More than Lifting the Veil: Exposing and re-dressing The Wizards of Media

I found Mandy’s statement to “consider the implications the media has on your values,” interesting because my wife and I have made a concious effort to be very selective about what media we look at or listen to.  We don’t have cable or sattelite tv, do not have internet at home (although this is on the way), and much of our news comes from listening to NPR and alternative radio.  That being said, because I have internet at school, I frequently visit a multitude of sites, ranging from The New York Times to Rolling Stone Magazine.  When I was young, I used to spend countless hours parked in front of the tv, watching sitcom after sitcom, or playing video games; but the more my eyes were opened up to the manipulation of the media, and the superficiality of our culture at large, the more turned off I became to television.  In my alternative high school program called SWAS (School Within A School), I had teachers who engaged me in the kinds of topics that Hobbs so often brings up: propaganda, consumption, target media audiences, and media manipulation.  I remember how disgusted I felt that my innocent love of Mickey Mouse as a child was in fact engendered by ingenius marketing strategists at Disney.  Furthermore, the fact that Disney was paying slave wages to workers in Haiti making cartoon t-shirts was enough to make me completely sick.   It shocked me to find out that most of what I believed was manipulated by the media, that companies specifically targeted kids like me to buy G.I Joe figures, or He-Man, or Snickers, or Lucky Charms.   I didn’t like being somebody’s tool of profit so I decided to tune out and disengage.  In retrospect, I don’t think this was my teacher’s intention.   Mr. Batamarco was trying to lift the veil; trying to make us see that the Wizards of Media were really just ordinary men and women pulling the strings of our minds and wallets.  But I felt betrayed; I believed that the wizard was a wizard who would serve; I grew up with so many  attachments to the consumerist world that when the bubble burst, I guess I just decided to turn my back on it completely.

Now that I’m a teacher, I think, along with Hobbs and Jenkins, that teaching media literacy is more than lifting the veil.  Using a term by Hobbs, students must be taught to read the world, which is more than simply gaining an understanding that the media is manipulative.  What Jenkins refers to as “participatory culture” is more than just critical discourse of media, it is involvement.  Play,  performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation, are all terms which reflect the active and social nature of new media literacy skills.  If students become outraged by media manipulation, as I was, instead of turning off, they must engage and transform the media, thereby becoming empowered in the process.  

In the poetry of William Blake, the world is broken up into three stages: innocence, experience, and higher innocence.  When thinking about this concept in terms of my own media awareness, I can comfortably say that I moved from a state of innocence to experience and remained stuck for a while in a very negative place.  I see myself now moving into a state of higher innocence, where I understand that the media is highly manipulative, but that there is a certain power that comes with having media literacy, and using that literacy to select and produce more inclusive and informative media.  Hopefully, I will be able to communicate my new found enthusiasm and interest in media to my students, and not simply turn them off to the propaganda which surrounds them, but turn them on to doing something about it.

~ by scrollman on November 7, 2007.