimately needed to embrace change even if I did not know anything about the subject. “There is almost always something good about everything” manifested into my outlook, which I attribute greatly to helping me to be open and accepting to almost everything. What is more interesting is this also affected my view on race. I realized that race wasn’t something I thought about due to always living in area with a great amount of diversity. I also feel I have never faced any harsh or cruel racism from another individual. Rather I often feel people are just ignorant and if they actually became familiar with the person they would often find they have something in common.

In the media I only see the portrayal of the Indian side of my heritage with some concern. I see tremendous character casting overlap with Indian and Middle Eastern people in casting characters. The Big Bang Theory and Silicon Valley both revolve around characters with high levels of education in the maths and sciences. Although a positive stereotype in some sense, the issue is that by only portraying Indians/Middle Eastern people as math and science focused, it encourages the stereotype that all Indian children are math and science oriented. People have predisposition to believing ethnicities are “wired’ a certain way which puts those children who do not fit that stereotype at a disadvantage. The result will be that those children may not get as much help in sports or school. Furthermore in both programs, the characters are awkward and have little to no ability in various social realms. In the case of The Big Bang Theory, the Indian character Raj Koothrappali has a whole episode entitled “The Grasshopper Experiment” centered around the premise he cannot talk to women unless drinking . Not only does this portray Indian and Middle Eastern people as socially inept but it also suggests that the character wouldn’t be socially capable if sober.

In the case of Silicon Valley the show has a middle eastern character name Dinesh Chugtai who serves as the foil to another character Bertram Gilfoyle. In Dinesh’s case he much like Raj Koothrappali, is found to be inept particularly socially. A large portion of the subplot of Silicon Valley is that Dinesh regularly is on the receiving end of Gilfoyle's pranks. Although Danesh is Middle Eastern I see him as being a character who is typecast in the same demographic I would be if I was to be cast into a program. The problem is similar in handicapping a minority character who has social issues. Danesh has time to develop as a character due to Silicon Valley being a far younger show then the Big Bang Theory. Although the overall trend is disturbing there is progress being made in other facets of Hollywood’s presentation of Indian and Middle Eastern characters.

The fictional media character I am most compared to is Don Draper from Mad Me. The non-fictional character who most people claim I am like is Aziz Ansari. While Aziz Ansari is undeniably talented and charismatic; I find it mentally lazy to compare someone who is talented to another person of the same aesthetic based on apparent ethnicity. While I appreciate the premise that I am funny and speak clear cogent English, I find myself to have little in common with Aziz Ansari from a comedic standpoint. I find Aziz is a guy who has comedy largely centered around personal matters and the observations he takes from those personal matters. I view my own comedy as being much more like Bill Maher where I walk through flawed logic and find myself laughing along the way. Sure both require observation however due to him being a short caucasian male and I a lanky brown Indian-Chinese fellow, I never hear the comparison from even the most racially aware and comedically educated individuals. In the case of Don Draper, my friends joke that I am him purely due to the fact I am an advertising major who likes good whiskey. Interestingly only my closest friends do this. I find that due to familiarization and time that race becomes a non factor in some of my life experiences and my friends see me as a human being rather than a human with a racial connotation. I think over time and familiarity all groups will have the same benefit so long as society continues to become more educated and conscious.

Looking at myself in media I found that while not perfect, time will only make things better. However, I feel society has enabled me enough to be to do this and though I realize other minorities have not experienced this same luxury I do. Ultimately the experience of writing this paper was humbling and made me realize how fortunate I am to be who I am and who I am gonna be going forward.

Media prognostication

Thirty years ago we got our news from newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. Today news comes via Facebook and Twitter. The Internet, PCs and smartphones were mere glimmers in the eyes of scientists 30 years ago. Music and movies were on albums, cassettes and videotapes. Today we stream movies to our smartphones in seconds. Every technology was invented for one purpose: To enable humans to take actions faster.

With this in mind, I want you to prognosticate the future of media. How and where will we be watching movies, listening to music and watching TV in the future? What will our smartphones do 30, 50 years in the future that they don’t do now? Will smartphones even exist anymore? Educate yourself on the future of media by reading on the Internet and be prepared to predict the future of media in an in-class essay. You can use handwritten notes on the essay that you bring to class.

In addition to prognosticating the future of media technology I want you to think about how media in the future will impact our behavior. More than 90 million Americans went to the movies every week in the 1940s. TV took hold of the living room in the 1950s and that number dropped to less than 30 million, an example of media technology clearly impacting people’s behavior. Families watched TV together in the living room in the 1970s. Today, we DVR TV shows and watch them whenever and wherever we want, another example of media technology changing people’s behavior. There is another war going on today for control of our living rooms between companies like Apple, Amazon and Netflix and cable TV giants such as Comcast. Who do you think will win that war?

I’m looking for examples like this in your media prognostication paper. Make the paper insightful with as many examples as you can come up with. The more specific you are the better.

Extra credit article to read

By Anzi Ansari

Fisher Stevens was cooking dinner when I got him on the phone. I had wanted to talk to him for years because, as I recount in my new Netflix series, “Master of None,” this actor played a strange role in my relationship to television and film.

The first time I saw an Indian character in an American movie was “Short Circuit 2,” a 1988 film in which a humanized robot named Johnny 5 goes to New York and bonds with an Indian scientist named Benjamin Jarhvi.

Seeing an Indian character in a lead role had a powerful effect on me, but it was only as I got older that I realized what an anomaly it was. I rarely saw any Indians on TV or film, except for brief appearances as a cabdriver or a convenience store worker literally servicing white characters who were off to more interesting adventures. This made “Short Circuit 2” special. An Indian lead character? With a Caucasian love interest? In the 1980s? What’s going on here? A bold foray into diversity far ahead of its time?

Not exactly.

One day in college, I decided to go on the television and film website IMDB to see what happened to the Indian actor from “Short Circuit 2.” Turns out, the Indian guy was a white guy.

The character was played by Mr. Stevens, a Caucasian actor in brownface. Rather than cast an Indian actor, the filmmakers had Mr. Stevens sit every morning in a makeup chair and get painted an “Indian color” before going on set and doing his “Indian voice.”

As a child, I thought the villain of the film was Oscar Baldwin, the banker who tricks Johnny 5 into helping him commit a jewel heist. As an adult, I thought the bad guy was actually Mr. Stevens, who mocked my ethnicity.

And now, here I was, a real Indian man, talking to the actor who played a fake one almost 30 years ago.

After a long conversation, I can confirm Mr. Stevens is not a villain, but was, when he took the role, a well-intentioned if slightly misguided young actor who needed a job during a more culturally insensitive time.

At first, he was remarkably casual, cooking dinner as we talked, seemingly happy to recall his days with Johnny 5.

“Originally, the role of Benjamin was a white grad student, and then the director and co-writer of ‘Short Circuit’ changed the character to Indian,” he told me. They then went to Mr. Stevens and asked, “Can you play Indian?”

It was 1987, so we were all a little less savvy about the things we were doing that were actually hurtful to large groups of people, and the answer, for a 21-year-old struggling actor, was yes.

What surprised me was how seriously Mr. Stevens dedicated himself to “becoming Indian.” He went full Method, studying with a dialect coach, reading R. K. Narayan’s “The Guide” and Hesse’s “Siddhartha.” “I started taking yoga and immersed myself, because I really wanted to be as real as possible,” he said. He even lived in India for a month before shooting “Short Circuit 2.”

Mr. Stevens’s efforts to make the character real, and not a full-on ethnic cartoon, are admirable, despite the underlying insult of his being cast. Toward the end of the conversation, it seemed to fully hit him how insensitive his casting may have been, and he said several times that he believed the role should have been played by an Indian and that he would never take it today.

These days, Indian people, real Indian people, pop up way more in film and television, but fake Indians are still around more than you think. I loved “The Social Network,” but I have a hard time understanding why the Indian-American Harvard student Divya Narendra was played by Max Minghella, a half-Chinese, half-Italian British actor. More recently, “The Martian” was based on a novel with an Indian character named Venkat Kapoor, who in the film became Vincent, a character portrayed by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a British actor of Nigerian origin. (The Indian actor Irrfan Khan was reportedly in talks to take the role, but couldn’t because of a scheduling conflict.)

My efforts to get responses from people who made these decisions were unsuccessful. But I don’t want to judge them before knowing the full story, especially because I know that both films made at least some attempts to pursue Indian actors. I auditioned for “The Social Network,” and I was horrible. I tried to improvise and make the role funny. I was a young actor who didn’t understand what he was doing. I was also asked to audition for a part in “The Martian” (not Kapoor), but I skimmed the script and — no offense — it seemed like a boring movie about a white guy stuck on Mars for two hours who gets fired up about plants, so it didn’t seem worth taking a break from my own projects. (I’ve heard the film is fantastic.) So, I know the filmmakers made an effort to cast Indian actors, but how hard did they try?

I had to cast an Asian actor for “Master of None,” and it was hard. When you cast a white person, you can get anything you want: “You need a white guy with red hair and one arm? Here’s six of ’em!” But for an Asian character, there were startlingly fewer options, and with each of them, something was off. Some had the right look but didn’t have comedy chops. Others were too young or old. We even debated changing the character to an Asian woman, but a week before shooting began, Kelvin Yu, an actor from Los Angeles, sent in an audition over YouTube and got the part.

So I get it: Sometimes you’re in a jam. Every time I’ve played a part that required stunts, they’ve been done by a white stuntman who has had to brown up. In those cases, the ethics didn’t seem quite as dubious. Training an Indian to do the stunts wasn’t practical, and a stuntman is not mocking Indian people; he’s tricking people into thinking it’s me, a real Indian. (If there is a heartbroken Indian stuntman reading this now: Dude, I’m so sorry, and you really need to get a better stunt agent.)

But I still wonder if we are trying hard enough.

Even though I’ve sold out Madison Square Garden as a standup comedian and have appeared in several films and a TV series, when my phone rings, the roles I’m offered are often defined by ethnicity and often require accents.

Sure, things are moving in the right direction with “Empire” and “Fresh Off the Boat.” But, as far as I know, black people and Asian people were around before the last TV season. And whatever progress toward diversity we are making, the percentage of minorities playing lead roles is still painfully low. (The numbers for women are depressing as well.) In 2013, according to a recent report produced by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at U.C.L.A., only 16.7 percent of lead film roles went to minorities. Broadcast TV was worse, with only 6.5 percent of lead roles going to nonwhites in the 2012-13 season. In cable, minorities did better, getting 19.3 percent of the roles.

For me, as a modern American consumer, these numbers come as zero surprise. Here’s a game to play: When you look at posters for movies or TV shows, see if it makes sense to switch the title to “What’s Gonna Happen to This White Guy?” (“Forrest Gump,” “The Martian,” “Black Mass”) or if there’s a woman in the poster, too, “Are These White People Gonna Have Sex With Each Other?” (“Casablanca,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “The Notebook”). Even at a time when minorities account for almost 40 percent of the American population, when Hollywood wants an “everyman,” what it really wants is a straight white guy. But a straight white guy is not every man. The “everyman” is everybody.

When we were looking for an Asian actor for “Master of None,” my fellow creator, Alan Yang, asked me: “How many times have you seen an Asian guy kiss someone in TV or film?” After a long hard think, we came up with two (Steven Yeun on “The Walking Dead” and Daniel Dae Kim on “Lost”). It made me realize how important it was not to give up on our search.

But I wouldn’t be in the position to do any of this, and neither would Alan, unless some straight white guy, in this case Mike Schur, had given us jobs on “Parks and Recreation.” Without that opportunity, we wouldn’t have developed the experience necessary to tell our stories. So if you’re a straight white guy, do the industry a solid and give minorities a second look.

And to anyone worried that it may be “weird” to cast someone who looks a certain way to play a certain part, because it’s not what people are used to, I say: Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It’s true. Arnold Schwarzenegger is an unsung pioneer for minority actors. Look at “The Terminator”: There had to be someone who heard his name tossed around for the role and thought: Wait, why would the robot have an Austrian accent? No one’s gonna buy that! We gotta get a robot that has an American accent! Just get a white guy from the States. Audiences will be confused. Nope. They weren’t. 

Because, you know what? No one really cares.