#10 Reflection (ym)

     First of all, I want to reflect this weekend...! Starting from Halloween to my birthday, it was an incredible week ever. Also, my birthday weekend was the best weekend ever since I moved to D.C.! I had so much fun with my friends and it was totally refreshing. (Thank you to everyone who celebrated my birthday :)

     Reflecting the class from Thursday (with our costumes), some of the things that caught me was:
Danniel: "Women in Asia should protest for empowerment and make actions for women, such as not buying newspapers anymore etc..."
(I forgot who... ><): "Asian countries are using media to draw attention from the western nations."
During the discussion and even after the class on Thursday, I kept thinking what the Asian countries should do in general to reduce our gender difference. Surprisingly, I think some of the people in Japan think that gender difference is an old issue to talk about, which is false. It explains how long the issue of gender difference has existed in Asian countries, and the people have lived with it. I agree to Danniel's point of Asian women should take some actions for empowerment. However, I question if they should stop buying newspapers, because newspapers are one of the most credible sources (although they of course have limitation). With the development of technology, news articles are much easier to be published online these days. However, it also raises the limitation of allowing everyone to publish whatever they want, which makes people difficult to judge each article's credibility of the article or other sources. Also, acting to not buy newspapers will not directly help solve the issue of gender difference because newspapers do not only write about gender difference issues, and it will not help to grow the female journalist either. Along with the point that newspapers are still the most credible sources, newspapers have the most impact to foreign countries such as the other western countries to draw their attention. I absolutely agree that Asian sources are trying to draw attention from foreign countries, especially from the United States to be the cause of some important political actions between the countries.

     Listening to my classmates analyze the Taiwan article, it made me think about the difference between Japan and the other Asian countries. Although the gender difference is still big within Japan, the issues are different from Taiwan. However, for all of the Asian countries, it is true that the media construction plays an important role in shaping the common knowledge shared by the public, which is strongly connected and impacted by Social Constructivism. Reading this article made me better understand the concept of Social Constructivism, which states that words and emotions belong to the belonging culture and community, and their definition can change anytime under different cultures. Also, concepts and words are created by dialogues between people.