Abigail Berman

Author: admin

  • Media Literacy and Unions

    I take a lot of pride in being able to go back to school at ASU, and I’m very thankful that my job at Starbucks provides me with this opportunity. My studies at ASU have made me more mindful of the media I consume and have taught me how to do better research.

    However, I do not just work at Starbucks. My store recently unionized, and I was lucky enough to be selected as its union representative. This week, I will be involved in my first bargaining session as a delegate! It’s been a challenge adding this new workload on top of already working and going to school full-time, but I’m very excited to work with all the other delegates and fight for my partners! 

    In the process of unionizing, I noticed a lot of misinformation about unions from my partners and people who don’t even work at Starbucks. Unions play an essential role in the workplace. Aspects of media literacy also pertain to our daily lives. It’s important to be able to identify misinformation in the media and spread by word of mouth. Either way, misinformation should be faced with proper research. 

    Misinformation about unions is incredibly dangerous. Workers have the right to choose whether to unionize or not, and feeding them with misinformation can deprive them of the benefits they would gain. I have coworkers who are afraid they’re not going to get paid, either from union dues or because they think Starbucks would outright withhold their paycheck. 

    Media literacy is an important skill. Witnessing a workplace unionize has shown me how being media illiterate affects people in their daily lives.

    Misinformation

    When Starbucks stores first began to unionize, Starbucks committed numerous NLRA violations. These actions resulted in employees being fired, disciplined, and even withholding pay. With the help of the media, these violations became wild accusations on social media. I heard partners tell me that they didn’t want to unionize because we would stop getting paid. And although this is technically true, it’s been blown out of proportion. This misinformation is harmful to workers. I hear my coworkers complain constantly about our working conditions and pay. It upsets me to know that they are falling victim to misinformation that is deterring them from the union when it will fight for them and their wants and needs. We need to put an end to the spread of misinformation. If you read something online or a friend tells you something and you think, “Wow! That’s crazy!” take a second and do a simple search to double-check if that information is true.

    Research

    Unionizing takes work. Union busting is a challenge that all organizing workers face, regardless of their employer; this is not something that is unique to working at Starbucks. But the question stands: how do you organize workers without being blatantly obvious and putting your job in danger? How do you communicate effectively to a large group without it becoming workplace gossip? It’s hard to find information about what the union will do for workers, especially with Starbucks Workers United. Since this union is new and there hasn’t been a contract, there is little information online. No facts are being shared; they are simply goals they want to achieve. People lack media literacy skills concerning research. Even outside the union, we’ve all been asked questions that could have easily been googled. But it’s important to have this skill. People don’t do their own research to see if a union is something they want but then proceed to ask someone who feeds them with misinformation. It’s a dangerous cycle, both online and in person, and at or outside work.

    Media literacy is an important asset that can impact our daily lives. Being able to identify misinformation or to do proper research can negatively affect us, as I’ve shown with unions. In today’s world, it’s important that we have a voice and fight for our rights, and learning how to be media literate is the first step!

    Disclaimer: I am not speaking on behalf of SBWU nor am I promoting unions.

  • Can I use AI to create embroidery?

    I have recently added embroidery to my repertoire of various fiber arts crafts. With this new skill, I have embroidered my name and some cute designs on my Starbucks aprons. I embroidered some foliage for the fall season and recently just finished some string lights on my red holiday apron. My next project will be to embroider some snowflakes! However, I’ve had a lot of difficulty finding a pattern that fits my vision, but this won’t stop me!

    String of lights embroidered around the Starbucks logo on a red apron.

    Instead of pouring through books and browsing Etsy, I decided to take matters into my own hands and create my own pattern! The first step was to do an image search of snowflakes to get some inspiration for the individual snowflakes. I want a variety of shapes and sizes, and I found some great resources!

    line images of snowflakes

    This image I found on Vecteezy. It’s a great starting point! The snowflakes have great simple lines I can follow, and I can move the different snowflakes around to place them where I’d like them. Some of them are a little more detailed than I’d like, but I can always alter them!

    But my search for inspiration continued! The free images I found online are great, however they will require a lot of manipulating to be able to use them. I’ll have to figure out sizing and replacement. And although these aren’t major issues, it’s a little more effort than I’d like to be putting into this project. As someone who works full time and takes a full load of classes, I don’t have a lot of free time! I’d like to make this process as easy as possible.

    That takes me to my next source: AI! This is the first time I’ve ever used AI to produce an image. I did encounter a few difficulties along the way. I tried to be as specific as possible and found that DALL-E 3 did not want to help me when I mentioned Starbucks. And of course, AI can only do so much! Even with all the details I provided, I still wasn’t getting exactly what I wanted. In fact, the more I prompted it to alter the image the wonkier it became.

    AI generated photo of embroidered snowflakes surroudning a circle.

    Then I decided to simplify my request. I asked for an image of simple snowflakes, and was provided with an image that more closely resembles the free images from Vecteezy. But, since I had previously asked for snowflakes that would be easy to embroider, it gave me snowflakes that were embroidered.

    AI generated photo of 9 embroidered snowflakes

    With all of these resources I’ve gathered, I think I’m prepared to get started on my project. It will definitely take some finessing, but there’s never a project that works up perfectly!

  • Parable of the Sower: Octavia Butler’s future nightmare vs. today

    Octavia Butler is an important figure in literature. She is one of the first African American science fiction writers and is considered to be a pioneer in Afrofuturism literature. Her stories reflect on issues surrounding the environment, politics, and injustices toward African Americans.

    Butler’s 1995 novel Parable of the Sower takes place in post-apocalyptic California across the years 2024-2027. When reading the story today, it shows frightening similarities to the world today, global warming, wealth inequality, corrupt politicians/police officers and corporate greed. The story follows a girl named Lauren on her journey to walk across California to start a better life. Lauren grew up in an area that was rampant with violent crime and drug abuse, her community survived on growing their own produce because it was far too expensive to buy groceries, let alone dangerous to travel to a store in world where walking was the primary form of transportation. Most of her community was unemployed due to the dangers, and employment opportunities that provide safe housing and food were equivalent to slavery. The environment was so polluted that safe drinking water was hard to come by and extremely expensive, if money was spent on anything it was water. The only choice that Lauren had to surviving is to escape and rebuild her community with the friends she made along the way.

    The novel has increased in popularity within the last year as the novel begins in the summer of 2024, and many readers have found that the novel is representative of today’s world. Based on issues going on in the 90’s, Butler focused on issues she thought were important to discuss and created a world where these things destroyed the United States. However, in the 90s, this story was not the alternate world that we would have desired to live in but one we should fear.

    In the novel, poverty is a major issue across the entire country, and the proposed solution was modern day slavery. Employing workers who couldn’t make enough to pay back their employer for food or rent. Before Butler began working on her novel, Reagan issued budget cuts to welfare programs and set higher restrictions on those who were able to receive benefits, negatively affecting families already struggling. Parable of the Sower shows us the potential future if we dismiss social reform policies to benefit the already wealthy.

    A major issue Lauren and her community face is the inability to access clean drinking water. It’s said to cost “several times as much as gasoline” (18). Places to get safe drinking water were dangerous as it made you a target for thieves and beggars, you could buy water from water peddlers but there was no guarantee that what you bought wasn’t disease ridden or contaminated with chemicals.  We saw a major issue with unsafe drinking water not long ago in Flint, Michigan. Other major bodies of water are also contaminated, the Hudson River in New York used to be filled with oysters and despite repopulation efforts, they continue to die. Despite all the practices and policies put into place about the environment, we still struggle to have clean air and water, and the push for industrialization only makes things worse.

    The last influence I’ll mention is the LA riots in 1992. The riots began as a response to four police officers who were acquitted after brutally beating Rodney King in the streets of LA. The book reflects these riots in both violence and impact of the police. In Lauren’s world, drugs are rampant, and users act violently on people and property, killing people to steal the little money they had and burning down homes because they enjoy watching the flames. Community is something that is very important to her, and the violence of the novel shows us the dangers of what happens when we don’t support our communities. The depiction of police officers in the novel are also represented by that of the 1992 riots. In the novel, the police do little to protect the communities they serve, going far as extorting members of the community for personal benefit.

    Octavia Butler tried to warn us of all the dangers we could face if we don’t make major changes in the world; it is a wake-up call to take care of our home and our community. Unfortunately, we are facing many of these difficulties perpetrated by Butler’s alternate future, and hopefully, we can prevent them from developing further.

  • Antisemitism in the media

    I am a Jewish-American woman. I’ve encountered antisemitism many times growing up, ranging from hurtful speech to acts of violence. As the world progresses, we’ve seen a rise in attempts to put antisemitism to rest. However, social media creates a perfect platform for folks to spew antisemitic rhetoric that invalidates an entire religion. When celebrities and politicians participate in this behavior, it fuels others to follow in their directions, worsening the situation.

    Something I’ve noticed in recent years with the popularity of online DNA tests such as 23andMe is people identifying as Jewish because they’ve received results with Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. Although this testing is important due to the serious health issues related to Ashkenazi DNA, a person’s religion is not identifiable through DNA testing. Judaism is a closed practice, meaning that not anyone can go to temple or participate in holidays and claim to be Jewish. Although there are different opinions on defining what makes a person Jewish, claiming to be genetically Jewish while actively participating in another religion invalidates the Jewish people.

    However, the idea of identifying as Jewish is not just pinpointed to DNA tests; rapper Kanye West claims that his identity as a black man constitutes him as being Jewish. He uses these claims to justify his antisemitic remarks that perpetuate stereotypes, endorse conspiracy theories, and call for violence against Jews. Kanye has a large number of supporters who read and believe what he says online, which fuels antisemitism. If a non-Jewish person believes that Kanye is justified in his remarks, they may feel justified in other antisemitic actions or speech.

    Tweet by Kanye West: "I'm a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I'm going death con 3 on Jewish people. The funny thing is I actually can't be antisemitic because black people are actually Jew also. You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda."

    Judaism is practiced worldwide, and it doesn’t discriminate against a person’s skin color. However, this claim, along with his hate speech, invalidates those of us who actively practice the religion. As a white woman, I don’t want to invalidate Kanye’s identity as a black man. However, I can’t excuse him using his identity to invalidate my own as a Jewish woman.

    Invalidating a religion doesn’t stop with false self-identification. There has been a theme with people who disagree with government policies and relate them to the Holocaust. Although these people may feel unjustly treated for not agreeing or abiding by these policies, they do not compare to the mass extermination of a group of people.

    The topic of abortions has always been, and will always be, controversial; however, with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, people took to social media to defend their stance at any opportunity they could, including relating abortion to the Holocaust. Politicians such as Rep. Mike Johnson, Sen. Darren Bailey, Sen. Ben Albritton, and Rep. Terri Collins have all publicly made this comparison. Pro-life groups online share instigating posts of the same nature; Live Action shared a photo comparing Hitler to Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood), comparing the deaths of the Holocaust with abortions. These kinds of posts spread like wildfire on social media; they not only dismiss the tragedies that occurred during the Holocaust but any other act of genocide in history.

    Photo of Adolph Hitler, with additional text saying "6 million Jews" next to a photo of Margaret Sanger saying "7 million babies"

    The difficulty with this is that people who identify as pro-life believe that abortion is equivalent to murder. This is why many laws were placed in effect to convict people associating, performing, and receiving abortions. Although I disagree, I understand why they believe what they do. Despite using the tragedies of the Holocaust to fuel their narrative, there is also an issue of the pro-life stance along with Judaism. Jewish law believes that life begins at first breath, and with this, abortion is considered health care and is encouraged if it endangers the mother’s health physically or mentally. Therefore, the comparison between the Holocaust and abortions not only bastardizes the genocide of Jewish people but uses it to push Catholic beliefs on Jewish people.

  • Book Bans

    Book bans are a way to censor information that doesn’t fit into a certain narrative or rhetoric. According to National Geographic, the earliest book bans in the United States took place in 1650, when the Massachusetts Bay colonist William Pynchon published a religious pamphlet that differed from the religious norms at the time. Other colonists denounced his writing as heresy and burned them. Later on in the US there were bans on literature that was anti-slavery or anything that was deemed “immoral.”

    Today, we see the controversy surrounding reading material in schools and public libraries. The American Library Association noted the top three reasons for book censorship is due to literature containing “sexually explicit” content, “offensive language,” and/or the content is “unsuited for any age group.” Although a CBS poll shows that most Americans reject book bans, PEN America says that most bans are done through smaller organized political groups such as Moms for Liberty.

    Most books that are being targeted are written or about minority experiences. According to PEN America’s Index of School Book Ban List, 41% address LGBTQIA+ themes, 40% contain POC protagonists or prominent secondary characters, 22% contain sexual content (ranging from puberty to sexual abuse), and 9% are nonfictional books (biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs)

    There is no standard for what is deemed inappropriate for readers, and the rhetoric used to push bans causes hysteria within a community. For instance, in Marion County, Mississippi, the graphic novel series Heartstopper by Alice Oseman was being challenged. The books contain a wholesome romance story between two teenage boys, yet they’re being described as “pornography” and that homosexuality is a sin according to the Bible. This rhetoric not only villainizes literature, but also the authors and characters of these books.

    The issue of book banning is still an ongoing problem, and with the pressure of the upcoming election and the threat of Project 2025, this issue is nowhere near being settled. Unfortunately, there will always be people who are trying to censor certain demographics and narratives. However, many libraries and bookstores celebrate Banned Book Week (September 22-28, 2024) in order to raise awareness and encourage reads to read titles they may have otherwise not considered.