Media often portrait
the older people as vulnerable and burden in the society, and makes the
negative stereotype of older people as being poor, forgetful, antisocial,
incapable of work, in ill health, difficult, and grumpy.
In the modern industrial society, some of
magazines and advertisers give a message in their content that signs that
growing old is bad.
The cosmetics and
treatments now available to disguise signs of ageing. Media advertising of products and services that focus on such
aspects of aging as memory loss, frailty, incontinence, and loss of mobility
There are some research about the negative
stereotype towards older people.
·
Biggs (1993)’s research found
that older people were represented in the media TV sitcoms as being forgetful
and difficult
·
Cuddy and Fiske (2004) showed
that in the US TV, there are only 1.5% of elders out of all characters and most
of them has minor roles and appeared as a joke and has ineffective mental,
physical;, and sexual capacities.
In the other hand, older men are more
likely to be portrayed positively than older women. Women usually admired more based on their
looks, so they usually gone from industries to when they reach the older age.
Women segregation
in media has been found across all age groups, in fact Dr. Linda-Marie Delloff
has found that “Elderly women are shown much less on Television then elderly
men, only one in ten characters over 65 is a woman”
The stereotype of the
older people may be introduced to the teenage who see older people as the
burden and useless to children. There are several cartoon that represent the
adult who are stereotyped as grumpy, idiot, or ‘evil parent who hate or does
not care to their children’.
Disney’s animated movies, for the example, other
than argued has negative stereotype of gender, also often to represent the
older people’s negative stereotype, as either the villain, burden of the heroes
or heroines, or dead. Cinderella’s and Snow White’s step-mother, Cruella de Vil,
Madam Mim, Captain Hook, etc. are the example of these evil-older-people, which
also dominated by adult women.
Overall, most of the Disney’s animated
movies are have the negative stereotype towards the older people. This is not
entirely good because the children may develop to think that they are always
right and most of the elders are wrong.
And there are characters portrayed in the media more to negative
stereotype, rather than positive stereotype, such as :
·
King of Queens (TV show) : Arthur ( the father of Carrie) does
not understand what is going on at all. Carrie and her husband Doug repeatedly
say something but he seems to be in his own world and acts like a lost child.
·
Everybody Loves Raymond (TV
show) : Marrie is portrayed as a
stay at home grandma. In some scene, she is baking and then confronted by her
daughter in law for needing to see an optometrist (someone who provide health
care for visual problem), while her own
husband makes a joke about her poor vision.
·
Gran Torino (Movie) : Walt Kowalski is portrayed as a
grumpy elderly person because of his experience during Korean War and believes
the new generations lack values his
generation did (this film also dealt with racism)
Ageism is Prejudice or discrimination against a person age, and one of
the example of consequences for the negative representation of the media. The
prejudice makes the negative assumption
in media’s society, thus caused stereotyping toward older people.
Stereotypes
affect the behavior of older adults in an everyday context. For example,
negative stereotypes may not only affect the medical problem regarding an older
adult illness, such as not receive enough medical care, but may also affect the
older person's develop self-fulfilling prophercy, and caused older people
doesn't want more medical care because of his or her own stereotypes about
normal aging.
However, some researches found that the
negative representation of old people may become lesser in recent years in the
media to avoid the insulting the important role of older people as the part of
the audience.
This is because the older people nowadays
are the generation when baby boom happened and they have disposable income from
savings, pensions, and investments so are significant market for media
industries.
For the fictional characters, Albus Dumbledore (from Harry Potter), Gandalf the
Gray (from The Hobbit), and Obi-Wan Kenobi (from Star Wars) shown as wise and
brave in their own film, even though not all society acknowledge them. There are also films that portrayed older
characters with both compassion and respect
And there are the real older people who seen as
successful person, such as Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch whose are
successful business people and Nelson Mandela, who are successful religious and
political leader
How to prevent media’s impact on ageism :
* Public must be more
aware to use any content about older people in the media
* When watching any media
source and elderly are misrepresented and if someone is around, tell him/her why
it is not an accurate representation of older adults
* Social security for the
elderly must be stronger
* Use more positive
representations of the elderly in media (television, movies, magazines,
posters, ads etc)
* Campaigns about the
media’s influence on ageism
“People will try to label
you not good enough, too slow, too old, too many mistakes. You can’t stop
negative comments or prevent negative labels, but you can choose to not let
them hold you back.”— Joel Osteen
Reference
:
·
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK83767/
·
https://www.slideshare.net/ellesullivan310/as-lesson-9-old-age
·
http://www.aplaceformom.com/blog/14-18-4-aging-myths-dispe
lled/
·
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-458808/Disneys-villains-children-negative-images-elderly.html
·
http://psyc3490m.blogspot.co.id/
·
https://www.images.google.com/
·
Sociology’s IGCSE textbook
