Media Smarts—Media Literacy Lecture

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Media Smarts: Media Literacy
How do we know what (we think) we know?

The Lecture Outline:
1. Review Intro chapter
2. Critical Thinking Skills
3. What Is Media Literacy?
(Video: “Rich Media, Poor Democracy” video (part 1) → Concentration of Media Ownership)

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Making Sense of the Information Age
Key Concepts

Agriculture Age → Industrial Age → Information Age
subsistence culture → mechanization/standardization → knowledge as “coin of the realm”
oral tradition → mass communication (Gutenberg, printing) → global homogenization

Gemeinschaft → Gesellschaft

Gemeinschaft—personal relationships, one-on-one communication; family unit
Gesellschaft—mass society, large community; mediated communication
(See illustration)

Transition from reading literacy to media literacy, and from real-world experience to received, mediated “reality” and knowledge.

What changed in the Information Age? The world got bigger, richer, wider, but we also lost our minds: ability to remember, the oral tradition, the first-person, verifiable experience.

→E.B. White (“Removal,” One Man’s Meat, New York: Harper & Row, 1938)

“Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the distant and the remote. More hours in every 24 will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images—distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar to us than their originals.”
“When I was a child, people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist-deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.”
“...I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace, or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television—of that I am quite sure.”

(See also: Media Quotes—Bill McKibben, Bart Simpson, Newton Minow, etc.)

1964: Marshall McLuhan’s Vision

• Information Age—knowledge is more valuable than things.
• “mediated” communication—what does that mean?
• The Global Village
• McLuhan’s Fish: I’m not sure who first discovered water, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.

The advent of the Global Village, as it was shrunken and homogenized by instantaneous communication (radio, TV, satellite, movies and, eventually, Internet…) had a number of results.
McLuhan hypothesized (optimistically) that the global village would result in better understanding of one another, better sharing of knowledge, etc. The world would become “smaller” because we would understand each other better and share more common goals and values. (HA!)

Others saw mass communication as a development tool for poor nations, a way to educate themselves, and as a means of easing “that terrible ascent to modernity” (Schramm).

BUT:

→When TV changed Fiji. . . .
→Arthur C. Clark found “I Love Lucy” on TV in a hut in Sri Lanka . . .
→Queen Elizabeth’s favorite TV show was once purported to be “Kojak”. . .
→The most popular TV show worldwide? “Baywatch” That’s how the world “knows” us.
→My little French amie……. Chicago and tommy guns.

Media literacy: an essential tool
in the Information Age.

That begins with CRITICAL THINKING—even skepticism—about what’s in our mass media diets. So . . .

QUESTION AUTHORITY! Question what we’re told

But the “authority” in the mass media age is TV, the Internet—not what we know from our own experience, but what other people—people we don’t even know—tell us is “truth.”

But what IS “Truth”?.........“TRUTHINESS”?……….

ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (AP)—A panel of linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is “truthiness,” defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.

Michael Adams, a professor at North Carolina State University who specializes in lexicology, said “truthiness” means “truthy, not facty.”

“The national argument right now is, one, who’s got the truth and, two, who’s got the facts,” he said. “Until we can manage to get the two of them back together again, we’re not going make much progress.” (1/5/06.)

“Truthiness” was coined by Comedy Central truthmeister Stephen Colbert in October 2005. (See video clip here.)

So how reliable are the mass media with which we spend such large parts of our lives? These are the “authorities,” but how authoritative, how reliable, how “truthy” (or how “facty”) are they?

In response to everything you’re told (even by me) or hear/see on TV or on the Internet, the media-smart response should be, “Oh really…?” And ask for proof.

4 components of the Critical Thinking Process

1. Question your own assumptions, or the assumptions on which media messages seem to be based.

• What do you assume that you already “know”? Examine your assumptions, as well as those of the people on TV.
• What do you really know about this topic?
• How do I know it?
• Who told me that?
• How do they know? Is that really true and accurate (or fair and balanced)?

And when asking these same questions of media messages—TV news or ads or sitcoms—do I really think like/value the things that these messages seem to assume I do? (Later, we’ll talk about selective perception, and how that works in the mass mediated age)

2. Crank up your Bias-Detector. Be aware both of your own biases/ prejudices/preferences, and also try to be aware of the perspectives/biases that might lie behind the sources of media messages.

Be very wary of media messages, esp. TV and Internet—which seem to offer information as “authoritative.” It’s not a bad thing, necessarily, that information is biased, as long as you are aware of what the biases are and thus can take the “authoritative” information with a grain of salt.

Try to analyze the messages and who’s producing them—why do they think the way they do? What sources of information are being used, and what are the sources’ biases? (Does FOX News = “fair & balanced”?) What is the focus of the “authoritative” message, and what info/perspectives may be left out? Why? Try to figure out the message sender’s objectives…

3. Analyze the Context of the Message. What factors may be influencing the message? Political, cultural, ideological, religious… Who’s telling the story? What axes do they have to grind? Why? (hysteria, lack of reliability surrounding disasters, breaking news, etc. )

4. Don’t Settle! Seek more information on your own, to confirm or refute or modify what you’re told by one source, and what you think you know. Alternative (and truly authoritative/dispassionate) sources of information. “If you mother tells you she loves you, get a second source.” Comparison shop. Be open-minded

(For more reading, see this link to Critical Thinking skills)

7 principles of Media Literacy

1. Media Messages Are (re)Constructions. Every media message, in every form, is carefully selected, filtered, edited, targeted and constructed. Remember that we’re talking about mediated communication, which means there’s always some “middleman” between the reality and you, the reader/viewer/listener. Whether the mediator means to or not, the original reality of the event is always skewed in some way, selected, edited, framed in some way. So, seeing is not necessarily believing. It is essential for the critical consumer of media messages to remember to ask:

WHO says
WHAT
to WHOM
via WHAT CHANNEL
with WHAT INTENT
and with WHAT EFFECT?

(See Mass Comm Theories: Selective Exposure/Perception; Gatekeeping)

2. Media Representations Construct New “Realities.” There is a relationship between how messages are constructed by the mass media, and how we as consumers of media messages perceive the world.

The famous 1950s Walter Cronkite TV program, YOU ARE THERE, meant well, but viewers weren’t there. No matter how diligent reporters may try to be in their reporting (in France, new reports are called, in fact, “réalités”), they necessarily skew reality, either a lot or a little.

For example: The “Mean World Syndrome”—Crime occurs 10 times more frequently on TV than in the real world, resulting in many people thinking the world is a much more dangerous place than it really is. So what we know and how we “see” the world in the information age depends heavily on others’ interpretations. (See Mass Communication Theories: Cultivation/Framing/Coorientation)

3. Audiences Create Their Own Realities. Readers/listeners/viewers aren’t just passive, mindless sponges for media messages, of course. Everyone filters and interprets input (media, personal, whatever) through his or her own unique and complex web of perspectives of the world.

(See Selective Exposure/Perception/Attention-Retention; Coorientation)

(Draw Venn Diagram here)

4. Media Constructions Are Intentional: They Have Purposes: economic, commercial, ideological, political, social . . . Even if the message’s goal is not financial (as in advertising), ALL messages are framed from particular perspectives and have some kind of objective. Popular TV shows have both economic objectives and cultural/social/perhaps ideological content
(“infotainment” is justified by some media producers because that’s what they say audiences want—so infotainment is justified by alleged market demand, and that’s what sells (economics)….; on local TV news, “if it bleeds, it leads” is a phenomenon explained by two rationales:

1) people do want to gawk at car crashes and fires (infotainment);
2) it is cheap and easy to shoot a mangled SUV or a fire, neither of which needs a lot of intelligence/analysis to report…..)

Another example: The public says it hates the amount of sex and violence on TV and in the movies, but that’s what sells (and translates easily to international markets).

BUT!

Reuven Frank, former president of NBC News, disputes this claim as too easy:
“This business of giving people what they want is a dope pusher’s argument. News is something people don’t know they’re interested in until they hear about it. The job of the journalist is to take what’s important and make it interesting.”

(See Mass Comm Theories: Agenda-setting; gatekeeping)

5. Media Messages Are Vehicles for Values and Ideologies: Americans spend more time with media than in any other single pastime. What are the values and standards and societal norms—the expectations and models of behavior—embedded in mass media content? Is there a set of standards across all media? Are there recurring themes (macho, gender, violence, consumerism, wealth….)?
(See Mass Comm Theories: Agenda-setting; Cultivation)

6. Media Messages Have Social and Political Consequences: Who/What is portrayed (and who isn’t?) in media messages, and How are they portrayed? And how are issues framed in terms of outcomes and consequences—answers to journalism’s “So What?” question?

(Heavy Viewers v. Light/Moderate Viewers drawing here)

Policy/Political/Market Implications?
(prisons; affirmative action; mean-world syndrome; prisons; racial/gender opportunity….)

7. Each Medium Has Its Own Unique Aesthetic Characteristics/Strengths:

Text v. Image
Still v. Motion
B/W v. Color
TV v. Movies v. Theater

• “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan” in B/W recreated feeling newsreels and historical era
• Vietnam was the “living room war” (seeing was believing)
• Iraq 1 (Desert Storm)—a video game war; Iraq 2—Embedded journalists=“You are there,” but impact on reporting?

(See also these links to 1) media literacy; 2) key concepts of media literacy; and 3) some principles of media literacy)

More to follow.......