And psychologically we know it affects our sense of self, our feeling of being agents who act upon the world. Images may not always have been so important in the days before the power of contemporary media. It may also be that the absence of authentic media images of women and workers, too, is equally significant to their sense of identity. But no one doubts the critical role of media in defining public images of minorities. Television imagery is particularly critical in this way, not only as a pervasive formative influence on the young, but as the public institution present in the home of almost every family.
Television is the contemporary, publicly accepted record of faces and voices.
Making Mass Media Almost all my work has been for television, designed for reaching a mass audience. In doing that, I've made certain assumptions about the audience. For the problem of absence, the main work is to create presence. My preferred approach is to displace stereotypes by creating vital images of Asian Americans as real human beings, with individual faces, voices, and personal histories that we come to know and care about. Authentic images of minorities do not abound.